My Fight / Your Fight (32 page)

I had ignored everyone who said it could never be done. Now I was going to be the first woman ever in the UFC.

The night of a fight, I am impatient. As the hour of the fight grows nearer, my impatience intensifies. By the time they lead me into the Octagon, I am holding myself back, every muscle in my body yearning to unleash everything I have upon my opponent. The hardest moment comes when I am standing in my corner, staring down my challenger, just waiting for the referee to give us the signal to go. I hate those seconds, because for just a fraction of time, I have to accept that what is happening in the Octagon is not in my control.

But once I step into the Octagon, I am patient. I don't rush a submission. I take the time to set up. I'm not sitting there waiting for something to open up—that's passive. Active patience is taking the time to set something up correctly.

When Dana said he was bringing me into the UFC, he said they were going to hold a news conference, announce the addition of a women's division, and give me the UFC championship belt. I hated the idea of being “given” the belt. I wanted to earn it, not be handed it ceremoniously. I believe you shouldn't hold the belt until after you win it or after you defend it.

Dana wouldn't budge.

“When we brought José Aldo in from the WEC [another promotion the UFC purchased] and Dominick Cruz, they started with the belt,” he said. “That's just the way we do it. We bring in the whole division with the champion.”

“OK,” I reluctantly agreed. “So when is the press conference?”

“Soon,” Dana said. “We're still figuring it out.”

In the meantime, I was under strict orders to tell no one. I told Edmond, but no one else. I didn't even tell Darin, who was still my fight manager.

Behind the scenes, the UFC was in negotiations with Showtime. The UFC's parent company, Zuffa, owned Strikeforce. However, Strikeforce had a TV deal with Showtime and the UFC fights are primarily aired on pay-per-view and through a deal with Fox.

The folks at the UFC thought they were on the verge of a deal. They were wrong.

In late September, two weeks after our drinks at Mr. Chow, Dana brought me up to Toronto for UFC 152. He planned to announce my signing there. I met up with him in Vegas and flew with him, his bodyguard, and a couple of his friends on the UFC's private plane.

It was my first time flying on a chartered jet. It was amazing. If I so much as glanced toward the rear of the airplane, a flight attendant would rush right over to ask me if I needed anything. I sat back in the leather chair and could hardly believe this was my life. I had started drifting off to sleep when someone mentioned to me there was a bed that I could sleep in.

Fifteen months earlier, I had been en route to Canada, hungry and exhausted, trying to find a comfortable position to sleep, crammed in a coach seat between Darin and an intoxicated Edmond. Now, I was being offered a bed. An actual bed, on an airplane. I felt like I had drifted off and awoken in an awesome alternate universe.

But when we got to Toronto, it turned out the negotiations with Showtime still were not resolved. I discovered it is easier to handle disappointment if you've had a good night's rest.

In early October, the UFC had fights in Minneapolis. They were going to give me the belt there. Again, I met up with Dana in Vegas and boarded the UFC plane. We got to the Twin Cities, but the negotiations still weren't done.

Once more I went home empty-handed, but not unnoticed. People started asking me what was going on. Fight fans wanted to know what brought me to town. Media wanted to know why I was traveling everywhere with Dana. Friends just wanted to know what the hell I was doing. And because I am a terrible liar, it was obvious I was hiding something. Before I knew it, rumors were flying that Dana and I were having an affair. I wanted so badly to explain, but I just laughed it off as ridiculous.

I went from being disappointed to growing frustrated over having to keep the secret. I couldn't wait to give everyone an explanation, to be able to hold up the belt and say, “See, this is why!”

We were traveling on a private plane, but I was on constant standby.

The news wasn't yet public, but I got permission to tell Darin and a lawyer whom he introduced me to because we had to start working out the terms of my UFC contract. Darin said we should formalize our agreement for him to serve as my fight manager. He “needed it for tax purposes.”

“If you're ever the least bit unhappy with the job I'm doing, we'll just tear it up,” he said of our contract.

It was early December when I flew out to upstate New York to help Marina drive her car out to L.A. I want to stop in North Dakota, I told her. So we planned a trip that would take us through the Midwest to Seattle, where we could catch our friend Nate Diaz headline a UFC bout on Fox, before driving down the Pacific coast.

We piled into Marina's 2007 Honda Accord, which was gold like mine, but smelled better. Fueled by coffee and beef jerky, we cruised the open road to the sounds of “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, “Open Road Song” by Eve 6, “Midnight City” by M83, “Universally Speaking” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.

It was evening when we arrived in Jamestown, North Dakota. I had not been back since we had moved away. We drove to the white house with green trim where my family had once lived. There was a
FOR SALE
sign in the front yard. I led Marina around back and discovered the back door was unlocked, just like we had always left it. I stood in the living room in the spot where our couch would have been and thought about the last time I saw my father alive.

“I want to see my dad,” I told Marina.

“OK, let's go.”

We walked back out to the car, and I called my mom, who told me to go to the funeral home and ask for directions to the cemetery. She told me she would call ahead. There was a man standing outside waiting for me when we arrived.

“I'll take you to the cemetery,” he said.

We got back in our car and followed him. I had only been to the cemetery once, the day my dad was buried. When we pulled up, he didn't even need to show me where Dad's grave was, I just knew. I had never even seen his grave after they put the headstone on it, but I knew exactly which one it was.

I got out of the car. It was dark and was kind of sprinkling. I walked over to where he was buried, and I stood there. Just me and my dad.

