Former WWE star and Women’s Champion Ronda Rousey appeared on The Jim Rome Show to discuss various topics, including her outreach to UFC President Dana White.
Rousey said, ‘Well, I reached out to her through Dana. So I asked Dana if he’d be interested. And he was like, ‘Of course, I’d be interested.’ And he like sent me this voice memo where — I can tell when he’s super excited about something, because he stutters. And he was stuttering all over the voice memo. I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s he’s down.’ And so he reached out to Gina, and she said that she’d already lost 25 pounds and this was like, that walk back into the cage again is something that she’s always wanted to do. And so that’s when the talk started happening and got that interest from her. She was down from from the first mention of it.”
On arranging a deal through White:
“Yes, it is very much a [part of the saga of making the fight]. Well, originally I wanted to do it for New Year’s. And he — you know, I went to him and I’m like, ‘Dude, you always say that I’m the best fighter you ever worked with. Reward me for it. Don’t punish me for being easy to work with. Give me the best deal you ever gave anybody.’ And he was, ‘All right, I’m going to go back and get you the best deal I ever had.’ So, he came back and he’s literally brought me the a deal where I would make more per PPV buy than anybody in history. If I hit my historical numbers, which I know we would have been able to succeed, I would have made as much as I did in my entire career. And um I was like, ‘Hell yeah, Dana, high five. Thanks.’”
On the UFC passing on the fght:
“But Gina needed more time. And it happened to go to the other side of when ESPN’s deal and their PPV model would be ending and they would be going to streaming [with Paramount]. And you know, they’re now a publicly traded company. And they — how do I put it? They didn’t want to set a precedent of giving me the guaranteed money that I deserve, because once I rise that raise that tide it lifts all the boats. And they just made a 7.7 billion dollar deal at Paramount. So it’s in their best interest actually not to put on the best fights possible, but to spend as little as money as possible so that he can keep it. Dana’s now legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. It’s not just about proving the concept of fighting and putting on the best fights possible, and proving that this is a sport to be taken seriously. I think now that it’s gone into — now that they’ve sold the company, it’s kind of out of Dana’s hands, unfortunately. And now it’s falling onto Hunter Campbell and UFC Corp., where they don’t care about putting on the best fights possible. They care about putting on the most cost-effective fights possible. So it no longer made sense for for me to go over there, because they didn’t want to pay us the money that we deserve. Because then for the rest of the time of the deal, they’re going to have to pay everybody else more. And so then I decided to look elsewhere.”
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(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
