My Fight / Your Fight (35 page)

“The greatest actors aren't the biggest stars,” he told me. “A great actor can play anyone in any situation, but you don't see people lining up around the block to see most critically adored actors. You see people lining up around the block to see stars like Al Pacino, who in every role is himself. He doesn't play different people. He's Al Pacino as the cop. Al Pacino as the lawyer. Al Pacino as the gangster. Al Pacino as the blind retired Marine or whatever. He always plays himself, and people just fall in love with that character of
you.
That's what makes you a star. That's what makes people line up around the block.

“That is all you need to do,” he said. “Just relax and be yourself. That's what stars are. They are just themselves in every situation you put them in.”

“Let's talk again soon,” Stallone said when lunch was over.

When I got back from Vegas, I was lower than I had been in a long time. I knew that when
The Ultimate Fighter
aired, I was going to look like a reality TV show nutcase. I felt like I had to rush. I needed to get accepted for roles and already be filming a movie when the show started airing or else Hollywood might not want me.

Then, Stallone wanted a second meeting. This time, just the two of us. I met him at Roni's Diner, a diner and pizzeria across the street from his office. It had dark wood tables and rows of black-and-white photos of celebrities on the walls. The meeting was casual, but it felt more businesslike this time. As Stallone launched into telling me why he thought I was right for the part, it was obvious he did this kind of thing all the time. I tried to pretend that I did too. I shifted into sales mode, trying to emphasize why I thought I would be good for this role. It was a strong female character.
Check.
It involved fighting.
Check.
I really respected his work.
Check.
By the time the actual check came, I felt like we were in a pretty good place. We stood up to leave, and he walked me to my car.

“You think you could fight with the curse? You think you could handle this?” he asked me, referring to the belief that acting is the kiss of death for an athlete's career.

“One hundred percent. I promise I'll make you look like a genius,” I said, thinking back to when Dana told me he was bringing me into the UFC.

“All right, then. Let's do this,” he said, and he shook my hand.

I broke out into a huge smile. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to do a happy dance. It was only in that moment that I allowed myself to accept how badly I had wanted the part.

The next week, I met Stallone again at the diner where he was finishing up lunch, and we walked over to his office. It was hot out, and I was wearing a t-shirt dress.

“Look at the size of your arms,” he said.

I tensed up for a second. It was the kind of comment that had made me so self-conscious in high school. But I wasn't in high school anymore, I reminded myself. All those people who had made fun of me had been idiots, I realized. I'm fabulous.

Stallone was still checking out my biceps.

“Man, those are awesome,” he marveled.

Back at the office, we read through the script. It was a work-in-progress Stallone told me. They were going to be making a few changes to it. Then we switched from reading lines to talking about acting.

“Always start out being over the top in the first take,” he said. “That way you keep yourself from feeling ridiculous the rest of the time. It's so much easier to tone it down than to rev it up.

“Acting is just playing,” he added. “You're having fun. A lot of people take this too seriously. Never be afraid to embarrass yourself.”

I arrived in Bulgaria to begin filming in early August. When I got there, they showed me the outfit I was going to be wearing. I mentioned that it was different than what I had originally been shown.

“I know,” the wardrobe person said. “Stallone said that your arms were so awesome that he had us do a cutout so we could show them off.”

I felt my cheeks flush, but it wasn't from embarrassment. It was with pride.

When something bad happens to me, I get mad and then I get motivated.

In the moments that you fall hardest—when you lose a job, or find out a boyfriend is cheating on you, or realize that you made a bad financial decision—you can channel your shame, your anger, your desire, your loss. You can learn, take chances, change course. You can choose to become so successful that no one can ever put you in a situation like that again.

My mom's old judo coach put it bluntly: Winning is a bitch, but revenge is a motherfucker.

Spite can be a powerful motivator if harnessed in the right way.

I spent eight weeks in Bulgaria shooting
Expendables 3.
On set, I threw punches and traded scripted verbal jabs. I ran up stairwells and fired blanks-filled guns. I was starstruck by Harrison Ford. I would see him on set and think, “Oh my God, it's Han Solo. Be cool. Be cool.” And then I would be so not cool.

Professional boxer Victor Ortiz was also in the movie and his coach found a gym in Sofia where we would go to work out. I was convinced it was a front for some kind of mafia money-laundering operation, because it was a state-of-the-art gym with top-of-the-line equipment, but hardly anyone was ever there.

Wrestling is big in Bulgaria, and I found some guys to grapple with, but it wasn't the same the level of training I was used to doing back home. One day, my costar Jason Statham asked if he could come watch me train. I started out just hitting the heavy bag, but it was miserable without Edmond to wrap my hands before I trained, to correct me if I make a mistake.

Still I was glad to have Statham there. Talking to him while I hit the bag made me feel cool and reminded me of the familiar comfort I had back home at GFC, where Edmond would stand and watch me hit the bag.

Then a couple of Bulgarian wrestlers whom I had worked out with before came into the gym.

“Ronda, do you want to wrestle?” one of them asked me. This was my chance to look like a badass. I looked at Statham and winked.

And that day, I just wiped the floor with them. I was doing all this crazy ninja shit, flips and every showboating acrobatic move I could think of. The guys I was wrestling with were really cool about it. Statham was awestruck.

“Proper blown away! I've never seen anything like that in my life,” he said.

I missed Edmond. Initially, he wanted to come out and train in Bulgaria with me, but Armenian boxing legend and three-division world champion Vic Darchinyan asked Edmond to train him for an upcoming fight. That camp coincided exactly with the film shoot.

I called him every day.

“Did you train?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, then told him what I did.

I would wrestle, grapple, run up stairs, run up mountains, run on the ellipticals, swim, shadowbox, but I wasn't able to do real training like I did at home because most of the time I had to do it alone. I was also putting in almost sixteen hours on set a day, and my schedule varied daily.

