Aug. 31, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:07:26
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And boom, we're live. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's up? | ||
| It's suddenly like pressure when you said it's live. | ||
| I was chilling here for a minute. | ||
| I should take these off. | ||
| It's more casual. | ||
| You guys don't have them on. | ||
| Jamie, let us know if you can't hear us. | ||
| So, Edmund and Rhonda, welcome. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Welcome to this humble abode. | ||
| I like the new place. | ||
| It's been a minute. | ||
| Yeah, it's been a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The last time we did a podcast, you weren't even in the UFC yet. | ||
| No, I hadn't even fought for... | ||
| I was going to fight for the Strikeforce title the first time when I came on. | ||
| Is that really that long ago? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I got you the cognac. | ||
| What's the matter, Jamie? | ||
| That's good. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're good. | |
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Armenian cognac. | ||
| That got us fucked up. | ||
| You guys are a very interesting combination. | ||
| Before this even got started, I have to tell everybody. | ||
| Edmund's over here. | ||
| Rhonda's over here. | ||
| You're like, get over here. | ||
| Get closer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Get closer. | |
| He can't be that far from me. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I have to be able to hit him at all times. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, I have to measure my distance with him at all times. | ||
| Well, you want to touch him. | ||
| You want him right there. | ||
| You guys are very close. | ||
| You have a very unusual relationship. | ||
| It wasn't always like that, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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No? | |
| It was very, like, Clint Eastwood, Hillary, Savannah, Million Dollar Baby status. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was like, who is this American chick in the gym with all the Armenian guys? | |
| Stay away from me. | ||
| No one would talk to me at all. | ||
| Well, I love Armenians. | ||
| One of the reasons why I love Armenians is because they're unapologetically masculine. | ||
| There's very few unapologetically masculine cultures left in America. | ||
| People are apologizing for being men. | ||
| And Armenians don't play that shit. | ||
| It's a fun culture. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| They're unapologetically masculine, but they are not afraid to accessorize at all. | ||
| How so? | ||
| The bracelets! | ||
| I'm like, show up, show up! | ||
| Gold chains! | ||
| Yeah, all this! | ||
| A lot of shiny shit! | ||
| But it's because it's designer cologne, you know? | ||
| No socks now, that's the thing now. | ||
| They wear the shoes with no socks. | ||
| They're very fashionable. | ||
| They had to get me to actually start cleaning up a little bit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it was the reverse. | ||
| They had to make me over when I first started coming. | ||
| So what was their advice? | ||
| Well, it used to be that I had this car, the Fonda was my Honda, and it had one working window and no air conditioning, so I would just sweat all the way home. | ||
| So I would just put on my same, like, my clothes I came in with, no shower. | ||
| I would just throw it on, still sweating, and jump in my car, because I would just sweat all the way home, that's the point. | ||
| And Edmund's first word of advice was he made me shower before I got in the car. | ||
| Even if I would sweat all the way home and have to shower again, that was like, you're like, I know you're a very good girl and all these things. | ||
| But he didn't speak English. | ||
| I taught him English pretty much. | ||
| He didn't speak English at all. | ||
| You speak so fluently. | ||
| I graduated high school, yeah, but during the classes, Armenian kids have to grow up. | ||
| The parents loved it because they go to school, speak English, and the parents would bring them to the gym after school programs and they would They want their kids to speak Armenian so they won't forget where they're from. | ||
| Teaching for 10 years, every day, 4 to 10, I was only speaking Armenian. | ||
| I couldn't speak well. | ||
| I was like, what's happening here? | ||
| I forgot my English or something? | ||
| And Rana brought it back. | ||
| He was the one, too, after I won a couple fights, he was like, maybe you should wear, get a little pretty sometime, put some makeup on, you know? | ||
| Don't be a bad thing! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that was all him trying to get me to growl you up a little bit. | |
| Because I was a lot grungier when I first started coming to the gym. | ||
| You're such a fascinating contradiction in that way. | ||
| Because when you clean up, you're beautiful. | ||
| You clean up, you're a 10. But you don't give a fuck. | ||
| Well, you can't walk around like... | ||
| We're going all out all the time because then you can't step it up when it's time to step it up. | ||
| I want to be able to have my she's all that unveiling moment whenever I feel like it. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Other girls did do it the other way. | ||
| They literally can't not be made up when they leave the house. | ||
| They fucking panic. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand that. | ||
| I like my face. | ||
| You have a beautiful face. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| You should like your face. | ||
| I don't think I should spend my time paranoid to show people what my actual face looks like. | ||
| That's a weird thing with women. | ||
| Our culture has decided that women have to have unusual, unnatural colors over their eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Your lips have to go, this is where I suck the dick. | |
| It's all happening right here. | ||
| Look how shiny! | ||
| Don't you want to get in there? | ||
| Haven't you seen those contouring videos and stuff like that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You have to find these contouring things where it starts with a girl with her face plain and they do all this contour stuff to them and they're an entirely different person by the end of it. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I saw this one thing, I don't know, it was on Instagram, so who knows if it was even true, that some guy sued his wife after they were married because he never saw her without makeup. | ||
|
unidentified
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And she was totally busted without it. | |
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| There was one about a Chinese guy who sued his wife because she had a gang of plastic surgery and the kids came out ugly. | ||
| But I don't think that was real either. | ||
| I've seen that a lot. | ||
| Whenever I see people, like a good-looking couple, but they got butt-ugly kids, then you know. | ||
| It's just like, they got work done. | ||
| You can't get your genetics lifted. | ||
| Yeah, it is a weird thing. | ||
| Koreans have a real issue in their culture where they get their eyes. | ||
| It's so common that a lot of girls, there's very few natural eyes left. | ||
| It's like everyone gets their eyes done. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| They get their eyes changed. | ||
| Koreans have naturally a thin opening for their eye. | ||
| Well, they get their eyelids, they get surgery done, and their eyes are fucking, hello! | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie, pull it up so you guys can see it. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| But it's extremely common. | ||
| Like, as common as, probably more common than braces are here. | ||
| Like, look what's going on. | ||
| Men, too. | ||
| That's men! | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa! | |
| Look at the girls. | ||
| She looks like an anime character. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello! | |
| Look at those eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi! | |
| My eyes are crazy! | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Okay, look at those two. | ||
| Well, one of them looks like she's eight. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| But it's a very, very, very common procedure over there to the point where so many of these girls... | ||
| Are those stitches in the corners of her eyes? | ||
| It looks like it, doesn't it? | ||
| Ouch! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, oh, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oof. | |
| Extremely, extremely common. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They do all sorts of other weird shit, too. | ||
| Like, they put chin implants in them. | ||
| Look at that girl. | ||
| Had her chin shaved down. | ||
| Like, okay, there's perfect. | ||
| The one on the left, that looks like Bigfoot Silva's sister. | ||
| And the one on the right is a 10. So, like, what happened there? | ||
| Well, they shaved her down. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| She looks like Enoki's sister. | ||
| That's what she looks like. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Antonio Inoki, the guy who fought Muhammad Ali. | ||
| That's what she looks like, right? | ||
| Not that it's a bad thing. | ||
| Look, they fixed it. | ||
| She's great now. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| I bet that girl went on a dick rampage, though, after she got that done. | ||
| She probably did, you know, because before, like, everyone was, like, not really interested, and then, bam, the girl on the right. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was probably a swarm. | |
| You know? | ||
| But that's super common. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird because it's... | ||
| It's not in your DNA, and so, like, your children are going to have to deal with the same issues. | ||
| Like, whatever weird jaw structure thing, nose structure thing that you're going to get fixed with a doctor, are you going to get your kids snipped, too? | ||
| You know? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I'm not, like, a big cosmetic surgery type of person, you know? | ||
| Like, that's your face and, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I should be cool with it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Yeah, but what if you have, like, something goofy, you know? | ||
| Like, there was a girl I went to school with in high school. | ||
| She had a big, crazy nose. | ||
| She's a nice girl, but it was, like, crazy, like, Wicked Witch of the West type shit. | ||
| She had, like, a crazy hump. | ||
| And then she got it removed. | ||
| She got her nose fixed. | ||
| And all of a sudden, she was hot as fuck. | ||
| And everybody was like, what happened to Susan? | ||
| Like, damn, this is weird. | ||
| But there's plenty of people that there's nothing wrong with them. | ||
| Like, the chick from Dirty Dancing was absolutely gorgeous. | ||
| She got her nose done, and it was like, no one could recognize her. | ||
| She never could get a part again. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird because you become famous for that look. | ||
| And then like the other girl who did that recently, Renee Zellweger, she did it recently. | ||
| She's unrecognizable. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I see. | ||
| She's gorgeous. | ||
|
unidentified
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She's beautiful. | |
| I think that there's like a line, like, you know, if you have like a cleft lip or something like wrong with you, you know, like go, you know, go for it. | ||
| But like if you're just self-conscious, you know, about something and then, you know, maybe you should just accept it that that's how you look, you know? | ||
| I think the stars, if they're on TV all the time, they look pretty. | ||
| Already people get used to that look, so they shouldn't be that worried about it. | ||
| Also, if you're on television, that's your currency. | ||
| Your currency is your appearance. | ||
| Relinquishing any aspect of that, they think the whole reason they got there is because of their looks. | ||
| There's a lot of people that believe that. | ||
| Yeah, but when you're a kid, when you're in high school, you're a teenager, you're going to hate everything pretty much about yourself for a while. | ||
| You know, you're like, oh God, you know, you're suddenly super self-conscious about all that. | ||
| And if it's like so calm and easily accessible, people are going to end up getting so much work done when they're kids and they're just being going through that stage when, you know, you should at least wait till you're... | ||
| Like, past 30 and you're like, you know, you've had a good three decades of not being happy with how that looks, then okay, fine, go for it. | ||
| But if you're a teenager and you're like, oh my god, my friend Allison has big boobs and I want to get implants, like, no, don't do it. | ||
| You're 18. You'll get over it. | ||
| You'll accept that, you know, itty bitty titty committee is pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know? | |
| But, I don't know. | ||
| You're doing something right now with this whole don't be a do-nothing bitch thing. | ||
| Are you aware of how big this movement is? | ||
| I tweeted about it the other day that I was... | ||
| I don't forget where I was, but these two girls were arguing about the merits, pros, and cons of being a do-nothing bitch. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| It was all after your fight, and it was completely brought on by you. | ||
| Some girls were like, well, listen, I don't like to fucking work. | ||
| What's wrong with being a do-nothing bitch? | ||
| And the other girl was like, no, she's fucking right. | ||
| Too many girls are out there doing nothing. | ||
| The thing that's wrong with it is you just contribute nothing to society. | ||
| All you do is consume. | ||
| If you're a do-nothing bitch, all you do is spend somebody else's money and try to look pretty. | ||
| Like, that's all you do is you use stuff up. | ||
| You use up resources and you give nothing. | ||
| And so you're pretty much a drain on society. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| They don't think it that way. | ||
| They think what they are is something that all these men want to fuck. | ||
| So in working really hard to attain this appearance that all these men want to fuck, that what they are, they've created capital. | ||
| They've created a need for this. | ||
| I was just brought up to think that it wasn't your mission in life to be happy. | ||
| It was your mission in life to leave the world better than how you found it. | ||
| And by being a cum bucket, you're not going to do that. | ||
| It's not your mission in life to be happy. | ||
| Have you never heard that before? | ||
| I love introducing a new saying. | ||
| Like, yes, I invented that. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| That's a fascinating thing to say, that it's not your mission in life to be happy. | ||
| So but what's the point in leaving the world better if no one's happy? | ||
| If everybody follows that same principle the world just keeps getting better and better and everybody's miserable as fuck. | ||
| That doesn't seem to make sense. | ||
| I think your happiness is supposed to be a byproduct of actually living a fulfilling life. | ||
| You know, instead of just trying to, you know, if I tried to get drunk and party every day and get as happy as I possibly could every day, you know, I'm going to live a really unfulfilling life and die unhappy. | ||
| But is that where happiness comes from? | ||
| The reality of happiness is happiness comes, at least in my feeling, it comes from achieving goals and conquering whatever weird shit you don't like about yourself. | ||
| Like whatever weird discipline issues you might have or behavior issues you might have and accomplishing goals. | ||
| Like there's something about setting goals, working hard on something and accomplishing those things that creates a real happiness. | ||
| The other kind of happiness comes from family and friends and loved ones. | ||
| That's the other happiness. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think it's also about not being selfish and thinking about your kids, too, because we could all be as happy as possible. | ||
| You know, this generation, burn every resource we have, and all of our kids are going to starve, you know, in some post-apocalyptic world because everybody before him was just trying to be happy, you know? | ||
| Like, that's not really a good way to live, either. | ||
| You know, I want to know that my kids are going to be all right, and they're growing up in a better world than I did. | ||
| That's going to make me happier than knowing that I had a great time. | ||
| Good luck, kiddies. | ||
| So, the way you do that is by telling chicks to not be a do-nothing bitch? | ||
| Well, I definitely don't want my kids to be. | ||
| Well, I don't think they will be. | ||
| I think there would be a real issue growing up in the Rousey household. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Your mom wrote a fucking hilarious blog the other day about sycophants. | ||
| Did you read that? | ||
| No, my mom is a blog master. | ||
| She's a character. | ||
| If you really know my mother, you understand most of me. | ||
| I need to get her in here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your mom's so powerful. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something about your mom. | ||
| Just talking to her, you go, this is a powerful woman. | ||
| I used to think I was so laid back and chill, and my mom was just really intense, and then I realized just in comparison to her, I was really laid back and chill, and I'm actually pretty intense. | ||
| I was surprised. | ||
| I was like, you're so intense. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I'm a chill, cool one. | ||
| It's all relative. | ||
| Yeah, it's all relative. | ||
| Hang out with my mom and be like, whoa. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know how you are as chill as you are. | ||
| The standards were set so high in your house that just being, like, what you thought was chill in your house, everybody else was like, whoa! | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, I was, like, the black sheep loser in my house for, like, a long time. | ||
| You were a loser? | ||
| Yeah, because everybody else has, like, bachelor's and master's degrees, and they're like, you know, like, average was below average. | ||
| Like, exceptional was average in our family. | ||
| The rule was you could pick anything you wanted to do in the world, but you just had to be the best in the world at it. | ||
| She's like, you don't have to pick one specific thing, but you just have to be the best in the world at it. | ||
| Fuck, that's a lot of pressure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, when you were a kid, but you know what? | ||
| Now I'm happy for it, because now I'm in high-pressure situations all the time, and I can totally deal with it. | ||
| I mean, now I'm live on the Joe Rogan Experience, and I'm sure my heart rate is perfectly fine. | ||
| Well, this is a very low-pressure situation compared to Brazil. | ||
| Well, I'm sure some people listening right now, if they got on, you know, they'd have a hard time relaxing. | ||
| Like, my first time that I came on your show, I was a little bit, like, amped up, because I would watch it all the time, and I was a fan. | ||
| Like, I would go to training, I would come home, and I would make, you know, I got to the point where I could afford Trader Joe's at that point. | ||
| So I was like, made myself a little sandwich at Trader Joe's and I would like sit and eat my sandwich and listen to you every day. | ||
| Well, if I remember correctly, we might have been medicated at the time as well. | ||
| There might have been some plant burning going on. | ||
| Speaking of Brazil, that experience, to me, that was one of the strangest experiences of all my years of calling fights. | ||
| It was one of the strangest experiences because it had sort of transcended just fighting. | ||
| It had gotten into this weird cultural place. | ||
| First of all, when we went there, it was the first time I sat in the audience for a weigh-in. | ||
| I never sat in the audience for a weigh-in before. | ||
| But when we got there, they had some dude that was a Brazilian guy that was going to do the weigh-ins because they wanted it to be in Portuguese. | ||
| So I sat down in the front row and I got to watch. | ||
| And one of the freakiest things about it was it was the first time ever, out of all the fights that I've ever called in Brazil, where the Brazilian got booed and the American got cheered. | ||
| And I was like, we've hit some weird tipping point here. | ||
| And it was strange to observe that. | ||
| I was like, when you went on stage, they were cheering you. | ||
| And she's got the Brazilian flag, and she's getting fucking crazy, and she's trying to get everybody on her side. | ||
| And they're like, that's not what we're here for. | ||
| We're here for the Ronda Rousey show. | ||
| She was trying really hard to pull that angle. | ||
| She brought that Brazilian flag everywhere. | ||
| She flew with it in the plane. | ||
| She got off the plane with it. | ||
| I'm sure she went to the bathroom with it. | ||
| I never saw her without that flag. | ||
| And then they threw it on the ground when you were walking in. | ||
| Then her brother... | ||
| Takes the flag and throws it at my face when I'm walking in. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, it's cool for you to be patriotic and proud of your country, but you don't throw your flag on the ground. | ||
| Yeah, that's disrespectful to your country. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| So, Edmund's not going to say this, but like, okay... | ||
| This, her brother, the guy with like her, she had the brother with like blue hair. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He was giving me shit on Instagram for like a month. | ||
| He was harassing Edmund all over his Instagram, right? | ||
| And Edmund's like, just you wait. | ||
| When I get done with this, when you beat her ass, I'm going to let him have it. | ||
| I'm going to tell him. | ||
| I'm like, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| So, you know, because that's Edmund's thing. | ||
| He like gets riled up. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| So then we get there and he's like wearing like these pink shirts and he was outside and we were leaving the bus and being like, you know, fuck you! | ||
| And like a pink shirt. | ||
| I'm like, aw, look at you. | ||
| He's like, you know, same fucking pink. | ||
| That's cute. | ||
| So then I'm walking out. | ||
| The guy throws the Brazilian flag at my face. | ||
| Edmund almost starts something right then, but I'm about to walk out of the cage. | ||
| I can tell that he's restraining himself. | ||
| He's almost just like, I'm going to see you later, kind of thing, and cuts it off, which I appreciate that self-control at the moment. | ||
| So, if you watch in the background, I put that Don't Cry clip on my Instagram. | ||
| If you look in the background... | ||
| Her face hits the mat. | ||
| Edmund does not celebrate. | ||
| The first thing he does is he turns around and runs straight at that dude with the blue hair, her brother. | ||
| He doesn't go yay. | ||
| It was almost like he was sitting there the whole time waiting for me to knock her out just so he could go and give this guy shit. | ||
| It wasn't like he was waiting for me to win so he could be happy. | ||
| He'd be like, hurry up, knock this bitch out. | ||
| I gotta go get after this fucking guy. | ||
| That was his mindset. | ||
| So every single time I watched over and over, Edmund goes, whoop, off the chair, runs straight to the dude, not even... | ||
| He didn't even smile. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| I'll watch it over and over and over. | ||
|
unidentified
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You see the little gold Rousey bouncing away as he's running. | |
| One of the Brazilian fans that loves Ronda, their whole family just comes to all the fights. | ||
| He's literally standing right behind that dude. | ||
| and he has it recorded so they gave me it through his phone you know he gave it to me you see the flag he gets it and throws it i'm like you stupid fuck keep your you know it's your country's flag i was wanting to see what happened afterward though i only saw you running away towards him like what happened when he got on it i wanted to grab him and choke him and then everybody held me back all the security . | ||
| That whole event was so intense. | ||
| When she face-planted right on the Straight Outta Compton... | ||
| Oh my god, how funny was that meme? | ||
| Holy shit, Straight Outta Compton comes out in two weeks! | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| We were eating wings afterward and Dana showed it to me. | ||
| I'm like, oh! | ||
| And then you stood over and said, don't cry. | ||
| Well, because that's what she was saying at the weigh-in. | ||
| She's in my face going, don't cry, don't cry. | ||
| Before, she'd always yell things like Portuguese at me. | ||
| I'd be like, okay. | ||
| So at the weigh-in, she was speaking English to you? | ||
| That's the only thing she ever said to me in English was, don't cry, don't cry, over and over and over. | ||
| So then right when I knocked her out and I fixed my shorts, I was like, oh yeah, don't cry. | ||
| What makes you think of those things at that moment? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's the most incomprehensible moment ever. | ||
| That was an intense moment. | ||
| When you walked around the cage after you knocked her out, it was one of... | ||
| I've seen guys win before, I've seen women win before, I've seen people win before, but I never saw anybody soak it all in the way you did when you walked around. | ||
| When she face-planted, you said, don't cry, and then you walked around like you strutted. | ||
| Around the octagon. | ||
| You, like, strutted and looked around at all those people. | ||
| You, like, you took it all in. | ||
| You looked around. | ||
| I was like, wow! | ||
| This is a crazy moment. | ||
| Yeah, I never did. | ||
| That was the first time I did that, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I really, like, received it. | ||
| Because usually it's just like, okay, I beat the person and then I have to not say anything stupid and then I have to drug test and do my medicals and then I have to do press conference and don't say anything stupid again. | ||
| And then I can eat something and relax. | ||
| And that was the first time I took, like, a moment to just, like, look at it. | ||
| I think she was probably thinking, I wish I fucked her up one more time right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Just get up, bitch! | |
| I wanted to see what would happen to the crowd because it was interesting. | ||
| I was getting booed a little coming in. | ||
| They shut right the fuck up when you knocked her out. | ||
| They cheered. | ||
| When it turned, yeah. | ||
| I was this close to crying. | ||
| I'm a big time crier. | ||
| I was really, really close. | ||
| That one I'm going to remember forever. | ||
| It was definitely Rocky IV for sure. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| Well, it was also... | ||
| There was so much emotion attached to that because the shit that she had said about suicide and connecting to your father and all that shit. | ||
| And, you know, and knowing you as long as I've had and having daughters and... | ||
| It was so emotional for me. | ||
| That was the closest I've ever come to crying while I was in it. | ||
| I might cry now when I was interviewing somebody. | ||
| It's because it was just... | ||
| It was so intense and it was also like... | ||
| I really knew that I was seeing history. | ||
| I know it's hard for you to talk about it because you're living it right now, but you're in the middle of history. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| What's going on with you right now? | ||
| You're a part of some crazy movement right now. | ||
| It's not just sport. | ||
| It's like you're this very unique example for other women. | ||
| Like, that's never existed before. | ||
| There's never been a female combat sports athlete like you. | ||
| And when you went down to Brazil, knocked that girl out like that, and then were taking it all in. | ||
| It was so crazy. | ||
| I was so happy for you, and it was so crazy at the same time. | ||
| It was nuts. | ||
| The whole thing was such a strange moment. | ||
| There was a feeling in the air, and there was a recognition of what was happening that was very different for me than any other fight that I've ever called before. | ||
| I think people just are starting to recognize how solid she is as a human being, Ronda. | ||
| Every opponent she's faced, she keeps it very real, very intelligent, very professional, how an athlete should carry themselves, a person should carry themselves. | ||
| If you watch all the fights. | ||
| Misha didn't behave from the beginning. | ||
| There's a lot of things from the beginning. | ||
| She didn't do what she was supposed to do. | ||
| Bringing her forehead, you know, pushing during weigh-ins, stuff like that. | ||
| It's great building up, you know, a fight. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| It's the fight business. | ||
| But afterwards, going complaining to the commission to fine somebody when you fight for a living, it's nonsense. | ||
| Why was she saying to fine her? | ||
| To complain to the commission so they could touch her purse to fine her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About what? | |
| She said that she put her forehead on our first weigh-in and I pushed her back and she said the commission should fine me for head-butting her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically they're not real. | ||
| You don't do that. | ||
| You don't touch somebody's finances when you're a fighter yourself. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Not in that way. | ||
| And every opponent, how respectful she was against Kat, you know, even on the floor when the submitter said, you know, I'll give you another chance. | ||
| You know, that was too quick. | ||
| She's done an amazing job, man. | ||
| Everybody I think now after 10 fights, you know, 12 fights, 13 fights, they're starting to realize that. | ||
| Well, I don't think we're really, like, I don't even think I'm going to really know what is going on right now or realize what is going on right now until afterward, you know, until it's all done. | ||
| And I can just try to do the best that I can in the moment, but I don't really think that any of us really comprehend what's going on right now until we're looking at it in hindsight. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing I think is kind of funny. | ||
| There's so many people that just live to hate me, but when I'm gone, they're going to miss me. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I realize you're playing. | ||
| They really are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I realize you're playing. | |
| You keep it real and you kick everybody's ass. | ||
| I'm saying I'm like, how are they ever going to have a bad guy better than Heath Ledger as the Joker? | ||
| Like, you miss him! | ||
| You need, like, the Joker's gone! | ||
| Like, you're never gonna have Joker again! | ||
| I need a Joker? | ||
| I'm saying that, like, I am not the protagonist. | ||
| I'm the antagonist. | ||
| Because the protagonist just reacts. | ||
| They do nothing. | ||
| The whole storyline, the whole everything that goes on, is completely dependent on the antagonist. | ||
| I'm the one that's forcing everybody to do something. | ||
| And so, like, I like to think of myself as more of, like, the heel, like, the bad guy that you somehow, like, sometimes root for. | ||
| You can't help it a little bit sometimes, but sometimes you hate him. | ||
| But I think that the fact that mixed emotions come out is one of the more interesting things. | ||
| You know, I'm not trying to have everyone like me. | ||
| I'm trying to have everybody care about what I'm doing. | ||
| When you beat Misha and the audience was booing, do you remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That shit's all gone. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Nobody remembers that anymore. | ||
| Oh, it'll come back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You won't, you won't. | |
| It'll come back because you want to know why it happened? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I wouldn't shake her hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it was an entirely... | ||
| Disingenuous gesture for her to offer a handshake, because she never would have offered a handshake if she wasn't being watched by millions of people. | ||
| And I wouldn't have shook her hand if we were alone in the room or we had millions of people watching. | ||
| And the fact that I'm not going to play to the crowd, it would have been so easy to shake her hand and have everybody cheer, but I felt like it would have been dishonest and, you know, Honesty pays, but it pays very slowly, and it doesn't pay very consistently. | ||
| Do you think that she was being honest when she shook her hand? | ||
| Is it possible that she was being honest when she went to shake your hand? | ||
| Is it possible that all the anxiety and all the animosity that she had went away when you guys fought? | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| Not possible. | ||
| Because she insulted and really did some very shady Backhanded, you know, backstage things to people I really love and care about. | ||
| Without apologizing. | ||
| That we didn't see? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, that you didn't see. | ||
| Like, what kind of stuff? | ||
| Like, um... | ||
| One example. | ||
| At the Ultimate Fighter... | ||
| Chris Beal's about to go out and fight. | ||
| And he's all warmed up. | ||
| He's ready to go. | ||
| And literally, like, two minutes before he goes out, Dana walks in and he goes, you're signed with another promotion? | ||
| And he's like, what? | ||
| And he's like, your other promoter just called. | ||
| Like, we're pulling you out of this fight, all this stuff, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a closed set. | ||
| No one's supposed to even know that he's on the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| And how would his other promoter even know that he was about to fight in two minutes? | ||
| And who would benefit from that kind of timing and things like that? | ||
| Like, he would say it, he said it to other people in the house, so they knew, and the other team knew that it was the other promoter. | ||
| But how would the promoter know to call right before he was about to walk out to mess with him the most? | ||
| Because of Misha? | ||
| Because somebody tipped him off. | ||
| It was timed. | ||
| I don't believe in coincidences. | ||
| There's no way that that was a coincidence. | ||
| So he was signed with another promoter? | ||
| I think he had a contract, but he hadn't fought in so long. | ||
| The contract was supposed to default if they hadn't had him fight within that amount of time, so he was out of it. | ||
| But it was some sort of messy contract situation or whatever. | ||
| But he mentioned it to the other kids and It got back to their team and they called and set this up so that they would call right at the exact time he's about to go out and try to get Chris Beale pulled out. | ||
| Or at least mess with him enough to like have him not be fresh when he went in. | ||
| And so you're pretty sure that that was Misha's doing? | ||
| Who else's would it be? | ||
| Who else would benefit from that? | ||
| Who else had access to phones? | ||
| Was that the only thing? | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Who else would have access to a phone, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not the only thing. | ||
| That's one small example out of very many, and you know what? | ||
| I just don't even want to get into it. | ||
| I've moved on with my life. | ||
| And just not keeping it real, you know, we had Dana come in and say, just leave, you know, promise me that everything will be normal and you guys won't be acting up anymore, this and that. | ||
| And we said, yeah, we will. | ||
| And, you know, a promise is a promise. | ||
| You have to be respectful, you know. | ||
| And then the next day. | ||
| And the next day they do the same shit. | ||
| And the next day they put, like, some Count Chocula doll in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With a, like, certificate to, like, get your eyebrows waxed. | ||
| It said Edmund on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the thing is, I could give them my number, they could always see me anywhere in the street, you know, and I told them that, you know, there's too many cameras. | ||
| Don't act like a little bitch in front of cameras. | ||
| You know, you guys could do that because, you know, Ronda doesn't want me to step out of line and kick your fucking ass right there. | ||
| They're going to take me out of there and, you know, I got to do this for all those kids, you know. | ||
| They don't understand shit like that so when a person doesn't sometimes you can't fucking That's the thing like if someone is like been purposely like trying to like Backhand and work against you do really really shady shit and then try to like play sweetheart to everybody else And then they try to play sweetheart again. | ||
| I'm not gonna trust you at all Why would you expect that and why it would be insults all the people that I love that you Insulted to shake your hand without an apology to them anyway Did you like doing that show because it seemed like you hated it? | ||
| It was one of the worst experiences I've ever, like, had to deal with. | ||
| What was so horrible about it? | ||
| Just being around Misha all the time? | ||
| No, about being, um, felt like I was trapped in a situation because the kids needed me so I couldn't leave. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| You know, so, I mean, I was kind of trapped. | ||
| They were, like, using... | ||
| The fact that I needed to be there for these kids so they would treat us however they wanted and I just felt like I'd never felt like that disrespected in my whole life and I had to sit and take it every day and I had to watch people that I really love and care about get disrespected every day and that was really hard that they were like putting up with it every day because of me and I just felt really really responsible for for everything but um I'm not even supposed to go on about it anymore. | ||
| I get in trouble every time that I talk shit about the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| Who gives you trouble? | ||
| Dana? | ||
| Dana gets upset? | ||
| People get upset. | ||
| I think you could probably say whatever the fuck you want right about now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I was your manager, I'd be like, ah, just let it go. | |
