Ronda Rousey Addresses Rumors She’s Retired From MMA

Former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey has been out of the fight game for two years.

Despite that fact, she still remains silent on her last two bouts under the UFC banner. Up until those losses, she was a wrecking machine as she ran through the top contenders in the division at the time.

However, that all went away when she was dethroned of UFC gold by Holly Holm at UFC 193 in November 2015 as Holm knocked her out with a head kick in devastating style. Then, she suffered a 48-second TKO loss to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 in December 2016.

Since then, she has largely remained out of the spotlight and not done any interviews in which she talked about her MMA career.

This leads us to Sunday night when she made a surprise appearance at the WWE Royal Rumble PPV event on the WWE Network in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Wells Fargo Center. After the show, it was officially announced that she has signed a multi-year deal with the sports entertainment company.

ESPN has released video clips from their interview with Rousey where she discussed the new chapter in her life. Despite the new chapter, she still refuses to open up about her two latest losses.

“I think I’d rather just not talk about that right now,” Rousey said in a sit-down interview with ESPN.com (transcript courtesy of MMA Junkie).

Although Rousey didn’t want to talk about her past in the MMA world, she did note that she hasn’t followed the UFC over the past year. When it comes to a possible return and if she is retired, she didn’t dismiss an octagon return entirely.

Former UFC heavyweight and current WWE Universal champion Brock Lesnar is under contract with the WWE full-time but did make a jump back to the Octagon for a fight at UFC 200 against Mark Hunt. When asked about possibly making the transition to MMA again, she noted that’s not currently her focus but did say that doesn’t want to deem herself retired from fighting.

“(Retirement is) what everybody else seems to say,” Rousey said. “I never retired from judo. If that’s what you guys want to think. All I know is that I really want to devote 100 percent of my time to wrestling right now, and whatever people want to call that, they can call it.”

You can watch clips from her ESPN interview with Ramona Shelburne right here: