UFC president Dana White said he recently talked to Ronda Rousey, and based on that talk, believes she will never fight again.
“I think she’s probably done,” White said on a UFC Unfiltered podcast published Tuesday. “I think she’s going to ride off into the sunset and start living her life outside of fighting.”
White said he made those comments after speaking to Rousey earlier that same day.
“Her spirits are good. She’s doing her own thing,” he said. “In the conversation that I had with her, if I had to say right here, right now — and, again, I don’t like saying right here, right now because, you know, it’s up to her and her thing — but I wouldn’t say she fights again.”
Rousey (12-2) lost her second straight fight Dec. 30 via a brutal TKO at the pummeling hands of Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 in Las Vegas.
“It’s not even that I think it was an invincible thing,” White said on the podcast. “She’s so competitive that her career record meant everything to her, and then once she lost, she started to say to herself, ‘What the f— am I doing? This is my whole life? This is it? I want to experience and start doing other things.’ And that’s what she started to do. She’s got a lot of money. She’s never going to need money again because, first of all, unless you spend money like crazy, unless you spend money like Floyd [Mayweather], you’re not going to need money again when you have the kind of money that Ronda has. She’s not a big spender. She’s got a cute place down in Venice, California. She’s got some plans where I think she wants to move to a more desolate place and do her thing.”
The last time Rousey spoke to mainstream media, nearly a month ago, she said she needed “to take some time to reflect and think about the future.”
“Returning to not just fighting, but winning, was my entire focus this past year,” Rousey said in a statement Dec. 31, according to ESPN. “However, sometimes — even when you prepare and give everything you have and want something so badly — it doesn’t work how you planned. I take pride in seeing how far the women’s division has come in the UFC and commend all the other women who have been part of making this possible, including Amanda.
“I need to take some time to reflect and think about the future. Thank you for believing in me and understanding.”
Rousey, a 2008 Olympic judo bronze medalist, said before the Nunes fight that she was nearing the end of her MMA career and that Nunes would be “one of my last fights.”
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