| Let it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let it out. | |
| Be yourself. | ||
| Well, everybody knows how I feel about it. | ||
| But I'm saying that, like, you know, because I know that all those things happened. | ||
| The people watching don't know all those things happened. | ||
| And it would be very easy to placate to whatever everybody else was seeing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I was going to stay, you know... | ||
| Do what I felt was the God-honest right thing to do, which would be not shake that hand. | ||
| And if everyone boos me for it, fine. | ||
| And there's going to be another situation where, you know, everybody else sees something one way, but it's really another way. | ||
| And I could either... | ||
| Prioritize my perception and image above everything and everyone and every moral that I have, or I could try and do the right thing and be honest and have people hate me for it sometimes. | ||
| Because this is how it is. | ||
| If there's cameras, might as well show everything, what happened, then people will understand what really did happen, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just common sense. | ||
| But then whenever you have cameras and sometimes you show something and don't show the other, then they might, you know, people might think, what the hell just happened? | ||
| Like my situation with Dennis Holman, that guy's looking at me in the parking lot He's looking at me. | ||
| I'm looking at him. | ||
| He's looking at me. | ||
| Then he turns around and says, I said fucking bye. | ||
| I said, man, when you say bye, you don't use the fucking word fucking. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Have some fucking manners, you stupid idiot. | ||
| I'll teach you fucking manners. | ||
| You can't talk to me. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| If there's no cameras, there's no way you could speak to me. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| I don't even want to talk about it anymore. | ||
| Yeah, and then he comes, and then when I go at him, because he fucking gets on my nerves, and then there's the cameras, all kinds of bullshit. | ||
| Well, those reality shows are very problematic when they edit things, and they also like to edit things out of context, so they'll take the reaction to something else and put it onto one thing. | ||
| I think that's why we hate it. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| It was a lot of reaction shown without... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Contest. | |
| Yeah, what caused them. | ||
| I didn't even, you know, I just want to put that whole part of my life behind me. | ||
| Yeah, you can't take six weeks and put it into an hour a week. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| It just won't be real. | ||
| And all the different interactions you have, they just do their best to make it entertaining. | ||
| But there's this one moment where you guys, one of the coach's challenges, where you beat her and you're hanging from a rope and you go, fuck you! | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was like, God damn, that girl's fire burns hot. | |
| It didn't matter that you won. | ||
| You wanted to win and say, fuck you. | ||
| Well, what I really wanted to do was I wanted to win and say, fuck you. | ||
| And I wanted my kids to all go home with a thousand bucks. | ||
| That meant a lot to them. | ||
| And the fact that she didn't give a shit that that money would have meant a lot to her kids and they all lost it because she didn't, you know? | ||
| Like, the fact that it didn't affect her at all, I was like, you don't give a fuck about them. | ||
| I would have been crushed if I lost. | ||
| I would have been crushed if all those kids that really could use $1,000 didn't go home with $1,000. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because, like, man, I love those guys. | ||
| I was just, I just got a video from Neil the other day. | ||
| See, like, thinking about that shows intelligence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not thinking about after the fight when you're getting your fucking ass kicked. | ||
| Let me, you know, shake hands. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| You're fighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At that time, her intensity, the way she's fighting, you sticking your hand after being like that, and then people booing because of that? | ||
| It makes no fucking sense. | ||
| I know people are going to boo for other things. | ||
| It's also, you know, people love to boo winners. | ||
| There's something about, and people that win and they don't win, like, they're not good winners. | ||
| Like, they're still upset at the person they beat. | ||
| People have a real problem with that. | ||
| Oh my god, this reminds me of, like, these stories this year about my mom when she was competing, like, back in the day. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| And, like, yeah. | ||
| She was always pissed. | ||
| She had angry left over. | ||
| That's what they used to say about her. | ||
| Like, her old teammates tell me, like, yeah, she would walk onto the mat, and she'd be pissed off, and she'd throw the curl, and she'd beat the crowd at the armbar, and then walk off still pissed off. | ||
| She just had angry leftovers. | ||
| She was still angry. | ||
| It resolved nothing. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. | ||
| I can only imagine if MMA was around when my mom was competing. | ||
| How many siblings do you have? | ||
| You have one sister? | ||
| I have three sisters. | ||
| Three sisters? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Are they all crazy too? | ||
| Is everybody crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody's their own brand of crazy. | |
| Are you the craziest of all the sisters? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| Well, I don't think there's one, like, the most crazy. | ||
| I think we just really have our own different kind of crazy. | ||
| But I think Julia, my little sister, is probably the least. | ||
| The least? | ||
| She's the most chill. | ||
| She seems very calm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, whenever we're at fights, like, all my sisters are all like, oh, they're so amped up. | ||
| And, like, you know, my sister Maria, I remember at 168, ended up getting a migraine, like, threw up. | ||
| My mom went to the bathroom to cry. | ||
| My sister Jennifer's like, I'm never coming to a fight again! | ||
| And Julia's like... | ||
| I knew she'd win. | ||
| Whatever, you know? | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| Which one was 68? | ||
| Was that Sarah McMahon? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That was Misha. | ||
| Misha? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| But Jennifer did end up, she said she'd never come to a fight again, but she came to Brazil because I was like, I'll take you guys all resorting after if you come. | ||
| I kind of like baited them into it, you know? | ||
| She's like, all right, fine. | ||
| Does your little sister, does she train? | ||
| She is soccer. | ||
| She's like about to go to college and then she's going to get a soccer scholarship. | ||
| No Judo? | ||
| She did Judo. | ||
| She went up to Purple Belt, but, you know, she wasn't really... | ||
| There's a different mentality between someone who does individual sports and someone who does team sports. | ||
| And she is very much like a team sport mentality. | ||
| I've even brought her to come and do our training with us a little bit. | ||
| And whenever we have a team workout, she works a lot harder than if it's individual. | ||
| She really wants to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| She's got one of those things where that's her environment. | ||
| I need... | ||
| All the pressure to be on me all the time. | ||
| Whereas some kids do better. | ||
| All the attention. | ||
| Attention and pressure. | ||
| You seem to be uniquely qualified to handle it. | ||
| And uniquely qualified to handle the pressure that comes with being famous too. | ||
| It's very weird how you handle it. | ||
| Even your perspective, like what you said about you don't even know what the fuck's going on while it's happening because it's going to take until it's over for you to look back and kind of understand it. | ||
| That's a very uniquely honest and perceptive view of what you're going through. | ||
| Well, I mean, I noticed a lot of these girls, like, they would like to win a UFC belt and have that respect, but they're not about that life. | ||
| Like, they don't want that life. | ||
| They don't want that attention and scrutiny and pressure and constant work and All those things. | ||
| They don't want it. | ||
| They want one thing without the other, but it all comes together. | ||
| And that's, I think, one thing that's kind of working against them is when they actually come in to fight me, they get a taste, like a small taste of what that life is going to be like when they're a contender. | ||
| Because it is like way more attention, way more this, way more that, way more that. | ||
| And once you win the belt, it's just doubled every single time. | ||
| It's more and more and more and more. | ||
| And I don't think any of them would actually be happy with that lifestyle. | ||
| I don't think they really truly want it. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| Everybody wants to win. | ||
| Everybody wants to be a winner. | ||
| Everybody wants to be famous. | ||
| But I don't think anybody knows other than you. | ||
| Like, you have to be there to know what that is. | ||
| Like, I see it from the outside, and it looks mind-boggling. | ||
| The pressure? | ||
| The media obligations? | ||
| The media obligations alone, which is something nobody considers. | ||
| But if you go on YouTube or you go on the internet and look at all the different interviews that you do up to a fight, or any of the world champions do up to a fight, it's fucking staggering. | ||
| I mean, you guys are constantly on the radio, constantly sitting down and doing TV interviews, constantly. | ||
| There's articles in Rolling Stone and in fucking all these different magazines. | ||
| Even scheduling today was kind of a clusterfuck. | ||
| To be honest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And this is just like... | ||
| Monday? | ||
| Monday. | ||
| No fight coming up. | ||
| Well, Holly Holmes, not until... | ||
| Now it's the November card. | ||
|
unidentified
|
November 14th. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| November card. | ||
| And that's going to be the biggest audience ever for UFC. No, it's not. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Wasn't the GSP and Shields? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's going to be bigger. | |
| It's going to be bigger than that. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This will be bigger. | ||
| Because this will be over 60,000. | ||
| I'm receiving this information right now. | ||
| This is going to be over $60,000. | ||
| It'll be bigger than the Rogers Arena. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's going to be nuts. | ||
| So that hasn't ramped up yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| So now you're... | ||
| But even regular days, like, how the fuck do you relax? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She doesn't. | |
| She trains as a champion every day. | ||
| I have a problem. | ||
| He actually forced me to relax after this last camp, because usually I'm, like, back in the gym, like, two days after, because I just don't know what to do with myself. | ||
| And he, like, forced me to have 20 days off this time. | ||
| 20 whole days. | ||
| And then she was like, why 20? | ||
| 20. Why that number? | ||
| I was like, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't get an answer right now, but make it 20. What's the problem here? | |
| But what's fascinating is you listen to him. | ||
| How does he come up with this stuff, too? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She listens. | |
| She never... | ||
| That's what you're saying, that belief. | ||
| That's what you're saying, that belief, you know? | ||
| I've... | ||
| You know, trained Victor Chin, an amazing world champion right from Australia. | ||
| He's so stoked that Ronda's fighting there right now. | ||
| And, you know, the personality, everything. | ||
| She's born a fighter that we know. | ||
| But what she has is that belief, that trust into a trainer. | ||
| When I show her something, she believes it and she does it. | ||
| That belief, I think, comes with respecting who you're working with, the love, the passion, everything combined. | ||
| But her belief is even if you show it wrong to her, she will make it right. | ||
| She will make it happen. | ||
| You know, this is the first time, this last fight, I put a chest protector on in the locker room. | ||
| I said, Champ, you know why I'm wearing the chest protector? | ||
| I want you to hit that body when you angle off. | ||
| And she did it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| She does it. | ||
| She believes it. | ||
| She doesn't question. | ||
| She doesn't doubt. | ||
| Well, you guys have a very unique relationship. | ||
| And one of the things I love is Edmund, every time he sends me a text message, he doesn't call you Rhonda. | ||
| He calls you Champ. | ||
| You know who Shannon Briggs is? | ||
| Shannon Cannon Briggs? | ||
| He's crazy. | ||
| Let's go champ! | ||
| Let's go champ! | ||
| Everything he does, like every Instagram video is, let's go champ! | ||
| That's all he says is, let's go champ! | ||
| What are you doing champ? | ||
| You can't be drinking them sodas champ! | ||
| He calls everybody champ. | ||
| It's hilarious, but he's really fun. | ||
| But he just reminded me of that, because he only calls you champ. | ||
| That's what he calls you. | ||
| It's an urn title, I like it. | ||
| Fuck yeah it is! | ||
| It's not like someone calling someone Tiger or Bud or you know, whatever. | ||
| I call her champ, sometimes championess. | ||
| She's my champion. | ||
| It's easy to trust him because he's told you a couple of times before the fight, remember with McMahon, he said it was going to be a lever shot. | ||
| And with Davis, he's like, it's going to be an overhand right. | ||
| Look at this one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, like, with Zingano, he's like, she's going to come out with something flying right away. | ||
| And you're going to, like, check left and you're going to, like, you know, it's going to be quick. | ||
| And then, with this fight, he said, with Bet, she's like, she's going to sleep on her face. | ||
| He, swear to God, he said, you're going to knock her out and she's going to sleep on her face. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. | ||
| Like, it wasn't just that I knocked her out, but how, like, it was on her face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How... | |
| What are you doing, some Armenian voodoo? | ||
| What are you doing, man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know! | |
| You know what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's easy to trust them, though, because I'm just like, every time it's getting creepy at this point. | |
| It's because the preparation, what you see during training camp and what kind of sparring partners you hire. | ||
| I don't do sparrings in my gym for Ronda. | ||
| Ronda doesn't have that striking experience, meaning competition experience. | ||
| So how could I get that? | ||
| I thought I should get that in the gym. | ||
| She has competition experience in judo. | ||
| She's in her competition. | ||
| We can't talk about that, how high level it is. | ||
| Boxing, you know, she doesn't have any amateur boxing fights or amateur kickboxing fights, anything like that. | ||
| So to get it, I would get great sparring partners for her in the gym. | ||
| And in the gym, when I get the great sparring partners, I see Rhonda Knocking out people from the liver shot, maybe 20-30 people for training camp. | ||
| Those girls are hired sparring partners, they get paid so, you know, or some of them are her sparring partners in the gym where I, you know, help them and I train them and I, you know, she knows, never charge them. | ||
| I work with them, you know, so I could build them, give them what they need to be a champion and she drops all those people in the gym. | ||
| Of course she's going to do it during the fight. | ||
| How could she not? | ||
| A champion like her, how could she not? | ||
| She gets in there and she does it. | ||
| Well, you have as much of a belief in her as she has in your training of her. | ||
| That's why I say you have a very unique relationship, which is why she wanted you right there when you sat down. | ||
| You were over there, get over here! | ||
| Can't even touch you. | ||
| Can't even reach you. | ||
| We would eat dinner at night when she started her career, and you feel like training. | ||
| I would talk about boxing, about what are we doing. | ||
| Guide her about it, you know, about the sweet science teacher. | ||
| And she would, let's go to the gym and start working. | ||
| We'd work until 1 a.m. | ||
| on the minks. | ||
| I remember these pictures of like, yeah, me, you, and Manny were all at the gym at like 1 o'clock in the morning because we all went to dinner and we were so like amped up talking about fighting. | ||
| We were like, fuck it, let's go right now! | ||
| Let's go right now! | ||
| We were so like into fighting and, you know, you should see him go off on a tangent. | ||
| You're like, minks, you want to fight, you know? | ||
| So me and Manny were like, let's go back! | ||
| We turned around and straight back to the gym. | ||
| That too, it makes you want to fight. | ||
| But that's beautiful that you can do that. | ||
| You just want to do it, just go do it. | ||
| Why not, right? | ||
| Personality. | ||
| Personality, you know, has to work. | ||
| And with the trainer, you know, it's not only that I'm the best. | ||
| It works for her. | ||
| Personality and, you know. | ||
| There's a video, you guys, that I put up on my Instagram page that I retweeted. | ||
| Just pull that shit up. | ||
| I think I retweeted it either from Dana or the UFC. But you guys training in Brazil on the beach, one of those workout days. | ||
| Oh, the open workout? | ||
| And you were fucking hitting meds. | ||
| And I was like, Jesus Christ! | ||
| What the fuck is going on in your gym? | ||
| Because your striking has accelerated in these giant jumps. | ||
| Like every three or four months when I watch like you hit mitts, I'm like, what the fuck are they doing? | ||
| You don't see that kind of results from other fighters. | ||
| There's these giant leaps from the, if you go back to like, I saw you guys hitting mitts before the Liz Karmouche fight, and you go back to before the Betch-Cohea fight, you're like, fucking, they're so different. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| You're only talking about a few years, but there's a difference between like, Someone who's like, you know, got a decent understanding of how to throw punches to someone who looks like a fucking world champion kickboxer. | ||
| This is crazy shit. | ||
| She wins the boxing world champion any given day. | ||
| I always say that. | ||
| Right now, you know, there's a few females out there, you know, no disrespect, that are in the Olympic Games, that won Olympic gold medal I even told Rhonda about. | ||
| Girl, Reza, you know, she could box. | ||
| She won the Olympic boxing gold medal. | ||
| Like, a lot of respect to her. | ||
| She could definitely box. | ||
