Ronda

Part of Four Days in London

Ronda Rousey is the most famous person I’ve gone to Chillis with. Bad inside jokes aside, she has a reputation. Her run in the UFC was divisive, particularly in a sport dominated by men. Dana White made a point of claiming that women would never be in the UFC, but Ronda made herself into such a star that he broke. Thanks to her, there are now multiple competitive women’s divisions in the UFC and other organizations.

When Ronda lost her title to Holly Holm, I will never forget the backlash. I have never seen so grown men posting pictures of a bloodied athlete accompanied by celebratory language. I’d say this is a symptom of some pretty deep sexism within the martial arts community, and I would be accurate. Part of that backlash came from people who were sexist bastards, and some of it came from her own reputation. Ronda played the heel and she played it well.

I have not spoken with any length to Ronda since 2013. I have seen her mom from time to time (her mom has always been a very positive influence on me). That said, one of the reasons for watching people’s reactions to Ronda always stung me a little bit was while the heel was always there, I knew a different Ronda then what they saw on television.

The first I met Ronda Rousey in 2003, she had just moved to the Boston area to try her luck at making the Athens Olympic team. In contrast to her persona now, she was fairly quiet. We were around the same size so on the two nights a week I came to judo, we were usually training partners.

Ronda and I used to get into long o goshi battles. She was a left-sided judo player and I was a right-sided judo player. I eventually came to realize that the longer these went on, the more it was going to hurt when she finally got me. On the mat, she was a hard worker and vicious in both standup and groundwork. Off the mat, we talked about video games and she traded pokemon with my brother. We eventually became friends over AOL Instant Messenger.

Ronda was, even back then at seventeen, a dedicated armbar specialist. During her run up to the Olympic games, she was profiled for the first time by USA Today. The article, in what I assumed was meant to focus on how serious a competitor she was, focused for a paragraph on her having several arms during her run to make the Olympics. In the pre-Facebook days, the center of a lot of judo conversation was on the forums for Judoinfo.com. The fallout from the article was a lot of people being angry at her as a result of the article. Being an extremely online fifteen-year-old, that ended up being the first time I went to bat for her. That began a pattern where, for the next few years, we would stick up for each other.

A little over a year later there was an incident that nearly led to me leaving my home dojo. I had written a blog post on Myspace (oh god writing that makes me feel old), that someone took, altered, and then sent around to some of the judo coaches. A copy made it into the hands of Serge Bouyssou, who then sent it to Jimmy. The post was teenage me writing about what I wanted to do with the last year or so of high school and comparing going out to train in upstate New York full time versus staying at Pedros Judo Club. (The main driver of this desire had much more to do with me hating high school than actual judo considerations). The fallout wasn’t great and isn’t something I like writing about even fifteen years later. It was emotionally really hard for me. I worshipped the ground my coaches walked on and I was really upset at myself for putting something stupid on the internet and whoever had altered the document and sent it around. Ronda had left Jimmys at the time (she would come back in 2007). I spoke to her about it, and for a week she and I talked every day as I emotionally navigated one of the worst events of my high school years.

There were a few other events. The last one was when I sent her a Facebook message in 2012 thanking her for a kind message I had found on an old live journal. She had just by luck run into it. She had largely stopped checking Facebook because most of the messages she received were mean, but she by luck ran into it. We exchanged numbers and from time to time texted back and forth for a few years.

To quickly address the elephant in the room, she had a well-documented end to her professional connection to my coach. You can find out more about that from, oddly enough, a USA Today article from a few years back. One of the things I’ve had to carefully navigate in American judo, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, has been fights between two people I think highly of.

One thing that always stood out to me was when she was competing in the UFC, people would complain about her appearing arrogant. Whenever I saw this, I remembered that they didn’t realize that you were talking about the kind of person who had a long history of setting incredible goals for themself and reaching them. I haven’t spoken to her in many years, but I do check out her video game stream from time to time. We didn’t always get along. She had a strong personality and I wasn’t very socially graceful. One of her lasting contributions to my life was spotting and helping me recognize that I had issues with depression and mental health. She was a peer I looked up to and someone who had had a very positive impact on me.