I knelt down on the cold ground and talked to him for a while. I told him I missed him. I told him about the journey I was on. I begged forgiveness for my failures and asked for his guidance. I pressed my palms in the frozen grass and cried. I took my favorite ring—it was silver with a turquoise stone—off my right middle finger and pressed it into the soil next to his headstone. I promised to try to be a good person and do everything I could to make him proud to be my father.

I don't know how long I was there, but eventually I stood up and promised to come back someday.

Marina was at the car waiting for me. She had lost her father a few years before. She looked at me with the deepest understanding, and I knew from the way my best friend hugged me that we had felt the same pain.

Even with our stop in North Dakota, we made the entire trip from Albany to Seattle in fifty hours. We arrived in Seattle on December 5, the night before the fight press conference. The next morning, I got a call telling me that the UFC was giving me the belt at the pre-fight press conference in a few hours. When I told them I had nothing to wear, they told me to go shopping and they'd reimburse me.

All right
, I thought.
I'm going to Barneys, bitches.

I bought a dress and a pair of awesome shoes and even got myself this big coat that I didn't even end up wearing.

Then before I knew it, I was standing backstage at Key Arena and Dana said, “Let's bring the champ out here.” That was my cue. I sauntered out in front of the room filled with media and up the stairs to the stage, in heels that were squeezing my toes. I was concentrating more on not falling than on basking in the moment.

“I'm going to make it official,” Dana said. “The first-ever UFC women's champion, Ronda Rousey.”

He presented me with the belt. It was big and gold and jewel-encrusted. It was heavier than I thought it would be. And it was mine.

He then announced I would be making my UFC debut less than three months later against Liz Carmouche and—in what I think came as a surprise to a lot of people who followed the UFC—our fight would be the main event for UFC 157.

It was only when I got back to the hotel room and threw the belt down on the bed that the weight of everything it signified hit me. I felt giddy and let myself revel in the excitement, but only for a moment. My showdown with Liz Carmouche was less than three months away.

In every match, there is a second when the win is up for grabs and one person reaches out and grabs it. It may happen at the very beginning of a match, when one fighter comes right out swinging and catches the opponent before she's ready. That opportunity to win might happen in the middle of the match, when your opponent lets up for just a second, to catch her breath or gather her thoughts. Sometimes, the fight is up for grabs at the very end, when you have both been trying your hardest. No matter how tired you are, you have to find a way to dig deep down and make it happen.

I don't care what you have thrown at me. I don't care if I'm tired or injured or trailing in the last second. I'm going to be the person who wants to win the most. I want it so badly that I am willing to die for it. I am going to be the one who summons my last ounce of strength and my last breath to do everything humanly possible to emerge victorious.

And when the fight is over, I am going to be the one who won.

The media circus surrounding my fight against Miesha was nothing compared to the frenzy surrounding the lead-up to my fight against Carmouche. No one associated with the UFC could recall a fight drawing more attention. It was, without being dramatic, historic.

She was not only an 8–2 fighter, but of all the girls I faced in my MMA career—before and since—Liz Carmouche would be the only opponent to break my focus. We were doing a promotional stare-down, where fighters literally adopt a fighting stance and stare into each other's eyes, a month before the fight. Whenever I do a stare-down, I look into the other person's eyes and think,
I'm going to rip your fucking arm off, and there's nothing you can fucking do about it.
I push out my thoughts through that stare. I want them to be able to read me through my eyes. So there I was face-to-face with Carmouche, channeling all my venom into my gaze, when she looked me straight in the eye and blew me a kiss.

I had been expecting anything but that. It rattled my brain for a moment.

Even before that day, I had a huge amount of respect for Liz. There were a lot of girls talking smack about me, but there weren't a lot of girls lining up to fight me. Carmouche wanted the fight bad. I knew Carmouche would be tough. She was not only a fighter, but she had been in the Marines and did three tours of duty in the Middle East. That takes a strength of character that no other fighter I had faced possessed. She had been in Iraq, where people shoot at you. It's not like she was going to be intimidated by trash talk. But in that stare-down moment, I knew that against Carmouche I had to be ready for anything.

Our fight on February 23, 2013, was at the Honda Center in Anaheim. Everything I had dreamed about and everything I had worked for was on the verge of coming true. But I also knew if I didn't win, it all would have been for nothing.

On fight night, I was lying on the floor in the locker room resting. One of the undercard fights was playing on the TV, and I happened to glance up just as Urijah Faber got Ivan Menjivar in a standing rear naked choke, which is basically a choke applied from behind.

I was watching the fight and thinking,
Menjivar shouldn't be leaning on the cage. He's holding Faber on his back (allowing him to keep choking him). He should stand in the middle of the cage and try to get Faber off. He should focus on untying his legs first, not the hands.
Then it fell out of my mind. I didn't even say it out loud.

When I exited the locker room, it was as if the rest of the world faded into the background. When I stepped into the cage, my entire world shrank down to 750 square feet.

We were less than a minute into the fight. Adrenaline was pumping. I was uncharacteristically in a rush, and I forced a throw before I should have. I didn't set it up. I just went for it. I tried to muscle it and I gave up my back. Carmouche capitalized on my mistake, literally jumping on it.

In that moment, I had a choice. I could either turn so we were both lying on the ground with her on top of me or I could try to stand up. I made a snap decision. I figured it would be better to stand up and give her my back than be on the bottom on the ground with her, because that's her best spot. But I knew that if I stood up, she'd go for the rear naked choke.