Ronda Rousey definitely has a plan for the rest of her MMA career, but she doesn’t seem ready to share it with us just yet. All we know is that UFC 207 is “Definitely one of my last fights,” which makes us wonder just how long and who exactly Ronda wants to face off against before leaving for Hollywood.
Two names stick out in our minds: Holly Holm, who defeated Rousey last November via vicious head kick knockout. The other obvious fighter is Cris Cyborg, who has been involved in a brutal war of words with Ronda we imagine will only be eclipsed by the knock down drag out war the two would go through inside the cage. On account of that war of words, Cris Cyborg can’t wait. During a segment on ESPN’s Outside The Lines, the reporter asks her how she feels about Ronda calling her a man, an it, and saying Cyborg had male genitalia.
“It’s not about people. It’s about I want to punch her inside the cage,” Cyborg said. “Ronda did a lot of bad things to me for years, like six or seven years. I think everything she says about me, it’s not true. She don’t know me. She never talked to me. We never met each other. It made me cry because, you know, it’s hard. Because everything she says go into my Twitter, it goes everywhere. I can handle this, but my dad cannot handle this. … I don’t have anything personal with my opponents, but if it her, it would be different. It would be semi-violent. It would be the same thing, you know, but maybe I no finish the fight soon.”
“You would drag the fight out to punish her?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah,” she replied. “When you try to ridicule myself for all my fans, I think this is not cool. Not cool.”
For all the back and forth, many feel like a fight between Rousey and Cyborg will never go down. But there are reasons to be positive. The UFC knows it’s the money fight to beat all money fights, and they’ll need that kind of money to pay back investment firms that made the promotion’s recent $4 billion sale possible. UFC president Dana White has talked up the fight often and says it’s a fight that Ronda Rousey undoubtedly wants. And Ronda herself has said in the past that she wants Cyborg to be her last fight.
“I have this idea in my mind that my final fight would be just beating the crap out of Cris Cyborg, and then when Dana White puts the belt on me the last time, I could take it off and hand it back to him,” she said leading up to her fight with Bethe Correia in 2015. “But if she doesn’t step up, I can move on and do other things with my life. She’s the one who’s going to fall into obscurity without me.”
Clearly, no love lost between these two. It’s just another reason why we want the fight to happen so badly.