Ronda Rousey (Greatest Women's Fighter Ever): The Truth Behind My Fighting, I Kept This A Secret My Entire Career, WWE Is A Mess & Vince McMahon Is Still Running It!

Ronda Rousey (0:00)

People don't know about this. I had to keep it secret. ‎ It's really, really difficult.

Steven Bartlett (0:22)

Ronda, you have voted the best female athlete of all time. What was it that made you the person that sits in front of me today?

Ronda Rousey (0:30)

So when I was a kid, it was tough. My dad, he ended up taking his life when I was eight, and in school, I got picked on a lot. I actually dropped out when I was 16, and moved away from home to train full-time. But a lot of the coaches thought that being abusive to the athletes is what gave them the best results. My first coach dislocated my jaw. People don't know about this, but I'll get concussions all the time, and every time you get a concussion, it's easier to get another one. So by the time I got into MMA, I had to be able to finish the person off immediately. It was those experiences that made me the world champion.

Steven Bartlett (1:07)

And you stacked up a bunch of records, including the fastest ever win, fastest submission, fastest title defense. But then that loss to Holly Holm.

Ronda Rousey (1:15)

Just like that! My whole world turned upside down. I had to disappear for a while.

Steven Bartlett (1:24)

And you decide to move on to the WWE. You don't have nice things to say about it.

Ronda Rousey (1:29)

Vince McMahon just created a fundamentally sick environment. And I think he still is running the company to this day.

Steven Bartlett (1:35)

Why? Ronda, when I interview people, I often ask them to tell me the most sort of pertinent first event in their story that went on to shape who they are. And with you, from reading through your story, it's quite clear that the first potentially significant event happened as you were being born.

Ronda Rousey (2:05)

Yeah, I was born with the embole cord around my neck, and I was like a zero on the Apgar scale, which is like the health of a baby when they're born. And I was blue like that, I was dead.

It took a while to revive me. And I had some damage from that, some neurological damage which expressed itself as a motor speech disorder called aproxia, which is basically I would have words formed in my head and try to say it, but there was a kind of disconnect between my brain and my mouth, and it would come out differently than how I said it. So, I ended up having to do many years of speech therapy to be able to get over it. And sometimes I struggle a little bit, but I've dealt with it well enough where people don't notice. But doing things like pro wrestling promos and stuff where everybody will scrutinize you for saying a single syllable or not pronouncing every single word perfectly. Like if I just stuttered like I did just now or mispronounced something like I did just now in a wrestling promo, I would be like hung over it. And so, there's little things like that that still express themselves to this day, but mostly it's not noticeable now.

Steven Bartlett (3:21)

The umbilical cord is wrapped around your neck. The doctors gave you a zero out of ten in terms of your health when you were a baby. What age did you learn to speak properly?

Ronda Rousey (3:34)

I didn't really speak like in full, intelligible sentences until I was like around five or so.

Steven Bartlett (3:41)

When they did brain scans, did they notice anything different in your brain at that point because of the umbilical cord incident?

Ronda Rousey (3:47)

No, no one ever did a brain scan or anything like that. I got tested for deafness for a long time, autism. A proxy didn't exist as a diagnosis until after I had kind of really gotten over it. It was actually like a fan mom and her daughter that brought me like a pamphlet and it was like, we've heard your story, it's been so inspirational to us. We think what you had is this thing called a proxy.

And I was like, oh my God, this actually fits everything that we experienced perfectly. And we ended up having a walk for a proxy here. I got to like meet a bunch of different kids and stuff that were dealing with similar things. But yeah, it's kind of like newer in the field, people being aware of it. But I think that's what made me delve into sports so much because with judo, especially you like communicate physically with a person, you have to put your hands on another person, you have to talk and interact with that person. And so when I was having a hard time, when we moved back to LA., like really socializing with other kids, sports, specifically judo made it like a conduit for me to be able to like connect with other kids and have something to talk about.