In an interview with Sky Sports, former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey spoke about various topics. Here are highlights:
On her friendship with Shayna Baszler: “It wasn’t until I was fighting in the UFC and Shayna [Baszler] and Jessamyn [Duke] moved in with me and they always put WWE on the TV, it seemed like every single night. We would fight all day in the gym and when we came home we didn’t want to talk about fighting, we wanted to escape through wrestling. It was our sanctuary from the stress of the fighting world and it slowly became more and more where we wanted to be. Shayna was the first one of us to take that leap and she’s always been an example to me. She did women’s MMA before me and opened a lot of doors for all of us. If it wasn’t for her making a point of us sitting down and watching wrestling together then I wouldn’t be here either. When she made that jump from fighting from wrestling I saw how much happier that made her and how more applied she was. It was hard not to want to be part of that.”
On being happy in WWE: “I was a huge wrestling fan and I remember how they made me feel. I was a little kid in the mid-west who could barely talk, I could barely say Hulk Hogan but I had a Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy and I would rip that thing’s arm off over and over again. I wanted to be the biggest, toughest guy in the world and I wanted to be just like him.”