There was a day when we shot a scene where we had to run up an inclined roof to a helicopter. Call time was five a.m. I wanted to work out first, so I woke up at four a.m. The hotel gym didn't open until eight a.m., so I ran stairs in the hotel—eleven flights, eight times—before rushing back to my room to shower. Then I had to run up on the roof, a fifty-yard sprint at a forty-five degree angle, and I had to do that probably thirty times. When we finished shooting, it was afternoon, so I jumped in the car and had my driver, Alex, take me straight to a gym where I could wrestle with a bunch of guys there.

There wasn't one second I was there that I forgot about Miesha Tate.

When I got done filming
Expendables
, I flew to Atlanta for ten days to film a part in the seventh installment of the
Fast & Furious
franchise. I returned to L.A. forty-seven days before my fight with Miesha and headed straight into camp.

Everything we did in the lead-up to the rematch with Miesha was about ensuring that I would be able to handle anything. It wasn't so much about being ready for what she might do in the cage as it was about being able to control my emotions and getting back into fighting form after such a long layoff.

Edmond is really good about pushing me to use my anger as a tool. In training, he will purposely ignore me or make comments to try to make me emotional and put me in the situation where I have to suppress it.

He refuses to allow me to kick. Throwing kicks isn't part of the way I fight. But I would occasionally throw a kick in practice out of frustration or rage.

“Don't do that,” Edmond said one day. “When you kick, I know it means you're angry.”

He was right.

Ahead of the fight, Edmond brought in sparring partners who would go nuts, throwing crazy hooks and taking cheap shots. He had me go long rounds, trying to test my patience.

He would intentionally do things to try to get me aggravated before I sparred. He would ignore or snap at me, and I would get upset because I didn't understand why he was acting that way.

One day during camp, I asked him if he was going to hold mitts. After all the effort it took to get him to hold mitts for me, it's still a big deal for me, a ritual.

“No,” he told me. “Go hit the bag.”

As I was hitting the bag, he came up to me and looked over my shoulder.

“Why are you doing it like that?” he asked, then walked away.

That was the only thing he said to me that day. I spent the next few hours going back and forth between confused and upset.

I was asking myself,
What's wrong? What's the problem? Am I sucking? Does he want me to give an excuse for why I'm sucking?
I was already emotional, because I always get emotional during camp, and I started crying. And the whole time, he was looking at me. Then I realized I was letting him get in my head. He wanted to get in my head and make me emotional so that if I got emotional in the fight, I would be able to handle myself.

But there were also things that weren't getting handled in camp. Darin was responsible for making sure my training partners got paid. I had learned shortly after the camp for UFC 157 that—even though I had formalized my agreement with Darin—they hadn't been getting their checks.

That was a real concern. If you're not paying your sparring partners, they could just decide not to come to practice one day, and it would be just like I was back in Bulgaria with no one to train with.

One afternoon, Edmond and I were sitting on the edge of the ring as I unwrapped my hands when he said, “Ronda, fight managers are fine, but as long as they do the job right.”

I could tell he was trying to tell me something without overstepping his bounds, and I knew he was right.

“I know,” I sighed. “I'll deal with this shit after the fight.”

The day of the fight against Miesha, I was lying on the bed in the bedroom of my suite trying to rest when I heard an altercation between some of the people in the other room. I blocked it out, rolled over, and forced myself back to sleep, but I was angry. I don't like drama before I fight. I don't like distractions before I fight. I would deal with whatever was going on there after the fight.

I thought about the fight that was mere hours away. I thought about the first time I fought Miesha. I thought about TUF. I thought about the situation that had just gone down in my suite.

Somebody was going to have to pay. And that person was going to be standing across the cage from me very, very soon.

For me, anger is motivating. But I can't allow anger to consume me to the point where it impacts my judgment. When you're angry and trying to solve a problem or deal with a situation, you're not going to solve it wisely. In a relationship with somebody, if you're angry, you're not going to say the perfect words. When you're relaxed, then you calm down. You can think logically and rationally to solve the problem more efficiently. It's the same thing when you're fighting.

A big concept of fighting that many people don't get is one I call reading the rest beats, like when you're reading music. One reason why many people get tired in a fight has nothing to do with them being in bad shape. It's about knowing how to find those tiny split seconds of rest; they can make all the difference in a fight. It is the moments where I'm resting while still putting pressure on my opponent that allows me to maintain such a high pace throughout the fight.

For example, if I'm holding someone against the cage, I'm not using my muscle to press against the cage. If I lean on my forward foot and adjust my shoulder, all my weight is going on the person. I'm using gravity against and pressuring my opponent, all the while my muscles are resting.

Know when to explode and know when to relax—that's the only way to survive.

Time does not always heal all. Sometimes, it just gives you more time to get pissed off. I had been waiting almost six months from the end of filming
The Ultimate Fighter
to get to this fight. My rematch against Miesha was the co-main event for UFC 168.

She walked into the arena to Katy Perry's “Eye of the Tiger.” I have my game face on from the minute I leave my hotel room on Fight Night, but I rolled my eyes that night.

A few minutes later, I was stomping toward the cage in my battle boots to the sounds of Joan Jett. I have never wanted to destroy someone so badly. I did not so much want to break her arm again as I wanted to rip it off. I glared at her across the cage, feeling nothing but cold, calculated wrath.

“Touch gloves and let's do this,” the referee said, giving the standard pre-fight spiel.

I stepped back without raising a hand.

The referee said start. I was going to be in control every second of the fight. To me, it wasn't just about winning. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to show her just how dominant over her I was. I wanted her to never again think that she could step into the cage and face off against me. I wasn't going to rush for a finish. I was going to pick her apart in every aspect of her game.