| She could punch. | ||
| Amazing champion in Olympic gold medals. | ||
| But professional boxing, her weight class won a 35-pounder. | ||
| She would destroy them. | ||
| Here it is right here on the big screen. | ||
| This is a scene where you guys are hitting Mets. | ||
| All those pants are in my car. | ||
| I don't know why I thought of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is, yeah. | |
| Fucking speed is retarded! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you have a lot of striking knowledge. | |
| It's very obvious. | ||
| I've seen the work you've done with Ellenberger and with Travis. | ||
| In Ellenberger, there was a big difference between the way he was throwing punches and the way he was moving after he started working with you. | ||
| I could tell the way you coach her and the way you coach fighters. | ||
| You know a lot of shit about boxing. | ||
| There's a lot going on there with movement. | ||
| But it's also... | ||
| You're a very unusual athlete, Rhonda. | ||
| I'm sure you know this, but there's a fucking fire burning inside you that is just so much hotter than most people. | ||
| The intensity that you're bringing to it. | ||
| Does that come from the way your mom raised you? | ||
| Is that something that's always been in you? | ||
| Like... | ||
| I think it's a mix between how I was raised and never winning the Olympics. | ||
| That's like the best thing that's ever happened to me because now it's unlimited motivation forever because it's never going to be satiated. | ||
| I grew up as a little kid. | ||
| Even before I did judo, my dad convinced me, he's like, you're going to win the Olympics in swimming. | ||
| You're going to be an Olympic champion. | ||
| And then I switched to judo, so I was like, okay, I'm going to be an Olympic champion. | ||
| That's my whole life. | ||
| That was like my obsession, you know, and I went when I was 17 and It didn't go my way and then when I was 21 like I was so unhappy doing judo that I felt like that was like my last shot. | ||
| Why were you so unhappy doing judo? | ||
| because just It got to a point where it's very old school kind of training where it's drilled into your head that you have to make yourself absolutely miserable in order to deserve to win. | ||
| And so it was just like I was miserable all the time. | ||
| Why do you have to make yourself miserable? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Constantly over-trained. | ||
| Always over-trained. | ||
| I've recovered so much since coming to MMA. I was about to retire just because my knee was so bad in Judo. | ||
| Because I could barely walk some days. | ||
| I would wake up in the morning and it would take me 20 minutes to maneuver my knee enough so I could bend it again because it would lock in place in the middle of the night. | ||
| Just the people that I was around... | ||
| There was some of them that were cool, but mostly I had no control over who I lived with or who I was around all day long. | ||
| And so if you're around people that you don't really like constantly, you know, it's just kind of like you're always watching what you say and always looking over your shoulder. | ||
| You can never really relax. | ||
| And I didn't like where I lived. | ||
| And it was just the actual process of training, like the training itself wasn't fun at all. | ||
| And it wasn't meant to be fun at all. | ||
| And like from when I was a kid, from I think from I don't know, 2003 to 2006, 2002 to 2006, I cried every single practice and would lock myself in the locker room and cry for another half hour afterward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was only like when I got older that I was able to shake myself from not crying during training because if it didn't go exactly my way, like if I had, if I got thrown once, you know, by someone who was 50 pounds heavier than me with five years more experience, I would still cry about it. | ||
| And like I wouldn't, then I'd be embarrassed that I was crying and I would cry because I was embarrassed because I couldn't stop myself from crying and like it would just keep going. | ||
| That's how Manny and all of them knew me when I was a kid. | ||
| My mom would bring me in there just to get beat up because they were really tough guys. | ||
| She would bring me to four or five different gyms a week to get all the different styles. | ||
| They would beat up on me and I would get thrown once. | ||
| First time I get thrown, immediately start crying, then get embarrassed, cry more. | ||
| But they were used to me crying. | ||
| I'd be able to finish the whole night and sometimes I'd be able to stop crying by the end of the night. | ||
| And that was, like, comfortable to me in a way because I didn't have to be embarrassed because they were used to me crying all the time. | ||
| And so they, like, accepted me like that. | ||
| And they didn't think I was a stupid little girl because I was crying during training. | ||
| And then it really sucked, like, moving to a different environment. | ||
| And then, oh, no, these people don't know that I cry. | ||
| They don't know that it's my thing. | ||
| And now I'm like, I have to start all over again. | ||
| And then it makes me cry even easier. | ||
| So she was like, let me fight with him before I start crying. | ||
| That's what you did with me. | ||
| It wasn't until I ran away from home and was out on my own that I was able to stop myself from crying every night. | ||
| Then it would be a couple times a week, and then I kind of got rid of it, mostly. | ||
| But since doing MMA, I haven't cried during training. | ||
| When did you run away from home? | ||
| Like a week after I turned 18. Wow. | ||
| That's not running away from home. | ||
| That's like moving out. | ||
| Well, you know... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Running away from home is when you're like 13. I know, but no one knew I was leaving. | |
| Oh. | ||
| It was in the middle of the night. | ||
| You just couldn't take it anymore? | ||
| I was at a point where I felt like every second of my day was somebody else's decision. | ||
| I am so grateful to my mother. | ||
| She's an amazing person. | ||
| She did the perfect job raising me. | ||
| I was kind of a stupid and short-sighted kid that I didn't realize how much she was doing for me at the time. | ||
| I had Rapunzel and the castle syndrome. | ||
| I thought, like, oh, well, it was me. | ||
| I'm locked in the castle, and my mom is so mean. | ||
| And now I'm like, oh, my God, she's a genius. | ||
| But, you know, at the time, yeah, I was recognized as having a lot of potential, very, very young, and was treated like that, you know? | ||
| I was, like, the prodigy kid, very young, and got really intense, really structured training very early on. | ||
| And, like, it just became a whole life. | ||
| Like, I didn't have, I never went to a single, like, dance or party in school. | ||
| I never went on a single date. | ||
| Like, I trained all the time. | ||
| And I dropped out of school sophomore year, so I could train all the time. | ||
| And that was, like, my life. | ||
| And then I felt like my life was, like, out of my control. | ||
| And so I left and was like, well, I'm going to win, and I'm going to do this stuff on my own. | ||
| And I'm going to show everybody they actually know what I'm talking about. | ||
| Because I felt like my opinion and no one had any respect for what I thought. | ||
| And I was always doing what everybody else said I should be doing. | ||
| And so I went off and I bounced around a bunch of different clubs. | ||
| It was a very crazy time where I was moving cities like every couple of months. | ||
| And then after 2006, I was like the first American woman in nine years to win a World Cup in Judo. | ||
| With no coach. | ||
| I did it with no coach. | ||
| And then I also, I won in Sweden and I medaled in Finland when, you know, Americans were getting their asses kicked. | ||
| They weren't meddling. | ||
| They weren't getting past the first round. | ||
| And so, like, I was kind of my way to get respect from everybody else was... | ||
| And then I ended up moving to Canada because I was like, fuck all the U.S. coaches. | ||
| I'm going to do this on my own. | ||
| And I was just... | ||
| I was... | ||
| At the National Training Center there, where they couldn't coach me, but I was beating their girls, so they were like, yeah, well, come here, and they'll get used to you, and whatever, so I was just kind of like a body for them. | ||
| And I was pretty much on my own, training on my own, with no direction and no coaching, and I was like... | ||
| They couldn't coach you because you were a United States citizen? | ||
| Is that what the idea was? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and... | ||
| I was just like so stubborn and not getting enough respect that I felt like I was gonna go win with nobody's help and then ended up getting asked back to one of the gyms I was kicked out of when I was a kid. | ||
| Why were you kicked out? | ||
| I was kicked out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was kicked out several times. | |
| I was kicked out once because, I don't know, my old coach's wife didn't like my mom. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They were having an argument. | ||
| Then the last time I got kicked out was I was at the German Super A and I lost. | ||
| I remember first round, I was fighting this girl from Finland and I was ahead by a Yuko, which is a decent score. | ||
| And there was like 40 seconds left and I threw her with an Ochigari, which you don't know what that is. | ||
| I pretty much fall into the guard, and my arm is out, and then I just ended up in the armbar right away. | ||
| I got armbarred. | ||
| But my elbow, like, dislocated right away. | ||
| So this 18-year-old little me, my brain is going, and I'm like, well, I was about to turn 18. I was like, yeah, almost there. | ||
| I'm like, well, my elbow's already out, you know, so I might as well just try to get out, right? | ||
| And so I try to get out, and my elbow goes back in, and then she pops out again, and I'm thinking, like, well, she already popped it out twice. | ||
| I can't just let it do it twice. | ||
| I ended up getting out and ran the clock out and I won the match. | ||
| But then immediately right after, I fought this chick, Lucy DeCasse, who was a world Olympic champion from France, and I couldn't even lift my arm from my side. | ||
| I had to pick my hand up to pull it up to my side to fight. | ||
| And then I lost to her, and then I fought this German girl next, and I still couldn't even lift my hand up. | ||
| And I would, like, bring my hand up, and I ended up winning that fight against a German girl. | ||
| And then I ended up fighting Erske Zolnir, who's a World Olympic bronze medalist. | ||
| And it was a closer fight, but I lost. | ||
| And so I was all bummed out. | ||
| And I was talking to my, like, first boyfriend at the time, which was, like... | ||
| You know, I never had a date, never had a partner, nothing in high school, right? | ||
| And so, like, I'm a 17-year-old girl about to be 18, and this guy in his 20s that's, like, on the national team, like, has a thing for me, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I thought, like, I was so cool because, like, I was talking to this guy, and of course, you know, my mom and my coaches were totally against it, and they were like, you're not allowed to talk to him, da-da-da-da, and, you know, of course I would talk to him anyway. | ||
| And so we were seeing each other for a while. | ||
| I ended up seeing this guy for, like, two years, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I went back to the hotel and was like, screw this, I hate you! | |
| And then, so I went back and I was hanging out with him. | ||
| And then my coach went down to the lobby, got the key from my room, and came up and walked into the room with me and this guy. | ||
| Freaked out, lost his mind, says, you're out, you're gone, I'm done with you, you're out of the gym, you're out of everything. | ||
| I'll never want to see your face again, all that stuff. | ||
| Just because you're having fun with a guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Why was he so mad? | ||
| Because I was told not to and I disobeyed. | ||
| They could tell you who to hang out with? | ||
| They could tell you who you could date? | ||
| I told you I had no control over my life. | ||
| But that seems ridiculous. | ||
| Is that just old-school judo mentality? | ||
| I guess so, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Plus, you know, he was a sleazy kind of Preying on the young girl that I didn't see that. | ||
| I thought, you know, we were in love and all this stuff. | ||
| Oh, so your coach might have been kind of protecting you? | ||
| Yeah, everybody was. | ||
| In hindsight, I'm like, oh my God. | ||
| How much older was this guy than you? | ||
| Like five and a half years. | ||
| And you were like 18 or not quite 18? | ||
| Well, we were talking since I was like about to turn 16. So it's illegal. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it was illegal. | ||
| Oh, how dare he? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, that's different. | ||
| That kind of makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| But still, you were 18 at the time when you barged in? | ||
| I was about to turn 18. So it was still illegal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then I went home and my mom's like, you know, you're not going to do judo for a year and you better forget the name of whatever his name was and you're going to work and you're going to support yourself and you're going to pay me this amount of money to live in my house. | ||
| And I'm thinking, I'm like, well, I want to do judo and if I want to work... | ||
| I'm going to go pay for my rent wherever I want. | ||
| This is what I'm thinking. | ||
| And so that night, I used to get Social Security checks because of my dad. | ||
| He died. | ||
| And so I went and opened a big account, and I rerouted the Social Security checks to go into my account. | ||
| And then I had to get dentist stuff done, so I scheduled dentist things so I'd still be under my mom's insurance. | ||
| And then I got myself a plane ticket with the Social Security money to be right after my last dentist appointment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| That's intense. | ||
| Yeah, and like in the middle of the night, like I secretly packed my bags and all this stuff and like I waited until like 2 o'clock in the morning or whatever to like walk several blocks away from the house and then call the taxi several blocks away from the house and then took the taxi to the airport. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And how long did it take before your mom knew what was going on? | ||
| Next morning. | ||
| Did you call her? | ||
| Did you tell her where you were? | ||
| No. | ||
| When did you let her know? | ||
| She says I left a note. | ||
| I don't remember if I did, to be honest. | ||
| But I went to my best friend Lily's house all the way across the country in New York. | ||
| Because I was like, I'm going to work at Stewart's, which is their convenience store. | ||
| I was like, I'm going to get a job at a convenience store. | ||
| And I'm going to trade on my own. | ||
| And I'm going to do it on my own. | ||
| And I'm going to show everybody that I can do it on my own. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was a young, dumb kid. | ||
| And I had no way to rebel. | ||
| So I was, like, Little Miss Perfect, and that was, like, my little... | ||
| I suddenly just blew up one day and, like, took off. | ||
| How long was it before you talked to your mom again? | ||
| Like, two years. | ||
| You didn't talk to her at all for two years? | ||
| Like, any time we tried to talk, it would turn into a huge blow-up. | ||
| So, like, yeah. | ||
| And, like, my whole family, too. | ||
| Like, they, like, you know, it was a terrible thing that I did. | ||
| I, like, took off. | ||
| And I, like, really hurt my mom and my sisters really resented me for it. | ||
| And there were plenty of Thanksgivings where, like, I would sit there and no one would talk to me. | ||
| Since, like, yeah, after that. | ||
| You've got a fucking intense family. | ||
| Really intense family. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It took many years for them to actually, like, forgive me for what I did. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| The world of judo is a lot like the world of wrestling with that overtraining, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is that, like, so... | ||
| How come no one's caught... | ||
| Have they caught up to that since? | ||
| Have people figured that out since? | ||
| It's such an old sport where it's, like, Bushido martial arts, and they're, like, thinking, like, all the way Sensei Kano. | ||
| I mean, they would still do this thing. | ||
| I don't know what it was like. | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| Something training. | ||
| This wooden kind of training in Japan or like in the winter where they'd open all the windows and there'd be frost on the mats and they would purposely make you freezing cold while you train, which is terrible for you. | ||
| But it would be like, you know, old school mentality, mental toughness, you know, that kind of stuff. | ||
| And they would always do like more is more for them. | ||
| More is more and more is more. | ||
| And yeah, I was so constantly overtrained all the time. | ||
| And constantly cutting weight and not having any way to actually make weight healthily. | ||
| No tools, no education, anything. | ||
| Just getting weighed every week and being yelled at for being too heavy. | ||
| It's so poorly run. | ||
| You got yelled at for being too heavy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I used to get weight every Tuesday, and then I would not drink any water after Monday practice, and I wouldn't eat dinner to try and be lighter, and I would still be too heavy. | ||
| And then, you know, then I would eat all the Tuesday. | ||
| That's got to fuck with you and give you body image issues when you're young and someone's telling you you're too heavy and they're yelling at you about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It did for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, 16 year old girl and being told that you're too fat or should you be eating that all the time, constantly. | ||
| I thought, unless I weighed exactly 63 kilograms, I was ugly for the longest time. | ||
| Yeah, it took a while to get over. | ||
| That's why, like, I'm so big into, like, doing, like, body image stuff and, like, the Do Nothing Bitch, like, shirts, they all went to D.D. Hirsch, which is, um, it's, like, free, like, mental, like, mental health clinic that's, like, 52 different schools around L.A. that helps girls with, you know, body image and eating disorders and suicidal, like, all these different things to, like, to give, like, those kids treatment because I didn't have anyone to talk to. | ||
| I didn't even really know that I had that much of a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| That old school mentality does produce mental toughness, though. | ||
| It's like such a catch-22. | ||
| It's the dumbest way to train, to overtrain people and to make them fight when they're dehydrated. | ||
| It's the issue with wrestlers, it's the issue with judo people, with a lot of old school martial arts people. | ||
| I'm torn on it because, on the other hand, who the fuck is tougher than wrestlers? | ||
| Getting through that, they develop this indomitable determination because they're so used to being uncomfortable. | ||
