With her quick and brutal loss at UFC 207, many people consider Ronda Rousey’s retirement to be a sure thing. Considering how long it took her to return from her last defeat and her unwillingness to engage with the media and press, the general consensus is her head is no longer in the right place for fighting. And as we saw on Friday night, that often leads to brutal ass whuppins in a sport like the UFC.
For the record, Rousey hasn’t made any kind of announcement yet. And when TMZ managed to track Ronda’s mother AnnMaria De Mars down in a Vegas hotel late into the night, she said nothing is set in stone.
“I think making snap decisions like that is probably not the best idea, so I don’t know,” she said when asked if her daughter would retire. But she certainly wouldn’t mind it if she did. “I would like to see her retire. I would have liked to see her retire a long time ago. Who wants to see their kid get hit? She’s got a lot of talent in a lot of other things. Movies, writing, producing, she’s really smart. I told her that at the very beginning when she started this, I said ‘You’re smart and beautiful, let the stupid people get punched in the face.’ Sorry, stupid people!”
The UFC superstar’s mother has never been a fan of her daughter’s choice to fight in a cage. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon back before this losing skid started, Ronda recounted telling mom about her decision to fight. “Making the language cleaner, my mom said, ‘This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in my life, and considering the ideas you’ve had, that’s pretty bad.'”
So it shouldn’t be surprising that mom wants Ronda to walk away from the sport now that she’s taking the kind of quick and devastating beatings she used to dish out to her opponents. Fortunately (or unfortunately in the case of staying with her coach Edmond Tarverdyan), Ronda has never taken her mom’s advice in the past, so this may actually be a sign the former UFC champion may just stick around in the sport after all.