Ronda Rousey returned to MMA on Saturday night, submitted Gina Carano in seventeen seconds with her trademark armbar, and announced she was finished — this time with closure.
In the main event of MVP MMA's first Netflix card, Rousey clinched, hit the throw and finished it in under twenty seconds. It was her fourth career stoppage under thirty-five seconds, a record no man or woman in the sport had previously held.
After the fight, sitting alone at the post-fight press conference for the first time in her career, Rousey said the win against the woman who once inspired her to take up MMA had given her something the UFC never had.
"I feel like a ghost was banished," Rousey said. "It's just lifted a weight off of me that I didn't realise I was still carrying in that way. This is exactly what I needed. And that was closure."
She was not interested in trading on the feet despite the goodwill she and Carano had shared throughout fight week.
"No, not at all. Why would I do that?" Rousey said when asked whether she had considered standing with her former hero. "My husband and my kids are watching, you know. I don't come from judo — maximum efficiency, minimum effort."
Rousey said the entire experience of returning had changed her relationship with the sport.
"She's the only person who could have brought me into MMA and the only person who could have brought me back," Rousey said of Carano. "All of this prosperity in my life and success that I've had, financially, all of that, it's thanks to her. I would have been hustling for judo clinics if it wasn't for her."
The lead-up had been the most relaxed of her career.
"I used to feel like such a huge wave of relief after a win and I didn't even feel that at all tonight, because I wasn't stressed out," Rousey said. "I figured out the way I should have been doing it all along. That's another gift that she gave to me — this experience this last year and a half. It's been so fun. The best camp of my life, and I'm so glad I got to end it like this."
Rousey also reserved a jab for her former employer. The UFC announced the rebooking of Conor McGregor versus Max Holloway during Francis Ngannou's walkout earlier in the evening, which Rousey took as a backhanded compliment.
"It's kind of catty, but it also shows that they see MVP MMA as a threat that they would do it in that moment," she said. "It's also a compliment because it elevates MVP MMA and makes — they're declaring that they see us as a real rival. That's such a compelling story, and now they're helping us tell it."
Asked whether she might hang a memento on the wall, Rousey demurred.
"I always kind of thought it was weird, like in judo you would see people that their house was like a shrine to themselves," she said.
The armbar that ended her career on her own terms, she suggested, was souvenir enough.
