Ronda Rousey has given one of her most candid assessments of her time in WWE, describing creative suffocation, last-minute chaos, and a working environment that only got worse during her second run.
Speaking with Complex News ahead of her May 16 MMA return against Gina Carano on Netflix, Rousey reflected on what it actually felt like to work under Vince McMahon’s leadership.
“I felt like I was doing somebody else’s impression of myself. You can tell when I was allowed to write my own promos and when I wasn’t. I really enjoyed my time in the ring. I didn’t really enjoy being under the death throes of Vince McMahon’s reign.”
She pointed to the gap between the preparation given to her debut match and the preparation afforded the historic WrestleMania main event as the clearest example of misplaced priorities in how McMahon’s operation functioned.
“We had no time at all to put it together. We spent a year promoting it and like a day and a half putting it together. My debut match, we spent six weeks putting it together and we had all the best minds in the industry coming and giving their two cents. The main event milestone itself was incredible. The match unfortunately wasn’t as great as it could have been if we were able to put the same kind of preparation into it that I felt like it deserved.”
Rousey and Becky Lynch headlined WrestleMania 35 in April 2019 alongside Charlotte Flair in the first women’s main event in the show’s history.
Her second WWE run, she said, was even more chaotic than the first, with McMahon’s declining grip on reality producing a backstage atmosphere that nobody could navigate effectively.
“Vince was just more far gone and more difficult to work with and there was a lot of inner turmoil going on in the company. It was kind of a shit show and nobody ever knew what was going on. You would get to the arena and be made to do something that somebody threw in your lap that hadn’t thought about it until 15 minutes before. Any attempt to collaborate felt like we were trying to negotiate something as opposed to partnering together to make something great.”
Rousey faces Carano on Netflix on May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood in what she has described as her final MMA fight.