| They're so used to pushing when they're exhausted, pushing when they're dehydrated, pushing when they're not at their optimum. | ||
| I think there's a time for it. | ||
| I think when you're in a developmental phase, it's a good thing to be overtrained a little bit and be made uncomfortable and, you know, to have to run laps when your foot's broken. | ||
| Create personalities. | ||
| Yeah, but when you're at a professional level and this is the time you need to perform, whatever personality you've developed is already developed by now, then it's time to train professionally. | ||
| Like we've had situations and sparring sessions like if one of my guys or anybody gets caught with a punch you know they take a knee I relax you know there's always another day you don't need that extra punishment to the head it's not healthy for you right some people don't understand that they push their fighters They get dropped and it's happened to, you know, even with Champ, her opponent gets dropped and they keep on pushing. | ||
| Oh, she's okay. | ||
| Go one more. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Dropped again. | ||
| Go one more. | ||
| That's not healthy. | ||
| You know, you have to know where to push, how to push. | ||
| But she's absolutely right about young age. | ||
| Sometimes you want to create that personality, not giving up. | ||
| And the only way to do it is you got to Be a little bit old-school and hard on them, you know, and she's had that but now it's she has that you do it more professional more structured better, you know Sparring is the right way sparring partners. | ||
| Everything is done for her and she loves it. | ||
| That's why she loves it That's why she says she didn't like that and now she loves this. | ||
| Yeah that grind the Determination that you developed from that grind is like irreplaceable. | ||
| Yeah But once you have it, for you is it a matter of just like keeping the sword sharp? | ||
| What keeps your motivation high at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know, it just seems like unfinished. | |
| Unfinished? | ||
| Your life, your career? | ||
| My career, there's more left to do. | ||
| I don't feel like I'm done yet. | ||
| Because with the Olympics, it's just like, you win an Olympic gold medal and you're done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With the UFC, when am I really done? | ||
| You're done when you say you're done. | ||
| You might be done right now. | ||
| You might walk out of here and go, fuck this sport. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| I'm going to go do movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I'm not. | |
| Fuck bitches up on the big screen. | ||
| I mean, you can really do whatever you want at this point, right? | ||
| You're rich. | ||
| You're famous. | ||
| You can do whatever you want. | ||
| You transcended the sport already. | ||
| You know, you can do whatever you want. | ||
| It feels unfinished still. | ||
| What would make it feel finished? | ||
| Cyborg? | ||
| That definitely would. | ||
| That's like, she's your Ivan Drago. | ||
| But if she never steps up, I'll know. | ||
| I'll probably go a little longer waiting for her, but if she showed up sooner rather than later, I don't know how much longer I would go after that. | ||
| Well, she seems to want you to fight her at a heavier weight, which is very fascinating to me. | ||
| Because, you know, she knows that you're the 135-pound champ, and she wants, and she knows you fought at 145 before, so she wants you to fight where she is. | ||
| But she's clearly... | ||
| The thing is, someone who uses steroids and those kind of things, they need that to mentally think that they have an advantage that they didn't earn. | ||
| Bigger. | ||
| Like, it's a crutch for her. | ||
| She needs to feel like she somehow has an advantage from the outside. | ||
| Because she doesn't think she's good enough with just what she has. | ||
| That's why you dope in the first place, because you feel like the best you have isn't good enough. | ||
| She feels like if we fight fair, the best she has isn't going to be good enough. | ||
| That's why she wants it to be somehow stacked in her favor. | ||
| Well, the steroid that she got caught with is a steroid that allows you to keep size, keep your muscle while you're cutting weight. | ||
| It's one of the best ones for that. | ||
| So she's obviously not just concerned with making the weight, but concerned with making the weight and being big, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| Like, if you can make weight and be on steroids, even if it's a relatively making weight-friendly steroid, you're still, like, Without it, you're capable of moving down. | ||
| You see what happens to people when they get off of steroids. | ||
| You see what they look like. | ||
| It's very easy for them to drop down. | ||
| They immediately shrink up. | ||
| It changes everything. | ||
| It changes everything. | ||
| It's all like an insecurity thing. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| It's a fascinating time when you see these guys that were on TRT or the people that were involved in the urine testing, which was like they would say is basically an intelligence test. | ||
| If you test after your fight and you're on steroids, you're a fucking idiot. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| But you could cycle all the way up until right before your fight if you're using the right stuff, cycle off of it, weigh in, fight. | ||
| Get your drug test and still test clean. | ||
| And so you're not really clean. | ||
| You were never clean. | ||
| You were just clean enough to pass that test. | ||
| But your body still had all the effects of those steroids. | ||
| You can't do that anymore. | ||
| This Jeff Nowitzki guy is not fucking playing games. | ||
| And the testing that they're implementing on these athletes is no joke. | ||
| I mean, they're going to show up at your fucking house. | ||
| It's the same that I did growing up. | ||
| I was under USADA testing when I was 14 years old. | ||
| And then when I started doing MMA, I was like, really? | ||
| They'd just hand me a cup and say, go in this other room and come back with something? | ||
| I was a 14-year-old little girl. | ||
| They're like, drop your pants, pull up your shirt, spin around in a circle. | ||
| Okay, make sure I can see it while you're peeing. | ||
| It was the most thorough. | ||
| I remember the first time I was a little kid. | ||
| I had to drink eight bottles of water to be able to do it. | ||
| I was so nervous. | ||
| And I'm like, wait a minute. | ||
| To fight for Strikeforce title or UFC title is... | ||
| Less strict and, you know, less thorough testing than a 14-year-old at the Junior Miami Youth in Judo. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 14-year-old at the Junior Miami Youth International in Judo in Florida. | ||
| Well, up until a few years ago. | ||
| Stricter testing than the first couple times I won the UFC title. | ||
| Now it's the same testing. | ||
| When they brought Usada in to do the testing, I was like, thank God! | ||
| And you know what's funny? | ||
| The same chick that was my out-of-competition testing lady from when I was a kid, she was like my same lady again. | ||
| She showed up to the gym. | ||
| I was like, oh my God! | ||
| I haven't seen you in forever! | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was in out-of-competition testing, too. | ||
| I did it for so long. | ||
| I remember having to fill out those forms all the time. | ||
| It was such a pain in the ass. | ||
| Now it's really, really, really easy. | ||
| Out-of-competition testing was... | ||
| I hated it because of the paperwork, but I was always so happy that they did it. | ||
| Now I'm really confident with what the testing is for us now. | ||
| It's pretty intense, and it will absolutely weed out all the cheaters. | ||
| It's just going to take time. | ||
| But for these guys that relied on it for the longest time, you're seeing a difference in the way they look. | ||
| Their bodies are changing radically. | ||
| Look at the difference between Vitor before and after the Weidman fight. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| When you look at these people from before when they're using and after when they're not, they look entirely different. | ||
| And Cyborg looks in ways exactly the same. | ||
| If she gets off, it'll be very easy for her to make weight. | ||
| From what we've seen from every single other person that's got off. | ||
| So you think she's still on it right now? | ||
| I think that... | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| I can't say a proof or anything, la-da-da, but if you look the exact same as you did when you were using, then what changed? | ||
| Did you ever see the video of her when she had her first fight? | ||
| Oh, she's like tiny. | ||
| Completely different body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a woman's body. | ||
| I mean, it was very different. | ||
| I mean, she's so thick now. | ||
| She's so thick and muscular. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, you get thick and muscular from hard work, but boy, the change is so radical. | ||
| It's such a giant difference. | ||
| And to see, I mean, men can put that kind of size on through power lifting and hard weight, but to see a woman put that kind of size on, that kind of thickness. | ||
| It's not even just the size. | ||
| I mean, like the shape of your head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And shoulders, too. | ||
| The width of her shoulders. | ||
| The whole deal. | ||
| When you add testosterone to a woman's body, so many things change. | ||
| It's even more radical than adding it to a man's body. | ||
| When the guys are on the juice, they get bigger and thicker and everything like that, but they're just bigger and thicker men. | ||
| When a woman goes on the juice, your body only has a certain amount of testosterone that's being produced. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's a very small amount. | ||
| And then when you add all this extra test to it, you see what happens with transgender women. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's very similar to the hormone therapy that... | ||
| Woman to man, transgender goes through. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| You're turning into a man. | ||
| Yeah, you literally do turn into a man. | ||
| Everything changes. | ||
| Your bone structure changes. | ||
| You get thicker. | ||
| I mean, the shoulders, the face, everything. | ||
| It all changes your ability to take punishment as well. | ||
| That's what's really weird. | ||
| The difference between guys who are on it and off of it, their ability to take a shot. | ||
| You see the difference in their ability to absorb punches. | ||
| They get off of it in one punch and their legs go. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's the confidence, too. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| If you walk in there with confidence, like there's no way this person's gonna touch me and they hit you, you don't care. | ||
| If you walk in there with doubt, that's what it is. | ||
| Like, doping is a mental handicap. | ||
| And when they use, it's the mental crutch. | ||
| Like, when you take that off, it's not just what they physically lose, it's what they mentally lose. | ||
| And that's the hardest thing for them to let go. | ||
| You'll use once, and you're going to have that forever. | ||
| You're going to have that mental handicap forever. | ||
| There's no way you can fix it. | ||
| Right, you'll always know that you used, and you'll always know that it helped you. | ||
| And you'll always feel like less without it. | ||
| Yeah, because when you have it, the guys that are juiced up, they feel like they're fucking supermen. | ||
| You go back to the early days of the UFC when you could just do whatever the fuck you wanted. | ||
| Go back to the pride days. | ||
| Those are my favorite days. | ||
| I don't know what Vanderlei was doing, but I'm assuming everything. | ||
| I don't know, but he was one of my all-time favorite fighters to watch because it wasn't even like watching a human. | ||
| It was like watching some rabid hyena that took a human form and learned Muay Thai. | ||
| Run across the cage and kick the fucking shit out of you and stomp your head when you were down. | ||
| It was wild, crazy shit to watch, but it was just a human that was just so far gone off the hormone spectrum. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| If you get into a setting where everyone's doing it, then you're hitting and punching harder than a person should. | ||
| And you're taking more damage and more punishment than a person should. | ||
| And that is how someone's going to eventually die. | ||
| Well, one of the big concerns with me is the lack of, when they're trying to take out the IVs. | ||
| And I understand why they're doing it, because they're trying to stop people from masking, doping. | ||
| Like, Nowitzki came on my podcast and explained it to me, that there's been instances where people used IV bags. | ||
| Yeah, it flushes your system out, and somehow or another can mask you. | ||
| And also, blood doping. | ||
| And blood doping is totally legit. | ||
| They've used it in cycling for years, where you take your blood out, your body replenishes the blood, and you put that blood back in right before you fight. | ||
| I know that people have done that before. | ||
| What's shocking to me is that the UFC and Nevada State Athletic Commission, just a few years ago, wasn't even testing for EPO. It wasn't that long ago. | ||
| It was less than a decade. | ||
| EPO wasn't something that they tested for, which is crazy. | ||
| If anything relies on endurance, it's a critical factor in endurance. | ||
| It's fighting. | ||
| It's one of the most critical factors. | ||
| Because if you're running in a race and you're slower because you're tired, you don't get kicked in the face. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's a big fucking difference. | ||
| The difference is so giant. | ||
| And the fact that they didn't take that into consideration when all those years, all those years they've been testing cyclists for it. | ||
| And even testing them, they're still doing it. | ||
| They're still pulling it off. | ||
| They're still cheating. | ||
| And the fact that they can test plastics in the blood from the IV bag, that is fascinating to me. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I mean, I'm completely supportive of IV, like, being... | ||
| Even just for weight cutting. | ||
| Did you ever use him for weight cutting? | ||
| Once. | ||
| In 2005, right before the world championships in Egypt, in Cairo. | ||
| And it was the worst ever. | ||
| Because in judo, you have like an hour and a half sometimes from way in to when you're going to go. | ||
| And then you're going to fight like seven times. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I got the opportunity to use it because a friend of mine had it. | ||
| And it wasn't, you know, it was still legal back then. | ||
| It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a thing. | ||
| So it wasn't like I was cheating. | ||
| It was just, you know, other people, I just didn't have the means to do it and other people did. | ||
| And so I got the opportunity to use it and I was like, all right, I'll try it out. | ||
| I had a really, really bad weight cut. | ||
| I was, you know, kind of like being a dumb kid. | ||
| And it was after I ran away from home and I had a terrible weight cut. | ||
| It was like 2005. It was like, yeah, that same year. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| I ended up getting chills. | ||
| My whole body got chills. | ||
| My whole body was swollen. | ||
| I've never felt that slow and that terrible. | ||
| It was the worst thing. | ||
| From the IV? From the IV. Was it edema? | ||
| Did you have edema? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| This is an issue that people get when they have IVs for some reason. | ||
| Your body just reacts in some sort of a strange way with the water. | ||
| I don't know but I just remember I got chills like I couldn't stop myself from shivering and like I was really really slow and sluggish and I absolutely hated it. | ||
| I hated it and never did it again. | ||
| When she told me she doesn't do it for MMA when she started her career I said I love it. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| Because none of my boxers do it. | ||
| If you need medical attention from cutting weight you're in the wrong division. | ||
| There's a lot of people in the wrong division, though. | ||
| Why can't you just drink normally? | ||
| You're not sick or you can't raise your hand and drink normally. | ||
| I think the issue is rehydrating the brain. | ||
| That's one of the big ones. | ||
| Rehydrating the brain takes a long time. | ||
| You have 24 hours. | ||
| I mean, in comparison to judo, I was like, what? | ||
| I got 24 hours? | ||
| 24 hours. | ||
| And I don't have... | ||
| Because in judo, I would have to... | ||
| An hour and a half to three hours and I have to weigh in like four times a month or something like that. | ||
| I mean, that's really like, I couldn't do that fighting 135 now. | ||
| The difference though is that that involves grappling only and even though there are some head impacts, it's not the same. | ||
| Joe, we do training camp if we're sharp at like, let's say, depending on the fight, we're sharp at 147 pounds, 148 pounds, right? | ||
| She's sharp, she's explosive, 149 let's say. | ||
| You drink gradually and you make that weight during the fight. | ||
| Even heavyweights in boxing look at their weight. | ||
| It's not heavyweight. | ||
| You could go up as much as you want. | ||
| You have to know where you're strong at during training, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you just drink. | ||
| You become 148, 149. You're good to go. | ||
| You fight. | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| Why would you do IV to get boom right away all loaded? | ||
| That's why most of these guys in MMA can't move sometimes. | ||
| They're not as sharp. | ||
| They're young. | ||
| And when they move and I look at them, I'm like, why are they so slow? | ||
| You know, compare it to boxing, man. | ||
| You see those guys, old school fighters, they're in their 40s. | ||
| Those guys are quick and explosive. | ||
|
unidentified
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None of them do IV. They don't do IV. Boxers don't use IVs? | |
| They don't use IV. But what about radical weight cuts, though? | ||
| If you make a guy like Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., he cuts a lot of weight. | ||
| Well, he cuts a lot of weight. | ||
| Probably he uses it. | ||
| That's why he's so slow. | ||
| What happened to him? | ||
| Do you see him as being the greatest? | ||
| He's a young guy. | ||
| Sometimes he fights. | ||
| He's like a zombie. | ||
| I think he's getting too much pussy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| If I had a guess, it's too good looking. | ||
| Discipline, discipline. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, there's definitely lack of that, but I think that's what it is. | |
| Goddamn superstar. | ||
| If you want to be sharp, I don't think you need that. | ||
| You don't need that. | ||
| I don't believe in it. | ||
| Well, I think you're correct, but I think there are a lot of issues where there's just not enough weight classes. | ||
| I think there's a lot of issues where guys are tweeners. | ||
| You know, they're not quite... | ||
| The 10-pound gap you're talking about is too much in boxing. | ||
| We have 2 pounds to... | ||
| Well, I don't think 10 pounds is so bad, but there's like 85 to 205 is crazy. | ||
