But while fans might want to believe a return is brewing, Rousey insists she’s not staging a comeback (yet)— she’s simply rediscovering her love for the sport that once defined her.
“I have a cage in my garage. It’s not like I went anywhere,” Rousey told The Breakfast Club recently. “I’m just having fun with it again. It got to a point where it kind of got hijacked from me, and I was fighting and training for reasons other than my own. I think after having my last baby, being pregnant is f—king tough. It felt like I was handicapped just compared to being a finely tuned athletic machine, where I feel like I can do anything, to suddenly I think if I did a forward roll, I would throw my back out.
“That’s just where it started, I wanted to get my bodily identity back from just being a vessel for creating another person,” Rousey added. “Just get that freedom of movement back. I started training MMA again because I feel like I kind of lost that identity as being a fighter. I think it broke my heart too much to be anywhere near it because I love it so much. I kind of went to the extreme where I don’t want to train. I don’t want to do anything at all.”
Now, nearly a decade later, she’s training again — not for a fight, but for herself.
“Mike Tyson coming back and having the biggest fight last year, it just kind of proves that I don’t think anyone’s ever really done,” Rousey said. “With Mike Tyson, you can never say never now. Holy shit….He got $20 million. Baddest man on the planet. 108 million views. F—king comment whatever you want, that’s the most-watched fight of all time, and he was almost 60. That’s how much his legacy means. How much his name means. That was very inspiring.”
BUT, Rousey revealed she got the good news from a doctor that there are things she can do about her neurological health, where “it’s not the nail in the coffin of being able to fight again.”
“It’s great news, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with that,” Rousey concluded.