The Ronda Rousey hype train continues to chug along, picking up more speed with each passing day. Now she’s getting the HBO Real Sports treatment, a 15-minute segment devoted completely to the UFC Bantamweight Champion. They go through her rise in judo and mixed martial arts, her crossover into stardom and the sexy photo shoots that followed, and how she deals with her new hectic life.
She also touched on losing her father at a young age to suicide. Ron Rousey broke his back on a family sledding trip, and complications with Bernard-Soulier syndrome meant he would never recover. The doctors gave him two years to live, in which time he’d slowly become a paraplegic, and then a quadriplegic. Rather than make his family deal with the emotional and financial costs of that prognosis, he took his own life.
“She said ‘Your dad’s gone to heaven.’ And I just remember that I couldn’t feel my legs. Like I tried to walk and I couldn’t feel my legs. And I just kinda pretended to myself that he was off on a business trip or something for a while or deny it for a while. And eventually it was … just the way it was. There was no more dad.”
It’s a perfect primer for anyone looking to find out what’s the deal with this “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey character as she heads into her next title defense against Bethe Correia at UFC 190 on Aug. 1.