AFTER KEEPING A relatively low profile in the weeks and months following her shock defeat to Holly Holm, Ronda Rousey has gradually returned to making headlines.
Rousey, who lost her UFC women’s bantamweight title when she was knocked out by Holm in November, spoke about how she struggled to handle the first loss of her MMA career when she appeared on The Ellen Show earlier this week.
The Olympic judo bronze medallist was also a guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, as well as speaking to MMAjunkie at a media event for the forthcoming EA Sports UFC 2 video game, during which she elaborated on her absence from the public spotlight.
“To be honest, I’ve been trying to disappear as much as possible. I don’t look at articles, I don’t look at tags, I don’t look at comments,” Rousey said.
People on the internet are mostly evil. I just don’t want to accept any of that negativity.
“I just use social media to put information out there. I really don’t use it to receive it because people are really cruel with that access and I don’t want to allow them to have that kind of access to me anymore.
“They really take it for granted and they don’t look at you like a person. You’re an event to them. I don’t want to read people saying all the worst things they could imagine about me every single day, so I just put out there what I have to put out there and I don’t look at anything else.”
Having made her professional MMA debut in 2011, Rousey needed just five fights to become a world champion with the now-defunct Strikeforce promotion. After switching to the UFC, Rousey defended her title with ease on six occasions until she came unstuck against Holly Holm at UFC 193 in Melbourne.
Holm will put the belt on the line against Miesha Tate in 15 days’ time, with UFC president Dana White confirming that Rousey will face the winner in the second half of 2016. Rousey has already admitted she plans to return to the octagon, but she doesn’t sound like she’s in any hurry to do so.
She said: “MMA? Yeah, they’ve been making me go non-stop. I fought six times in my first year. I feel like I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a long time. In judo, I took a long period of time off after the Beijing Olympics and I feel like I’m bodily and mentally in a similar space, where it’s just what I need right now.
It’s been surprising to me how happy I’ve been being away from it.
“I’m being purposely mysterious right now because I think people have taken my availability for granted and I’ve kind of just wanted to disappear.”
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