Ronda Rousey’s eagerly-anticipated UFC return was short lived. At UFC 207, women’s bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes battered Rousey in just 48-seconds.
The former UFC champion was making her first Octagon appearance since she was dethroned by Holly Holm in devastating fashion in 2015.
Now riding back-to-back defeats, her future in the sport remains unclear.
In the wake of her loss, she’s been offered some classy words from two of the biggest names in the NBA; Lebron James and the retired Kobe Bryant.
Speaking to the Akron Beacon Journal, the Cleveland Cavaliers star said;
“In sports, in general, they build you up as high as they can, put you on the highest mountain in the world, just to tear you down. That’s coming from somebody who has experienced it. That’s a fact. I know exactly how she feels because I was that athlete. I went through that.”
“You don’t know her mindset. You don’t know the drive, is the drive still there? You don’t know. But you can tell that it’s built and built and built and built and built, they always make the teardown story more important than how long it took for her to actually get to the mountaintop.”
And the LA Lakers legend, Bryant, also weighed in by posting a message on Twitter;
Instead of clapping for @RondaRousey defeat give her a standing O for putting the sport on the map #pioneer #muse
— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) December 31, 2016
Meanwhile, Rousey’s mother, AnnMaria De Mars, expressed to TMZ her desire to see her daughter retire from MMA;
“I would like to see her retire. I would have liked to see her retire a long time ago. Who wants to see their kid get hit? Cause she’s got a lot of talent in a lot of other things. Movies, writing, producing, she’s really, really smart. I told her that at the beginning when she started this.”
The sporting world awaits Rousey’s next move.
by Nasir Jabbar