| That's a giant jump. | ||
| 205 to 265 is fucking nuts. | ||
| That's a nutty one. | ||
| I think there should be a 225 for sure. | ||
| What you're saying is it's too much of a difference when they go down so low, then they want to gain it. | ||
| The only way is to stick an IV in there so you can gain that weight quicker. | ||
| But I think 24 hours is enough for you. | ||
| If you could raise your hand and drink water, I think IV is for people that when they're sick and, you know, they're throwing up and they can't, like, move, they're exhausted, you, you know, stick a needle in there so they could recover. | ||
| That's the purpose of IV, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's another mental thing, too. | |
| I really don't think it helps. | ||
| I don't believe it helps at all. | ||
| I think it's a hindrance. | ||
| But if you're having a terrible weight cut and you're really worried about this fight, it really helps put your mind at ease if you think, oh, no, no, it's fine. | ||
| I'll have an IV and it's like the magical cure and it's like this bad weight cut never happened. | ||
| Well, they do think that it's the better way to replenish the fluid in the brain. | ||
| But it still takes 70-something hours to fully replenish it. | ||
| And then the guys that use it, what I notice is when they're warming up in the locker room, like I see them during training, right? | ||
| So I know how there's people that sweat more than the others, so you know the athlete. | ||
| But the guys that use it, right in the locker room when they're starting to warm up, they're sweating. | ||
| You see that the body is not crisp and sharp. | ||
| It's something abnormal. | ||
| It's something that I don't see usually during training. | ||
| Because if you're drinking your water, you're coming to training, you're normal, you're fit, you're healthy. | ||
| Let's say at 150 or whatever it is, right? | ||
| I know that athlete and we're on the pads, you're sharp, wrestling this and that, he's looking good, sweating normally. | ||
| And then you see during the fight day where this person hasn't even warmed up and It's soaking wet. | ||
| There's too much in your body because you're... | ||
| Yeah, you have to think about why does your body only absorb water back as fast as it does? | ||
| Why does it expel that much and only keep so much? | ||
| Because that's what's best for it. | ||
| It does it that way because it's best for it, not because, you know, it's suddenly just, you know, while it was evolving, it was like, eh, this is the best I could do. | ||
| Well, your body doesn't understand dehydrating and then 24 hours later going into a hand-to-hand combat situation. | ||
| No, but it understands that, like, you know, you're living in Africa and there's not that much water and, you know, there could only be one day of rain and, you know, it could all dry up the next day and you need to drink as much as possible and then you're shit out of luck out of water for a while. | ||
| You know, these kind of situations happen for many, many, many years and why do we only rehydrate as fast as we do? | ||
| Nature never developed an IV, that's why. | ||
| An IV tree that grows in the jungle. | ||
| But I'm saying, like, camels can rehydrate faster than us, right? | ||
| They can hold a lot more water than us, all this stuff. | ||
| So it's just like, it's physically possible for you to evolve that way. | ||
| So why did we evolve this way? | ||
| Well, there are people, though, that are champions. | ||
| Like, Weidman cuts a lot of weight. | ||
| And I don't know how he's going to do with the IV ban. | ||
| Because he's a big boy. | ||
| You know, Weidman's well over 200 pounds, gets down to 185. I think during the training, if they do the training right and they see where he's sharp at, how they could deal with it, you know, if you're mentally tough, you could gradually just drink throughout the day. | ||
| 100% you'll be okay. | ||
| I don't believe it. | ||
| They're also going to get smaller. | ||
| They're going to have to get physically smaller. | ||
| They're going to have to lose muscle mass. | ||
| It's not only about being how big. | ||
| You see these guys are bloated, but they can't move. | ||
| You don't want to be that way either. | ||
| Speed kills, remember. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| Speed's very, very important. | ||
| The problem is with a lot of people, they're worried about being smothered by a bigger guy. | ||
| They're worried about being held onto and dragged to the cage. | ||
| They've got to learn not to get smothered. | ||
| They've got to know how to fight. | ||
| They've got to learn not to lie down on their back and let somebody be on top of them. | ||
| Get out of that position. | ||
| There's been an established way that things have been for a long time. | ||
| So now that this break up in the established way, it's going to cause... | ||
| Change is scary for people. | ||
| I stopped weightlifting a long time ago. | ||
| Almost two years ago now. | ||
| Rhonda hasn't touched weight. | ||
| No strength and conditioning. | ||
| I do everything for her. | ||
| You don't do any strength and conditioning at all? | ||
| No, only two-pound dumbbells shadow boxing. | ||
| Do you worry at all about injury prevention? | ||
| It's one of the benefits of strength and conditioning, they think, is injury prevention. | ||
| They can strengthen up areas, joints, back. | ||
| If anything's wrong, I can go see a physical therapist and he can give me stuff to do or whatever. | ||
| But, I mean, I have such a base of doing strength and conditioning for so many... | ||
| So many years that my body is balanced the way it is. | ||
| There's not an imbalance that I had to make up for through strength and conditioning. | ||
| Now it's like I'm worried about being too bulked up where I can't fight the way I want to fight. | ||
| You see how quick her hands are, how explosive combination. | ||
| She's fluid, she does her stretching, she does two pound dumbbell workouts, which In the 10th round, she's averaging in the shadow boxing. | ||
| When she's shadow boxing, and we know if we're on the shadow box, she's not going to be fucking air, I always say. | ||
| She's not going to just do it so it could look pretty. | ||
| She's really shadow boxing. | ||
| She imagines there's an opponent in front of her and she has to kill him. | ||
| Throws 500, how many? | ||
| 575? | ||
| 575 punches in 3 minutes. | ||
| With a 2-pound dumbbell. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That's automatically strength and conditioning plus 10. It's plus ten. | ||
| You know you're going to be firing your hands in the tenth round. | ||
| Ten rounds of, you know, there's shadowboxing, I always say, and there's shadowboxing. | ||
| This is not shadowboxing. | ||
| You're just loosening up. | ||
| But she does it, you know, throws the punches with the weights. | ||
| With intention. | ||
| With intention. | ||
| And then we go to Santa Monica stairs. | ||
| She gets her legs. | ||
| She does her course. | ||
| She does 2,000 sit-ups every day. | ||
| Oh, so you are doing conditioning. | ||
|
unidentified
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She is. | |
| Yeah, but I mean, have you ever seen... | ||
| Do you ever see Pacquiao doing cleans or bench pressing? | ||
| Do you ever see Mayweather doing anything like that? | ||
| Was Muhammad Ali hitting the iron or anything like that? | ||
| None of them were. | ||
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| Fight physical. | ||
| Whatever is fighting. | ||
| And then the time, right? | ||
| How much you do and what you do. | ||
| You need to know what you're doing at what time. | ||
| To play devil's advocate, though, Rafael Dos Anjos in his last fight against Anthony Pettis, he pushed them all in the most ferocious paces I've ever seen for a five-round fight. | ||
| And he went through an extensive strength and conditioning program with Nick Kurson, one of the guys who was a disciple of Marv Marinovich. | ||
| And I had Kurson on the podcast explaining to me all the different stuff they had to do, a lot of plyos, a lot of explosive drills. | ||
| That's different than lifting, though. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| We do conditioning, but we don't do, like, lifting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people think that lifting, in fact, slows you down and provides you with an unnatural workload on your muscles, which fucks you up in training. | ||
| Because, like, if you do bench press all the time, like, your chest is all fucked up and sore, so that way when you're training, you're going to have this issue. | ||
| You're sore and you're all ripped up. | ||
| Your chest is, you know, is all filled with lactic acid and... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Dos Anjos did an absolutely great job. | ||
| He was physically amazingly fit, and I know the guy you're talking about. | ||
| He did a hell of a job, but it's the training also. | ||
| Rafael Cordero did an amazing job with his tactical approach to it. | ||
| There is all of it combined, but he knew that he needs to win that fight, not only with the tactical aspect of it, with the physical ability, with the conditioning. | ||
| So he did his job right. | ||
| When you have an athlete, You need to know what you need to do to make that athlete into the best. | ||
| Ronda is the quickest, fastest, and the strongest fighter. | ||
| We're talking about Cyborg here. | ||
| Ronda, with one hand, will toss around Cyborg. | ||
| She won't know where she is, even at 145. The problem is it has to be fair, a fight. | ||
| And we do it pure. | ||
| She's never, you know, done anything unfair when it comes down to sports. | ||
| And she fought at 145, like I said before, is because she would walk around 148. People wouldn't want to fight her. | ||
| So we said she could jump in and fight tomorrow. | ||
| For her to get experience, because she was always training, but nobody would want to fight her. | ||
| So when they call you one day before for a fight, would you be willing your fighter to fight at 135 when you're walking around 148 or 145? | ||
| Of course 145. Why would you lose all that weight in one day? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And when you know your fighter is a monster, she'll beat anybody. | ||
| Of course, fight at 145. Now when you fight at 135, how much weight are you cutting to get down there? | ||
| 15 pounds. | ||
| So you cut 15 pounds in how long? | ||
| I mean, I get around 10 over, like three days before. | ||
| 10 over? | ||
| 10 pounds in the last three days. | ||
| So is it just watching your diet, coming back on your water? | ||
| I have Dolce, you know. | ||
| Pretty much the lightest that I could get without, you know. | ||
| I can't lose any more fat when I'm at like 43. And then like the last like eight pounds has to be water because that's just you know I just can't get any smaller than that. | ||
| That's when you get like super lean like right before the weigh-ins and If you have you ever Consider I mean, what do you think about the idea of fighters not cutting any weight at all? | ||
| I mean it seems to be Almost unnecessary evil at this stage of the game, but I really wish it weren't. | ||
| And I really would like to see fighters just fight at whatever is the healthiest weight for them. | ||
| I feel like I'm actually in my best shape and the best fighter that I possibly can be if I make 35 and then go back up to like 47, 48 the next day. | ||
| Why would that be better than if you fought at 148? | ||
| If you just felt like you just didn't cut any weight at all? | ||
| Because I have to be so much more disciplined. | ||
| In order to do that. | ||
| To get to the 45, I could fib a whole lot more. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I could kind of blur the lines on my diet a lot more. | ||
| I wouldn't have to be so disappointed. | ||
| I wouldn't have to be so many ounces at this hour for weeks and weeks and weeks ahead of time. | ||
| And so I feel like when I'm at the point where I'm about to actually go fight, I don't feel the weight cut from the day before. | ||
| It's this crazy feeling where I feel like I'm inhabiting this body that I only have for like a day. | ||
| My fight night body, it's like everything is peaked up to that day. | ||
| And so when I'm finally inhabiting this body that can like... | ||
| I feel like a fucking ninja, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't understand. | |
| Me right now is not me right then. | ||
| This is just the time we need to hit the gym right now. | ||
| Start training. | ||
| We're going to go back. | ||
| I can't describe to you how it feels. | ||
| After all that work and all that perfect food and perfect training and perfect peaking and it's all done and it's all been fine-tuned so I could be the best that is physically possible for a human form to be for this 24-hour period that I have. | ||
| I'm perfectly peaked. | ||
| It feels fucking amazing. | ||
| And I don't think I could get that feeling without cutting the 35 first. | ||
| Wow, that's fascinating. | ||
| And then when you're hungry, you know your opponent, you have to punish them for that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a mental thing. | |
| When I actually get to put on the four-ounce gloves, and he does the best wrap ever. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| But his fight day wrap is different than his training wrap. | ||
| When I actually have that wrap on and those small gloves on, I feel like I could rob a fucking liquor store. | ||
| I mean it. | ||
| We don't need a liquor store. | ||
| Something better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not going to pee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll be right back. | |
| I'm not going to lie. | ||
| Well, good. | ||
| I want to talk to Edmund about what... | ||
| I will tell you. | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| What was it like when you guys first started working together? | ||
| I mean she was describing it like you knew that she was a judo player and she was getting into MMA like what was like the first couple of training sessions like? | ||
| When she came in I didn't want to train her because I had my hands full and I had you know I was working with all of them and I was like, what is this girl doing? | ||
| You know, what is she going to do with this? | ||
| Is she serious? | ||
| Is she not? | ||
| And I don't like to jump into things. | ||
| I like to wait until it's the right time. | ||
| Timing, I feel like for me, is the most important thing that I've learned throughout my career. | ||
| You know, I opened up a gym when I was 16 years old. | ||
| And doing all this I learned that patience sometimes and timing is very important because in my life I went through a lot of hard days because I was a kid myself didn't understand what I'm getting into and I've been through a lot of tough days so I like to stay patient and just watch and see figure out what the person wants to do with their life and then I could guide them if I can I will if I can't I'll give them A pointer you know you could do it better with this person or you do it this way and some listen and some don't we know that. | ||
| Ron is an amazing student. | ||
| I figured that out right away because within the three four months she was in my gym I would tell her go stay on the bag and she would go hit the bag and really hit the bag until I paid attention to her again. | ||
| She would have a lot of patience and she would be understanding and she would work very hard but after like three four months being in the gym I gave her maybe a few pointers and then When they called me, they called me literally the day that they got her an amateur fight. | ||
| So the manager called me and was like, hey, we got a fight for Ronda. | ||
| Are you in the area? | ||
| Do you think you can come through? | ||
| I don't know what hit me, but I was like, maybe I should respect this girl. | ||
| She's an Olympic medalist and... | ||
| Everybody's talking about Ronda's Olympic medalist, you know? | ||
| She's a cool girl, this and that, Manny. | ||
| And I was like, maybe I should go check this girl out. | ||
| I went to the locker room, I wrapped her hands. | ||
| I saw she was excited that I was there, you know? | ||
| I wrapped her hands and I said, hey, keep your hands up, you know? | ||
| And I remember she was so squared instead of being in an angle. | ||
| And I was like, okay, yeah. | ||
| And then I was like, You know, she's gonna kick you, doesn't matter, kick, punch, whatever comes, just keep your hands up high and let's just step forward right away, you know, break the distance and get inside a clinch and do what you're best at. | ||
| And right when I told her that, her focus, the way she looked at me and, you know, I knew that she was a fighter, but I was like, let her get in there first, you know, let me, till I see this girl, yeah, so I could see it. | ||
| Speed, power, explosiveness, without even having that top level of training. | ||
| The way she did it, I knew she was a real athlete, real fighter. | ||
| So I was coming back and I text the manager, I was like, give me the name and last name of this girl, spell it out for me. | ||
| You didn't know my last name. | ||
| Yeah, besides that, I didn't even speak English well, so how could I write it? | ||
| I was like, what happened there? | ||
| So he texted it to me. | ||
| I didn't look that day. | ||
| Next day was like maybe 3 p.m. | ||
| I went online. | ||
| I pressed her name. | ||
| It became amateur debut, Ronda Rousey, and it had already like 100,000 views. | ||
| I was like, what the hell just happened, you know? | ||
| We just fought. | ||
| How is that possible, 100,000 views? | ||
| And I was like, okay, this girl has a following. | ||
| Then I started looking at her judo fights, all her matches, and it was interesting. | ||
| I knew that she was a real fighter because of her attitude, her approach to fighting. | ||
| And, you know, I don't understand judo at that point, especially I didn't understand much about it, but You know, I have a vision. | ||
| I've done all kinds of martial arts growing up. | ||
| And I knew what's a technical fighter only. | ||
| What's a fighter that has the attitude to fight? | ||
| What's a fighter that's born to fight? | ||
| You know, so she had all the pluses. | ||
| But I knew that it could be way better done. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because right away I knew that, hey, USA Judo, you know, it's amazing what Anna Marie did with Ronda Rousey. | ||
| It's phenomenal being in this country with judo not being such a strong sport in the United States and all the gyms she took her to and all that guidance made her into something special. | ||
| It's an amazing job. | ||
| But I said it could be done, you know, boxing and in U.S. boxing is huge and I said if we train With that concept and keeper judo, this girl is going to be unreal. | ||
| I started working with her. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Oh, no, then we bumped heads, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| What happened, Rhonda? | ||
| She chiched it. | ||
| Then I started working with her. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| For like the three amateur fights. | ||
| I remember going home. | ||
| I remember going home to my ex, he was my boyfriend at the time, and just bitching about how Edmund would not spend any time on me. | ||
| At all. | ||
| Even though, yeah, we already had her blow up and he was spending, oh my god, I would go home every night. | ||
| I would go home every night and I would be like, he's still, you know, I'm there and I ask him and he's just like, you know, I don't know, he's paying hard to get or like, what is this? | ||
