Ronda Rousey’s UFC title loss to Holly Holm last year hit her so hard that the former MMA champ and rising Hollywood star contemplated killing herself.
The 28-year-old revealed the shocking news after Ellen DeGeneres brought up her shocking defeat during an interview that aired Tuesday. Rousey said it was a “different” bout than previous ones, but doesn’t “make any excuses or anything like that.”
"I got clipped in the first exchange so I was knocked out on my feet like the first time I got hit," Rousey recalled. "It’s hard to really know what’s going on. In that first hit I cut up my whole mouth and I knocked my teeth loose. Guys fight for five, five-minute rounds, they are teeing off each other faces the whole time and nothing like that happens. It’s just destiny, it had to go down that way.”
Fighting back tears, Rousey candidly confessed just how broken she was after the loss.
“I was like, down in the medical room [after the match] and I was down in the corner and I was like, ‘What am I anymore if I’m not this?’ And I was literally sitting there and thinking about killing myself and that exact second I’m like, ‘I’m nothing. What do I do anymore? And no one gives a s*** about me anymore without this.”
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Then she said that she looked up and saw her boyfriend, Travis Browne, standing there.
“And I looked up at him, and I was like, ‘I need to have his babies. I need to stay alive,’” she said. “Really that was it.”
DeGeneres praised Rousey for being brave enough to open up about what she was going through after the fight.
“There are a lot of people out there that have thoughts like that, and they are looking at you going ‘Wow, if she can have thoughts like that?” DeGeneres said. “You just did a lot of good for a lot of people. Thank you for saying that.”
DeGeneres added: “I think that showing vulnerability and showing that just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you have soft side and a vulnerable side. I think it’s important to have both.”
The two also talked about Rousey’s new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover.
Rousey is expected to return to the ring sometime this November, a year after Holm knocked her out at UFC 193 in Australia. The bout will her first rematch against Holm.
Rousey was originally expected to face Holm at UFC 200, however her filming schedule – including stepping into the Patrick Swayze role in the remake of “Road House” – forced her to take additional time off.
“Of course I want to fight Holly, beat her and make everything right again,” she told DeGeneres.