Ronda Jean Rousey (/ˈraʊzi/;[12] born February 1, 1987) is an American professional wrestler, actress, and former judoka and mixed martial artist.[13] She is best known for her tenure in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and WWE.
She was the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in judo by winning bronze at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Rousey began her mixed martial arts (MMA) career with King of the Cage in 2011. She soon joined Strikeforce, becoming their last Women’s Bantamweight Champion until its acquisition by UFC.[14] Rousey was part of the company’s first female fight at UFC 157, was their inaugural Women’s Bantamweight Champion, and held the record for most UFC title defenses (6) by a female, until being surpassed by Valentina Shevchenko in 2022.[15][16][17][18] Rousey retired from MMA in 2016 and was the first female fighter inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2018.[19]
Rousey began a career in professional wrestling in 2018, signing with WWE,[20] and debuted at WrestleMania 34. She won the Raw Women’s Championship at that year’s SummerSlam, and headlined WWE’s only all-women’s pay-per-view Evolution, in which she defended the title. Rousey lost the title in the first women’s WrestleMania main event at WrestleMania 35. Rousey returned at the 2022 Royal Rumble, winning the women’s Royal Rumble match. That year, she would win the SmackDown Women’s Championship twice, making her an overall three-time women’s world champion in WWE. She became the eighth Women’s Triple Crown Champion when she won the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship with Shayna Baszler. Rousey and Baszler also unified the WWE and NXT Women’s Tag Team Championships. After leaving WWE in October 2023, she began wrestling on the independent circuit.
Rousey is the only woman to be the champion in both the UFC and WWE as well as the only woman to headline a pay-per-view event in both companies.[21] She was voted the best female athlete of all time in a 2015 ESPN fan poll, and Fox Sports described her as “one of the defining athletes of the 21st century.”[22][23][24][25] Rousey has also appeared in films, including The Expendables 3 (2014),[26] Furious 7 (2015),[27] and Mile 22 (2018),[28] and published her autobiography My Fight / Your Fight in 2015.[29]
Early life
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Ronda Jean Rousey was born in Riverside, California[30][31] on February 1, 1987, the youngest of three daughters of AnnMaria De Mars (née Waddell) and Ronald John Rousey,[32] after whom she was named.[33] Her mother, a decorated judoka, was the first American to win a World Judo Championship (in 1984, as AnnMaria Burns). Rousey is of English, Trinidadian, Venezuelan and Canadian ancestry.[34] One of her maternal great-grandfathers, Alfred E. Waddell, was a Trinidadian doctor who emigrated to Canada and became one of the first Black physicians in North America, while a maternal great-grandmother was born in Caracas, Venezuela.[35][36] Her stepfather is an aerospace engineer.[37] When Rousey was eight years old, her biological father, who had broken his back while sledding with his kids, died by suicide.[33][38] AnnMaria pursued a PhD in educational psychology at the University of California, Riverside as her daughters grew up.[33][39]
For the first six years of her life, Rousey struggled with speech and could not form an intelligible sentence due to apraxia, a neurological childhood speech sound disorder.[40] This speech disorder was attributed to being born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. When Rousey was three years old, her mother and father moved from Riverside, California, to Jamestown, North Dakota, to obtain intensive speech therapy with specialists at Minot State University.[41][42] Rousey dropped out of high school and later earned her GED.[43] She was raised between Jamestown and Southern California, retiring from her judo career at 21 and starting her MMA career at 22 when she realized that she did not want to spend her life in a conventional field of work.[44]
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