“I reached out to Dana [White] and asked if he would be interested in it,” Rousey told ESPN’s SportsCenter. “It didn’t exactly work out with the UFC, but it led us to here today.”
“I was nine months pregnant, and I saw a video of Gina Carano giving an interview, and she didn’t look good,” Rousey said Tuesday on ESPN’s SportsCenter. “She gained an unhealthy amount of weight. My first thought was, ‘Oh my god. What can I do? What can I do to help?’ The reason I had that thought was she’s the one woman not only in MMA who also doesn’t owe me a damn thing, but that I owe immensely. I’m always trying to look at what I could do for her.”
Sounds a little like hero syndrome.
“Her family owns Caesar’s Palace and Rebel Oil,” Rousey added. “There’s nothing I could really do for her except for when I was in a similar spot, when I was depressed and gave up on the world and inadvertently gave up on myself. What I needed was a goal and something to reignite my passion again. I always said that Gina is the one person I’d come back to fight for. I thought, ‘She needs this. She needs this fight.’ The more that I thought about it, I thought, ‘I need this. I need this fight.’”
“This has been in the making since I was pregnant, which is over a year ago,” Rousey said. “It took a long time to get us here. We fought for this. We fought to fight each other. There were a lot of obstacles along the way. I told her: ‘If I have to go out there, and train you myself to fight me, I will.‘ We made it happen. We had to work together to overcome every obstacle to get here. It’s really surreal because it’s been a secret for so long, I can’t believe I’m actually able to talk about it.”
We’ll probably never know why White and Co. passed on Rousey vs. Carano but you can expect the MMA media to grill White over the decision at the next UFC press conference, currently scheduled for the conclusion of the UFC Houston card this weekend at Toyota Center in Houston, Texas.
