Sometimes you just get beat by the better fighter.
It happens to everyone (but Floyd Mayweather and Rocky Marciano) and it is ok to give credit to the person that beat you.
There is no shame in that, but Ronda Rousey simply can not seem to give Holly Holm any credit for defeating her fair and square.
Instead she details a list of excuses of why she lost to ESPN.
Excuse #1: The fight was moved up and she didn’t have proper time to train (remember same applies to Holm).
“I was just trying to make too many people happy,” Rousey says. “But when I try and do favors and make everybody else happy, at the end of the day, they walk away happy and I’m the one who has to deal with the depression. All the pay-per-views in the world, all the money in the world, it means f—ing nothing to me because I lost.”
She’s had a year to think about all the things that went wrong in that loss. She remembers how weak and dehydrated her body felt from an excruciating weight cut. Afterward, Tarverdyan had doctors analyze her body chemistry with blood and hair samples. Her cortisol levels were off the charts. But all those are symptoms of a simple truth that looks so obvious in retrospect.
She just should’ve said, “No.”
Excuse #2: She was doing too much to try to please everyone.
When she was undefeated, she’d spend hours and hours thinking of all the things she was expected to do to be successful: Sell the fight, build the women’s division of the UFC, take photos with fans, pose on the red carpet. Tweet, Facebook, Instagram. Entertain. She’d stew and swirl all night until an alarm clock would sound way too early.
“That loss saved me from becoming what I hate,” she says. “One of those people who live their lives to impress everyone else. Who put up a front for the world to admire. Who make sure every charitable act is posted and shared for their own image gain. Who posture and pose for people they care nothing about except for the opinion they have of them.”
Rousey has never once congratulated or even acknowledged that on that night Holm was better than her. She has shown no class in that regard.
She also takes shots at McGregor, of course Mayweather and others who she wasn’t very respectful to when she was Queen of the castle, but expecting them to bow at her feet when she lost.
This is set up to be a redemption story for her, so we will just have to see how it goes. Is she going to come back strong or is she going to be like Roy Jones after the Tarver Punch?
Time will tell.