Ronda Rousey has shared that one of the reasons she exited WWE is because of her shaky relationship with the fans.
In a new interview with Wild Ride! w/ Steve-O, she said she didn’t think fans were grateful enough for her presence.
“What am I doing it for if I'm not being able to spend my time and energy on my family, but instead spending my time and my energy on a bunch of fucking ungrateful fans that don't even appreciate me?” Rousey said.
Last April, she revealed that she wanted to have a baby before coming back to WWE. She hadn’t competed in a WWE match since WrestleMania 35 in 2019 when she lost to Becky Lynch, ultimately ending Rousey’s 231-day streak as Raw Women's Champion.
“I don’t know what it’s like to have a baby. I could look down at this beautiful child and be like ‘fuck everything, I don’t care about anything else other than this baby.’ And you’ll never see me again,” she said. “But I’m just saying, you never know, I don’t want to make any promises about the future when I don’t know how I’m gonna feel in the future.”
Rousey said she would come back to WWE in a part-time capacity since her heavy touring schedule meant she was on the road 200 days out of the year.
“I wasn't even home when I was home,” she said. “I was basically just trying to recover enough to be able to get to the next stint of being gone. People think you're only wrestling as much as they see you on TV, but they don't realize that there's three or four other days of live shows during the week.... If I looked at all the live shows, I was only home a day and a half a week. It was just not worth it for my family.”
Regardless of the fans, Rousey said she appreciated her time with the WWE. “I love performing. I love the girls. I love being out there ... but, at the end of the day, I was just like, ‘Fuck these fans, dude,’” Rousey told Steve-O. “My family loves me and they appreciate me and I want all my energy to go into them. So that was my decision at the end of the day.”
Rousey also took to Instagram on Saturday, slamming some ex-co-workers for her calling WWE matches “fake fights.”
She wrote, “Anyone who is outraged by me calling pro wrestling 'fake fights for fun' has never been in a REAL fight.”
She continued, “”While you all are tiptoeing around bruising some pro wrestlers' huge soft egos—no one is thinking about all the REAL fighters you're insulting when pretending pro wrestling is somehow on the same level of realism.” Rousey added, “Yes, I understand, wrestling 300 days a year for years on end is incredibly tough on the body and a difficult profession -- but do you know what would happen if you got in 300 REAL fights in a year? You would be dead.”
Rousey’s retort looks to be a response to WWE’s Alexa Bliss and Lana, who put Rousey’s "fake fight" comments on blast, with Lana directly reprimanding Rousey.
