Ronda Rousey says her long-discussed fight with Gina Carano started as a private mission during pregnancy that slowly turned into a shared comeback built in secret over the past year.
Speaking on SportsCenter, she described seeing Carano in an interview, worrying about her health, and deciding that the best way she could help a woman she feels she “owes immensely” was to give her a fight that might reignite both of their passions for competition.
How Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano Came Together
Rousey explained that the idea first hit when she was “nine months pregnant” and came across a recent Carano interview where the original Strikeforce star “didn’t look good” and “had gained an unhealthy amount of weight.”
“My first thought was like, ‘Oh my God, what can I do? What can I do to help?’” she said, adding that Carano is “the one woman in MMA that doesn’t owe me a damn thing, but that I owe immensely,” given how her trailblazing run opened the door for Rousey’s own rise as a star.
She framed the concern through her own history, recalling a period when she was “depressed and gave up on the world and inadvertently gave up on myself,” and said what saved her back then was having a goal that “reignited” her drive.
That is why, Rousey said, she kept coming back to an old promise. “I always said that Gina is the one person I’d come back to fight for,” she said. Watching that interview flipped the switch: “She needs this. She needs this fight. And the more that I thought about it, I was like, you know what – I need this. I really need this fight.”
Her first call was to an old boss rather than to Netflix. “I reached out to Dana and asked him if he would be interested in it, and it didn’t exactly work out with the UFC, but it led us to here today,” she said, confirming the matchup eventually landed under Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions banner and on a new stage as Netflix’s first live MMA main event.
Rousey told SportsCenter that the fight “has been in the making since I was pregnant, which is over a year ago,” and that turning an idea into a signed bout meant working with Carano through “a lot of obstacles along the way.” “We fought for this and we fought to fight each other,” she said, revealing that at one stage she even joked to Carano, “If I have to go out there and train you myself to fight me, I will.”
She said both women “had to work together to overcome every obstacle to get here,” calling it “really surreal because it’s been like a secret for so long” that she is only now allowed to discuss.
The result of that long, quiet push is a five-round featherweight bout at 145 pounds on May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, with Netflix streaming the event live in partnership with Most Valuable Promotions. Rousey, 39, returns for the first time since 2016, while Carano, 43, fights for the first time since 2009, bringing two eras of women’s MMA together under one roof.
Rousey said the process of getting there has already given the matchup its meaning: a fight she believes Carano “needs,” that she admits she “really” needs too, and that both have quietly been chasing since the idea first surfaced in her living room late in pregnancy.
