Ronda Rousey doesn’t feel the need to tell anybody how she feels about the legacy she left behind in mixed martial arts and former opponent Miesha Tate wonders if that’s because she’s not happy with the way her career ended.
In a documentary shot for the UFC’s 25th anniversary, Rousey said she wasn’t sure anybody deserved to hear her feelings on her legacy because “how I feel about myself and my own legacy is something precious to me, so you don’t get to hear it, you just get to have your own opinion of my legacy”.
In the wake of those comments, Rousey’s most heated rival from her career weighed in on those comments and admitted that she wasn’t surprised to hear those kinds of comments from the former UFC champion.
“It’s very Ronda-esque,” Tate said on her SiriusXM radio show. “Look she’s not wrong even though it’s a bit arrogant but I think that’s the style that people have appreciated about Ronda. It’s not necessarily something I appreciate about Ronda but when you talk about her legacy this does sum it up in one quote really. It’s that she knows she has value and interest but she also really doesn’t give a s—t what anybody else wants to hear.
“She’s not entirely an open book. She’s not their entirely for the fans selflessly. Ronda has always been about Ronda so it doesn’t surprise me. She’s continue to be exactly how she’s always been.”
Tate believes that part of the reason why Rousey is so unwilling to address her legacy is because of the way her fighting career effectively ended with back-to-back knockout losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes.
Following those two losses, Rousey largely disappeared from the UFC radar until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year.
Since then, Rousey has been focused on her professional wrestling career and largely avoids talking about the UFC or her place in history.
“When I listen to this, she almost sounds emotional. I don’t think she’s entirely happy with her legacy,” Tate said. “The point that Ronda about us not deserving to hear it and about the vulnerability, I think it speaks again to point that she left the sport worse than she entered in.
“She has an inflated ego, she does have all of those things. I talk about myself and we’re polar opposites, that’s why we never really got along.”
While there are a lot of differences between Rousey and Tate, the retired UFC bantamweight champion says that humility was built into her DNA from her very first fight and that allowed her to maintain the same attidude throughout her career.
“I started my career off a loss. I started my career with the humble approach,” Tate said. “I’m a very open book. I’ve got nothing to hide. I have nothing to hide. I’ve won some, I’ve lost some, I don’t have the need to put myself on a pedestal or not be an open book. I enjoy being transparent because I hope somebody can take something away from my gains and my losses. I’ve lost horribly in front of the entire world and so did Ronda.
“But she has a chance here to open up and to give some insight and perspective and motivation but she’s obviously not at that point where she feels good enough about her own legacy to be vulnerable and to reflect and give back. She’s obviously not in a good place with it.”
Tate believes that Rousey would rather remember the better days she had in the sport when she was hailed as one of the best pound-for-pound fighters on the planet and UFC president Dana White was touting how she could beat boxer Floyd Mayweather in a fight.
Those days have long since passed and now Rousey is staring back at her record with those two brutal losses sitting at the top of it.
“She wants to be the hard Ronda Rousey,” Tate said. “The one that was back from 2014 that I always said winning is easy. You don’t have to make any adjustments. You don’t have to make any changes. You’re on top of the world. You’re doing great.
“When you lose, that’s when you see what you’re really made of.”
