Ronda Rousey has a direct message for the current generation of female MMA fighters: winning fights is not actually the job.
Speaking at a press conference promoting her May 16 return against Gina Carano at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Rousey challenged fighters who treat promotional obligations as secondary to their training and offered a framework she developed through her WWE experience for approaching every matchup.
“I think a lot of them need to realize that just going in and fighting isn’t the whole job and putting a lot of thought into like media and stuff like this and being able to get your message across because your job isn’t to win fights, it’s to get people to watch your fights,” Rousey said.
She was pointed about what she described as an unprepared approach to media that she has observed across the division.
“I think a lot of girls now are just going to do media and they’re just winging it. And it shows. You need to put just as much effort into promotion as you do into fighting if you want anyone to watch your awesome fight.”
Rousey then shared a specific question she learned to ask in WWE that she believes applies equally to MMA.
“There’s something that I kind of learned in pro wrestling is every single time that we had a match, we’d ask ourselves, ‘What’s the story of the match?’ I would advise everybody in MMA at any matchup that you have, think, ‘What is the story of my match? What is something unique that just the two of us bring to the table that you would never see in any other matchup?’”
She closed with the bluntest version of the message.
“It’s not your job to be cool, it’s to get people to watch your f**king fight. So, please think about it.”
Rousey made her professional MMA debut in March 2011 and became UFC women’s bantamweight champion in 2013, spending several years as the sport’s most recognized global star before transitioning to Hollywood and WWE.