Ronda Rousey took a dig at Joe Rogan recently when she claimed that he’s “not an expert” in MMA, but it doesn’t seem like the UFC color commentator is taking it to heart.
While it’s well documented that Rogan is a life-long martial artists who competed in taekwondo tournaments in his youth and later went on to become a black belt in Brazian Jiu-Jitsu as well as being part of UFC broadcasts since as far back at UFC 12 in 1997, Rousey’s argument was that he still can’t claim to be an expert in MMA, because he’s never fought in the sport.
“Joe Rogan’s not an expert, he’s a fan with an audience,” Rousey bluntly stated on Bert Kreischer’s podcast. “He’s never fought. Taekwondo is not fighting.”
There is of course likely to be some sour grapes here on Rousey’s part given that Rogan was once among her biggest supporters, but was more critical of her in the wake of the back-to-back defeats that ended her MMA career.
Nevertheless, Rogan says he can understand why Rousey said what she did and doesn’t hold it against her.
“She’s a legend,” Rogan said on his podcast. “I’ve got nothing but love and respect for that lady. What she did was so impressive, she was the first legitimate female superstar. She made the UFC female division possible. If it wasn’t for her, [Dana White] was very open about never having female UFC fighters. It took someone that was that dynamic, that was that special to open his eyes and go, ‘You know what? I think this lady’s a star.’
“And to be the typ, when she said, like, I wasn’t an expert, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but you’ve got to understand why she thinks like that. Because she has a champion mentality. ‘You never fought, you ain’t shit?’ I get it. It’s totally fine.”
“I was a huge supporter and still am,” Rogan continued. “But when you watch a fight and you’re watching you get your ass kicked and the other person is talking about how great the other person is doing and how bad you’re doing, that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, especially someone who’s got that kind of champion mentality, that f*cking pit bull mentality. I thought you were with me. F*ck you.’
“And then it was after the fight, I was very public about saying I don’t think she should fight for a long time. They were talking about doing an immediate rematch and I was like, that’s crazy. They were talking about doing a rematch in four months or something like that, I was like, when you get head kicked into the shadow realm, you’re supposed to take a long time off.”
“Also, the problem in that fight, I think for Ronda is when you start becoming really famous, then the hyenas show up. They start offering you this and offering you that and distracting you with this and distracting you with that and now you’re going to meetings and you’re talking to agents and you’re setting up movies and you’re doing this and you’re doing that and all those things take away from the most important thing, which is your fighting. Even if they don’t take away from the amount of training you do, they take away from your focus. They rob you of the bandwidth.
“So there was two factors. There was the skill of Holly, the fact that she had all this opportunity to study Ronda with a great team and devise a gameplan, and then there’s also the stealing of focus. Ronda, I was the biggest champions of her as a fighter, as a legitimate pioneer and a star. First, it was Gina Carano and Cris Cyborg to a certain extent… and then it was Ronda, but Ronda eclipsed all of them. She’s bigger than all of them.”
Watch Rogan’s comments in full below.