| He's like paying all attention to all these other people almost intentionally just rubbing my face and he's not paying attention to me and like, oh my god. | ||
| What turned the corner? | ||
| It was before my first pro fight he started. | ||
| I had a fight and this is how it happened. | ||
| She says it a bit differently. | ||
| Talking to this. | ||
| Yeah, she says it a bit differently, but this is what happened. | ||
| I was wearing, I don't know what kind of shirt was I wearing. | ||
| This was before the first amateur fight we had this fight. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You tell it. | ||
| You tell it. | ||
| Yeah, I was wearing like a shirt. | ||
| And my fighter had another pound or two pounds to drop. | ||
| He was fighting on Showtime. | ||
| I didn't know this. | ||
| He was a boxer. | ||
| And he was on the elliptical just to break into a quick sweat. | ||
| And she came right in front of me when I got out of the locker room and I was... | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I got up really early that morning so I could go to Alberto Crane's gym and spar. | ||
| They did MMA sparring in the morning, right? | ||
| From like 8.30 to like whatever. | ||
| 9.30. | ||
| It was like 8.30 to 10. They had a workout. | ||
| But I left early at 9.30 so that I could get to the gym in time at 10 to be able to be there to bug Edmund into holding events for me because he wouldn't. | ||
| He still hadn't at that point, but every day I would ask, can he hold it to me? | ||
| He's like, no, I'm busy. | ||
| Can he hold it to me? | ||
| No, I got this thing. | ||
| Can he hold it to me? | ||
| No, I got this thing. | ||
| And every single day, the excuse got worse and worse and worse. | ||
| Until I didn't have an excuse. | ||
| Yeah, and so that day, I left sparring early so that I could be there. | ||
| I'm wrapping my hands. | ||
| I'm sitting behind the desk. | ||
| I'm all like, okay. | ||
| I'm going to... | ||
| Pretty much, right when he gets in the door, I'm going to ask him again. | ||
| Because that's like my thing now. | ||
| And he comes in the door, and I'm like, Hey, Edmund, can you hold Mitch for me today? | ||
| And he goes, I don't want to sweat in this shirt. | ||
| And walks off. | ||
| Just like that. | ||
| Like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I looked at him, and I went, This is fucking bullshit! | |
| She started, like, her eyes got open. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then it was just like, No one speaks to Edmund like that. | |
| I was like, in his gym, all the other fighters, it was like, you pull the record, and it was like, Ah! | ||
| Everybody looked at him like, oh my god, something's gonna happen. | ||
| And he was just like... | ||
| I came close to a really close to a face. | ||
| I walk up and I'm going to grab my stuff or whatever. | ||
| I'm walking back across and he's like, don't ever swear. | ||
| Don't ever speak to me like that in my gym. | ||
| I was like, fuck it, whatever. | ||
| I went out the door. | ||
| I grabbed all my stuff. | ||
| I was ready to never go back in there again. | ||
| I was like, well, I'm not welcome back anymore. | ||
| He never even said that I could train there. | ||
| He just didn't say, no, you have to leave. | ||
| So I just stayed. | ||
| This is not a welcoming environment. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No, and then, yeah. | ||
| Everybody has that fuck you attitude. | ||
| And then I'm like pulling away and I was like, oh god, I left my gloves. | ||
| You know, because I couldn't afford anything. | ||
| Those were gloves that were given to me. | ||
| I think Roman gave me gloves. | ||
| And I was like, whatever. | ||
| You know, I'll find new gloves. | ||
| I'll find a new gym. | ||
| I don't know how. | ||
| I'm going to afford any of it. | ||
| I don't even know how I'm going to afford to get home, but somehow. | ||
| And then, like, then he texted me to come back. | ||
| He, like, I got a text. | ||
| He was like, come back to the gym. | ||
| And I was like, well... | ||
| At least I can get my gloves and have an excuse to walk back in and grab my gloves. | ||
| So I turn back around and go back to the gym. | ||
| You can pick it up from here if you want. | ||
| And I said, I need to talk to you. | ||
| Could you drop me off at the bank? | ||
| I gotta make some deposits. | ||
| And she said, yeah. | ||
| She was with the Honda. | ||
| And I sat in the car. | ||
| I was like, holy fuck. | ||
| I can't move in here because it was all messy. | ||
| I've never seen shit like that. | ||
| The thing is, if you're cashing in change to make rent, okay, if it's that close every month, fuck a car wash, okay? | ||
| When it rains, free car wash for everyone. | ||
| I also had a dog. | ||
| I had a really small apartment. | ||
| I still have this dog, Mochi. | ||
| She's awesome. | ||
| She was crate trained for the car, pretty much. | ||
| I would bring her everywhere I could, but not at the gym, because she wasn't allowed at the gym. | ||
| So she would just chill in your car? | ||
| Yeah, if I, like, had to go anywhere, you know, like, in the evening, I wasn't gonna let her, like, die of heat stroke or anything. | ||
| If it was, like, the weather was fine, she would come with me everywhere. | ||
| And then, like, I had a basket system in my car where I had, like, I would just bring my basket of, like, clean clothes and put it next to an empty basket. | ||
| And then after training, I would put all the other clothes and all the dirty clothes in one basket. | ||
| And then when the clean clothes basket was empty, I would wash the other one and, like, had this rotating basket thing. | ||
| My dog is just obsessed with the smell of my vagina. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know why, but she would just go through all of it. | ||
| Whenever she was in the back, she would rip all of the dirty clothes out, put them all over the chair, just rub my old sweaty underwear that had been sitting there all over her face. | ||
| It was her favorite thing in the world. | ||
| Just sweaty pants and underwear and bras everywhere and dog hair and all that stuff. | ||
| Edmund is like OCD clean. | ||
| You want to know why that pen is straight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because he was probably like that earlier and he already went like that and straightened it out. | |
| And we just didn't realize it, okay? | ||
| So he gets in my car and my car looks like, you know, it is a Petri Gist trying to find the new cure for leprosy or something. | ||
| And he... | ||
| Like, levitated. | ||
| He was hovering inside my car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like a public toilet when you have to take a shit. | |
| He was doing this, and I don't know how it was really physically possible. | ||
| It was a really low ride, you know? | ||
| He somehow had his feet at a 45 degree angle, but was not touching his ass to my chair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's how I drove him today. | |
| And did you guys resolve it in the car? | ||
| I told her that I was thinking about my fighters sweating. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it wasn't a great excuse. | ||
| She believed in it. | ||
| He didn't apologize. | ||
| What he did is he explained why he was right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why I was right. | |
| Well, I was right to not hold the mitts for you today because Art was cutting weight and this is my weigh-in shirt. | ||
| I wanted him to sweat. | ||
| I didn't want to sweat. | ||
| I didn't want to explain to her. | ||
| In my mind, I was like, there will be a time that you will be in the same position. | ||
| I have to be next to you because I'm like a... | ||
| But you obviously felt bad about it because you texted her. | ||
| I felt bad about it. | ||
| That's why I texted her, yeah. | ||
| So I said, come back. | ||
| But in my mind, when I told her to come back, I was like, man, this girl really wants to fucking do it. | ||
| And this was at a time where the UFC didn't have women's fights. | ||
| Women's fights were an oddity at best. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Other than the Gina Carano cyborg fight, there was very little attention whatsoever given to women's fighting. | ||
| So for you, it was like this thing that wasn't like a promising proposition. | ||
| Exactly, but I never, never, I didn't think about that. | ||
| I like to keep it real, honestly. | ||
| Like, she sees a lot of athletes come right now to my gym even. | ||
| I try to help them, guide them, you know. | ||
| I never think about, she knows about finances or will they become something special. | ||
| I want to help all of them out, you know, but... | ||
| At a point in life, you know, you have to make sacrifices and understand what you're doing. | ||
| It's a very fascinating position to be a coach because a coach relies a hundred percent on having a quality student. | ||
| If you're a great coach and you're around people that don't give a fuck and don't train hard, don't care, your knowledge is like, it doesn't ever get to them. | ||
| It doesn't ever get out there, and no one can ever see what you're truly good at. | ||
| You and I had this conversation once after a fight, and you were saying that all my years of training fighters, who would have ever thought that it would be this woman that would be, like, the greatest student? | ||
| I would never either. | ||
| MMA. He couldn't stand MMA. He hated it. | ||
| He didn't like doing MMA. He trained Manny just because Manny works so hard. | ||
| Because he's Armenian. | ||
| Before the Mike Brown fight, I trained Manny and all those fights. | ||
| Well, the Mike Brown fight was when he knocked him out. | ||
| Yeah, I worked with him. | ||
| That was a huge win for him. | ||
| Other than that, Edmund only had men, Armenian, boxers, and that was his little category. | ||
| How does the relationship work? | ||
| You're the striking coach then, but you're her overall coach? | ||
| Yes, I give the whole program, and I say when we're grappling, when we're using her judo, Know when to use the judo, like speed week, when to bring in those sparring partners, what kind of sparring partners, how many days a week she does her strength and conditioning or sparrings, you know? | ||
| But she's boxing and strength and conditioning, so she's learning always. | ||
| But I see Henner in your corner occasionally, Henner Gracie. | ||
| Edmund does, like, the structure of the camp. | ||
| So what we do what days. | ||
| But when I do, like, you know, jiu-jitsu or judo or wrestling, you know, I'm working with somebody else. | ||
| But because, like, the amount of time or, you know, how, like... | ||
| How the intensity or what day it is? | ||
| Or what we're working on specific, you know, what we need to do. | ||
| So because you're the closest to her. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I know her mentally, what she needs to do to be dominant, you know? | ||
| So sometimes people that don't have so much experience, they will work on certain things during certain time of the training camp that it's unnecessary to work on that. | ||
| You know, because you could do that at times that when she's off, she doesn't have a training camp. | ||
| She doesn't have a fight. | ||
| So I understand. | ||
| That's why sometimes it was so difficult to teach her everything in boxing and to progress earlier. | ||
| The reason was Ronda could have done that is because we had fights in front of us. | ||
| So when we have fights in front of us, we specifically work on that opponent and what she needs to do. | ||
| I didn't show her how to throw an overhand right or anything like that until the Alexis Davis fight. | ||
| She knocked her out. | ||
| You know, I told her straight shots. | ||
| Those are the best for you to back them up, get that clinch, you know? | ||
| You don't want those big overhand shots and we could stop all of those with a great jab. | ||
| You know, you work your way inside with a jab in boxing. | ||
| You work your way out. | ||
| If you don't want anybody to come inside, you keep that jab out there and they'll have a hard time. | ||
| So it's a simple concept. | ||
| A lot of footwork, you know, utilizing the distance, right? | ||
| And you see how she gets the clinch. | ||
| You know, if you watch Liz's fight, short, stocky girl throwing hard short shots, the way she maneuvers and uses that jab, gets under that elbow, it's beautiful. | ||
| For you, was it a difficult transition becoming an MMA coach, like being in a situation where... | ||
| No, because I was, people don't know, I did, I have like 40 professional Muay Thai fights. | ||
| You know, after doing Muay Thai, I did shoot boxing. | ||
| I fought in Japan, throws. | ||
| So I was used to all that. | ||
| I did Taekwondo matches, all those international, Jimmy Keem, all those fights. | ||
| So I have experience in all kinds of martial arts, but then fell in love with boxing, you know, polished my hands and, you know, trained with the best. | ||
| And putting it all together, it's not. | ||
| A fight is a fight. | ||
| You've got to understand. | ||
| It's not only about the fight. | ||
| You've got to understand what you have as a trainer. | ||
| I know what I have. | ||
| I know what abilities she has. | ||
| And, you know, I know Ronda's personality. | ||
| I know what they're going to be trying to do. | ||
| This last fight she knows, I said, Ronda, the way you're punching right now, everybody's going to try to push you off them. | ||
| Or, they're going to be desperate for them to clinch. | ||
| Before, you would want to go clinch. | ||
| But now you're going to clip them so hard, guess what? | ||
| They're going to try to come and clinch you. | ||
| And when they're doing that, you either counter take down, which you can do, Or you keep on punching them. | ||
| Counter punch or push them off. | ||
| Knock their ass out. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| She was punching her. | ||
| What did she want to do? | ||
| She couldn't take those shots. | ||
| She came to grab Ronda. | ||
| Ronda pushed her. | ||
| Kneed her. | ||
| Jumped on her again. | ||
| Fight was over. | ||
| But that we understood as we're seeing progress. | ||
| Because when I'm seeing the sparring partners, we have a boxing world champion sparring with Ronda. | ||
| Ronda's on her, hitting her. | ||
| And this girl's like, holy shit, trying to get inside to close. | ||
| Tie her up. | ||
| That means it's a big problem now. | ||
| So are you analyzing this stuff independently of your training sessions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Independently, absolutely. | |
| So you're sitting down afterwards and you're going over what you're seeing, what the progress is. | ||
| That's why I can't teach group classes. | ||
| I can't do group. | ||
| I like to work on an individual's ability and bring out the best from the fighter. | ||
| Well, you gotta look deep into them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Too much, too much. | ||
| Doing it at this level, you have to have that fighter. | ||
| You have to love that fighter. | ||
| You have to care about that fighter. | ||
| You have to understand that fighter. | ||
| That's why she lets me write the whole structure, but I'll tell you, she's intelligent. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because there has been choices she's made or said, hey, coach, you know, we should go work with Henner and Hiron, you know, because just to understand their tactical approach to fighting where they're on their back, I will never lie down on my back. | ||
| Because in the beginning it was like he did all the striking and I was all of the grappling. | ||
| So I didn't have a jiu-jitsu or wrestling or judo coach for years. | ||
| And then I brought Martin Berberian, which is an Olympic, three-time Olympian, bronze medalist. | ||
| So we added, like I added one, she added Henra and Hirona and she was like just for me to understand the approach. | ||
| To their style. | ||
| And then now, when we go, she understands that when they're on their back and being passive, judokai is not going to lie down on their back. | ||
| You know, you lose that weight. | ||
| But they do, jujutsu does, and just for her to be aware of that. | ||
| And I said, Ronda, you're brilliant. | ||
| Let's go to them, and we'll do it once a week, twice a week, so you could understand their approach to grappling, and then we'll know how to take advantage of that. | ||
| Well, it's an ever-evolving game. | ||
| Grappling, unlike anything else, is constantly evolving and adding new techniques to it. | ||
| If you pay attention to Abu Dhabi, like the World Championships, it's all leg locks now. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| The leg lock game in grappling has changed so much over the last few years. | ||
| Everybody's attacking with leg locks, using leg locks for sweeps, using leg locks to establish other transitions. | ||
| Yeah, but leg locks, when you bring striking into it, It's very different because it's very risky in that when you go for a leg lock, if it doesn't work out, you lose position. | ||
| And I may have to think a lot more about risk. | ||
| And that's why I feel like arm bars work so well is because if it doesn't work out, I'm still on top. | ||
| I can still be somewhere positive. | ||
| If I go for a leg lock, I'm suddenly on the bottom. | ||
| That's why I don't do doubles. | ||
| I don't shoot for doubles. | ||
| What if it doesn't work? | ||
| Then you're on the bottom. | ||
| You're in a worse place. | ||
| It's so risky. | ||
| Do you know who Eddie Cummins is? | ||
| Top level Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitor right now. | ||
| Trains under John Donaher. | ||
| And John Donaher apparently has a very complex and comprehensive system involving attacking legs and leg locks. | ||
| He's one of Henzo Gracie's black belts. | ||
| Really, really respected Jiu Jitsu guy. | ||
| And Eddie was talking about... | ||
| He just competed in Abu Dhabi and he was talking about... | ||
| Bringing leg locks to MMA and that you are seeing many more leg locks in MMA now because guys are learning the like at the highest level that the transitions it's like a lot of times we have these looks at things we go well that's not gonna work because of this and people might have said that about all sorts of different aspects of MMA before someone came along and figured out a way to do it successfully I'm not discounting like leg locks at all I'm just saying they're risky and then again it's the ability of the fighter What ability do you have? | ||
| What you've done? | ||
| Like, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like when she does with Henor and Hiron, you know, during training camp, she's not gonna, one month before the fight, lie down on her back and try to do triangles. | ||
| That's not her. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So we need to be dominant in certain areas. | ||
| Do you train those things, like, do you learn, like, specific skills outside of a training camp? | ||
| So, like, when the training camp's over, you know, you knock out Betch-Cohea and you go, ah, I'd like to learn how to do this, or I'd like to add a little bit of that to my game. | ||
| Yeah, she's done that before. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you just do, you learn stuff without a particular direction when you're outside of camp, and camp is what directs it towards something specific. | ||
| But is it crazy because MMA, there's so many skills, there's so many things you can adhere to, or so many styles you can... | ||
| It's like you kind of figure out where to focus your thing. | ||
| And you're focusing your thing on boxing, your judo, and your armbar. | ||
| And because of that, you've been so successful. | ||
| Because everything is just razor sharp. | ||
| When you start adding things... | ||
| Sometimes what happens is you're putting too much attention to these other things. | ||
| You can add, but know when to add. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Now we got Justin Flores, you know, he comes in, the judo, the explosive throws. | ||
| We know that judo is all about timing and explosive, and she loves it when she uses that, knowing when to do that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But if she does that right now, when we're just starting off and quick explosive throws, her body is not ready, like you were saying about strength and conditioning. | ||
| People do that so they could prevent injuries, right? | ||
| For you not to have your joints hurting, this and that. | ||
| So it's the same thing. | ||
| You have to think of it when to use it. | ||
| It's okay to add, but when to use it? | ||
| When you're fighting, you have to do what's... | ||
| The best of your ability to get the W. It's about the W. People make the mistake of trying to memorize certain things, like separate things that are completely disjointed and not related, as opposed to memorizing concepts. | ||
| When I'm grappling, I probably make up 15 different moves a night that I've never done before, just off the top of my head because it makes sense right there. | ||
| Because you know the concept and now that you're in an unusual position, you just apply the concept to that position. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, the concepts. | |
| I'm just applying the concepts to every kind of situation I could end up in. | ||
| I don't memorize every single individual move. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| I'm not gonna memorize a leg lock and then memorize a spinning back elbow and then memorize a push kick and memorize, you know, something else that's completely a Superman punch. | ||
| Like, they're completely all over the place and they have nothing to do with each other. | ||
| They're not connected. | ||
| Why am I spending so many hours of my day on all these different things that they're not connected to each other? | ||
| And so I spend a lot of my time Connecting things as opposed to trying to learn individual things that don't have anything to do with the other. | ||
| Connecting and ring journalism. | ||
| Where's the ring journalism? | ||
| It's the most important thing. | ||
| You see her on the pads, watch her. | ||
| Every time I'm stepping, she's one step ahead. | ||
| What is she doing? | ||
| She's controlling me. | ||
|
unidentified
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She's controlling you and she's building that framework in her mind of always knowing what to do. | |
| It's the most important thing in boxing and fighting in general. | ||
| You can't be in the middle of the octagon, walk 10 steps and hit your back on the cage and then expect to learn a superman punch and become something special. | ||
| You've got to learn ring generalship first. | ||
| There's more to fighting. | ||
| People just, you know, know it, have an idea, and there's coaches out there that think, oh, they could show a fancy jumping kick or a punch or whatever it is, or a throw, and become something special with that. | ||
| No, no, it doesn't work that way. | ||
| Positioning is so critical in grappling, but it's just as critical in striking. | ||
| It's just as critical in movement, just as critical in being in a position where the person literally doesn't have the leverage to hit you correctly. | ||
| And it's an art. | ||
| You watch Floyd Mayweather, it's the one thing he does better than anybody. | ||
| He's always in a good position. | ||
| Constantly in a good position to avoid damage. | ||
| And he knows if he goes on the ring ropes, calls you in, takes the impact, he knows which round he's doing that in. | ||
| You know, if he knows you're a huge puncher, he won't go there the first two rounds. | ||
| He'll, you know, know exactly when he's calling you in to counter those shots, you know, on the ring ropes, on the ropes. | ||
| He knows when to do it. | ||
| It's about when to do it, how you use it. | ||
| When Ronda went and clinched Misha, you know, the second fight, Ronda says she was done. | ||
| And then Misha admitted that she was hurt from that right hand. | ||
| If you watch her interview at the end, she's like, yeah, I got hit. | ||
| That was a good right hand, right? | ||
| Well, it made sense because she was so high. | ||
| She was so high up on your hips. | ||
| I remember watching and I was like, why is she? | ||
| She's going flying! | ||
|
unidentified
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Boom! | |
| I mean, as soon as she was clinching you up high like that, I was like, she's going to go flying. | ||
| But it's the sense. | ||
| When Rhonda says, I clinched her, she was already out. | ||
| So Rhonda tossed her and did an arm bar. | ||
| But why she did that throw there is because she knew she was out. | ||
| She could have finished it standing too. | ||
| That was the worst throw ever. | ||
| The beginning of the third round, she was out on her feet with a straight right, and I knew it because of the way she was breathing. | ||
| When I put her up against the cage, I felt she was deflated. | ||
| She wasn't there anymore. | ||
| So I knew I could do whatever kind of bullshit throw in the world. | ||
| Even if I could be on the bottom, it's still going to work right then because she's not there. | ||
| And the idea in that fight, the structure of the fight that he put out is you're going to break her first standing, and then the submission will be easier because they're going to be so focused on the submission You have to get their minds somewhere else before you go for it. | ||
| And so at that point, I knew that she wasn't there because you have to have a feel for the other person and know them very well. | ||
| You have to know them so intimately. | ||
| You know that if they're breathing differently, you know where their mind is at. | ||
| And that's the time I can do the shittiest sumigaiishi that you've ever seen and be straight on the bottom and know that I'm going to finish her from there because she's not defensively there at all. | ||
| When you're looking at your future right now, are you planning when you're going to bail out of this and what your life is going to be like after? | ||
| Because you've hit this crazy peak in your life right now. | ||
| It's likely never going to be replicated by anyone else that comes after you. | ||
| You're in this weird crazy position and it can't last. | ||
| You can't fight like this when you're 80. It just can't be done. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not gonna be in my 30s. | |
| I'm not gonna be doing this in my 30s, no. | ||
| No, not when you're 30, no. | ||
| I don't want to be fighting in my 30s. | ||
| Dana White's gonna call you up on the phone, he's gonna listen. | ||
| By 30s, I mean like 31, 32. Stacks of thousands, he's gonna rifle it through the phone. | ||
| But I mean, if you're actually 30 years old, that's not 30s, that's 30. 30s. | ||
| Once you add 31, that's 30s, plural. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| I'm 28. 28. Are you really thinking, like, a couple years? | ||
| Two, three years? | ||
| Like, what are you thinking? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, I look at it, like, exactly like how we were talking about how fighting. | ||
| That's how I do everything else. | ||
| I don't look at all these separate, disjointed things. | ||
| Like, I'm not gonna go in there and I'm not gonna try this thing and then try this thing and try that thing and then hope something works out. | ||
| It's like I follow a path train of thought while I'm in there and while I'm doing everything else. | ||
| So it's just like, this is what I want to do right now, and these are the possible reactions, these are the possible things that could happen. | ||
| And we're going with option three, okay. | ||
| These are the possible reactions. | ||
| And I follow it like a path from whatever happens from what I'm doing right now that determines everything else afterward. | ||
| And I just kind of follow it. | ||
| And so everything's very organically done. | ||
| And I'm improvising all the time. | ||
| I'm improvising when I'm fighting. | ||
| I'm improvising with my career. | ||
| I just know the concepts of what I want to accomplish in my career. | ||
| I don't know exactly what I'm going to be doing. | ||
| I don't walk in and know I'm going to armbar that person. | ||
| I don't right now know exactly when I'm going to retire and how exactly I'm going to do it. | ||
| But I know it's going to happen at some point. | ||
| I know I'm going to finish it somehow. | ||
| But we know she's going to be undefeated. | ||
| I know I'm going to be undefeated. | ||
| I know I'm going to retire at some point. | ||
| But still, I'm still so far away that I can't say exactly how. | ||
| I'm still following the path and the train of thought to get there. | ||
| And we know when she wins, you know, so quick, no injuries, training healthy, happy, smart, intelligent, back-to-back wins, she could fight three fights a year, you know? | ||
| Because she was in there... | ||
| Not over a minute for this last three fights. | ||
| How are you gonna know when to stop? | ||
| And what what do you think you'll be able to just walk away? | ||
| Yeah, but that's why look at Fedor. | ||
| That's why I'm doing all this other stuff. | ||
| He's jumping back too. | ||
| Just because what else is there for them to do? | ||
| So you think the other stuff will be sufficient and sufficiently exciting? | ||
| Yeah, I just want to build it up enough and develop it enough where it's ready for me to do full-time when I want to switch over. | ||
| I got a lot going on. | ||
| You almost have too much going on. | ||
| I always wonder, are you doing movies right before you're training for fights? | ||
| You're in the middle of things? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Doing Expendables and Fast and Furious back to back right before going into camp. | ||
| Should I tell them why it went to the third round with Misha? | ||
| Joe knows. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Do you know why I went to the third round? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not only that, but I still keep on saying it. | ||
| It's because she had the movies, right? | ||
| So first time going to a big movie of her career and dealing with all those big actors and she kept her weight very low and I wasn't there because I had Nonitos and Vic's fight. | ||
| Donner's fight. | ||
| And I couldn't go there to help her out during training camp. | ||
| When she came back... | ||
| Rhonda, you know, because she always... | ||
| I do her hand wraps and she, you know, works on the bag and her hands... | ||
| I don't know how to wrap my own hands. | ||
| Yeah, her hands are ready to take that impact. | ||
| She messed up her knuckles right away during training camp. | ||
| She wasn't fit, you know, she wasn't healthy, and it took us... | ||
| She couldn't throw punches that fight. | ||
| Still hurt her in the third round. | ||
| That's why when we thought we were going to fight Misha the next fight, I said it's not healthy for her. | ||
| It's not going to be healthy for Misha next time she fights Rhonda. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know the scar on my knuckle? | |
| I think it was like nine stitches or something like that from the Lexus Davis fight? | ||
| That is an injury from that Misha fight because I lost my calluses while I was filming. | ||
| When I came back all the skin came off my hands right away like bare like my knuckles were gone. | ||
| So while you were filming you didn't do any training at all? | ||
| No, I trained a lot, but I couldn't do any impact on my hands because I punched too hard for my hands. | ||
| I have the smallest hands in the UFC. I have tiny fragile little hands like the even like my thumb bone like is like abnormally small. | ||
| Yeah, and So I can't hit unless he he professionally wraps my hands with gauze and tape every single training session and I can't hit any other way. | ||
| My hands will like explode pretty much. | ||
| And so I was training really hard. | ||
| I was running up mountains and I was wrestling and I was, you know, doing all these things and everything that I could, but I wasn't having any impact on my hands. | ||
| I was shadow boxing with the weights. | ||
| I was doing everything I could, but yeah, I couldn't land anything. | ||
| And so I got home and all the skin comes off my hands. | ||
| But I'm like, okay, I have to leave for Fast and Furious in a few days. | ||
| So fuck it. | ||
| I'm just gonna punch like this. | ||
| And so it's just open wounds. | ||
| I'm just punching open wounds for five days straight until I literally had a crater on this one hand. | ||
| And I'm just like, okay, well, it'll heal while I'm at Fast and Furious. | ||
| And I'll come back. | ||
| It'll be fine. | ||
| Because me, I'm thinking, oh, it's just a scrape. | ||
| It's whatever. | ||
| And then I come back and it never heals the whole camp. | ||
| We just keep putting neosporin and peroxide in it. | ||
| And I just have like... | ||
| Like a crater in my hand and it keeps falling off and the whole thing falls off and it gets bigger every time. | ||
| Every time it falls off it's bigger and it's deeper and I start to see like the little like the fat like beads because it's like that like deep. | ||
| Like I would look at it sideways and there would be a dent. | ||
| Inside and then it would heal and then there'd be a huge lump and then they would, whatever it was inside would burst. | ||
| I was getting a ganglion cyst on my knuckle. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| And so I finally like healed up enough where I could fight, you know, like, but I had to like not punch on it really at all or else it would rip right off. | ||
| And I remember right before the fight, I told Edmund, I was like, this knuckle on my right hand, I'm like, I'm going to plant it right on her face, I promise you. | ||
| I ended up actually knocking her out with the straight right. | ||
| But then I couldn't get anything done about it. | ||
| Because then I had to go straight to McMahon. | ||
| And then with McMahon I did two camps back to back. | ||
| Now my knee is fucking up because I'm doing two camps back to back and I can't take that much punishment all the time. | ||
| And my knuckle is still super fucked up. | ||
| And I'm like, whatever. | ||
| And it keeps ripping off and trying to heal it back. | ||
| And ripping off and trying to heal it back. | ||
| And ripping off and trying to heal it back. | ||
| And so we get through the McMahon fight and I was going to get surgery. | ||
| I was going to get my hand and my knee worked on. | ||
| But then Dana's like, listen, you could fight Gina in February. | ||
| I mean, in February, in December. | ||
| And I was like, well, I don't want to wait till December. | ||
| I'll be a better fighter in December if I fight in July. | ||
| I don't want to be sitting ring rust that long. | ||
| Because I ring rusted for the Misha fight and I didn't feel good. | ||
| So I'm like, I want to stay active in that time. | ||
| So give me a fight right away. | ||
| So I was like, okay, I'm going to fight Alexis Davis. | ||
| I just want to fight someone. | ||
| So I was like, I fought Alexis Davis. | ||
| You said Gina. | ||
| Yeah, it was going to be Gina Carano. | ||
| And it ended up not happening. | ||
| That was a big deal. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanted to fight in the meantime, so I was like, okay, I can't get surgery, and I can't get all these things worked on now. | ||
| I'm going to go do this fight, and then I'll do it afterward. | ||
| And so then I went and did the Lexus fight, and I remember just looking at this thing in my knuckle, and I was like, I feel like I could pull it out. | ||
| I feel like whatever the fuck is in there, I could get it out. | ||
| And there were times I was trying to do surgery on it, and pull things out, and I was pulling things out of my hand. | ||
| What were you pulling out of there, furniture? | ||
| Like little beads, like little balls of things. | ||
| I don't know where they were. | ||
| I felt like I was pulling out balls of fat or scar tissue and stuff out of my hand. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| But I felt like, even right before the Davis fight, I was like, I feel like I could just rip it off right now and pull it out. | ||
| But I couldn't do it because I was about to fight and I couldn't do that to my hand. | ||
| I just couldn't wait to get this thing out. | ||
| I felt like it was in there. | ||
| It was itchy almost. | ||
| And then, yeah, the first overhand right I ever threw in a fight, I threw it right on Alexis' head and the whole thing exploded, like, down to the bone, like, from the inside of my knuckle all the way out. | ||
| They never got good footage of it because I didn't want my mom to see it because she was, like, all, you know, really nervous and worried for me when I'm doing MMA. And so there's like this tiny bit of footage that Elliot got where I'm like holding my hand away from my mother and he's like looking around the corner. | ||
| You never saw it. | ||
| It was down to the bone all the way around my hand and the whole thing blew up. | ||
| We still have the wrap. | ||
| The wrap is covered in blood. | ||
| But that's how you get rid of a ganglion cyst. | ||
| You have to like burst it. | ||
| And so it was actually gone once we did that and I sewed it up. | ||
| And then I was like, oh, cool. | ||
| You know, that's what it was. | ||
| I thought my hand hurt. | ||
| And then I realized a couple days later I broke my thumb and I was walking around with my hand out and I ended up having to have a pin put in and all that stuff. | ||
| So I just have fragile little hands. | ||
| I have a great chin, but fragile little hands. | ||
| I'd rather have it that way than the other way around. | ||
| Yeah, so that's my knuckle chronicle. | ||
| And then I ripped it open before the last camp because of the stupid... | ||
| Was it commercial? | ||
| No, the promo commercial. | ||
| And then I hurt my pinky during the Budweiser commercial. | ||
| I didn't hurt anything else during the camp at all. | ||
| I got hurt doing like the two commercials right beforehand. | ||
| It's one of the big problems that people don't think about when they watch fights, if they're casual observers, is what fighters are going into camp with, kind of nagging injuries. | ||
| You know, like we do it, but she punches. | ||
| It's natural. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| I gotta get out of here. | ||
| I gotta take my kid to a martial arts class. | ||
| Dude, I have a million things to do. | ||
| I just didn't even want to know what time it was. | ||
| It's 3. 3.10. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| I'm so late for everything. | ||
| 3.06. | ||
| 3.06. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| It was so much fun. | ||
| Anytime you guys want to come back, open invitation. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll start this bitch up. | ||
| We can go off tangents like none other. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it was fun. | |
| Really fun. | ||
| All right, that's it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Appreciate it. | ||
| You guys are the best. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
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