Ronda Rousey Wishes WWE Cared More About Championship Rivalry
Ronda Rousey was disappointed that WWE didn’t care more about her first championship rivalry.
When Ronda Rousey made her WWE debut in 2018 to a lot of fanfare, she picked up a win as a tag team with Kurt Angle over Triple H & Stephanie McMahon at WrestleMania 34. After that, she was quickly pushed into the Raw Women’s Title picture.
At SummerSlam 2018, Ronda Rousey easily defeated Alexa Bliss in about four minutes to become the Raw Women’s Champion for the first time. Rousey went on to beat Bliss again at Hell in a Cell and she was on her way to a lengthy 231-day title reign.
The feud was all about establishing Rousey as a dominant threat in the women’s division. Bliss did have credibility as a multi-time women’s champion, but Rousey was able to dominate her in that rivalry.
While talking to Ring The Belle, Rousey spoke about what she thought about the Bliss rivalry when it was presented to her.
“Well at the time I was like ‘Oh well maybe they’re just trying to like make me be a better wrestler and be able to sell for someone who’s as big as my leg and make it convincing.’ But really it just came down to the fact that Vince didn’t pay any attention to us and just looked at ‘Oh she sells the most merch, Ronda’s hot right now, put them together.’
That was as much thought as he put into it. That started a long legacy of having to make chicken s**t into chicken salad. But I learned a lot from her. She taught me like okay we’re going to have to lead on like comedy and story and expressions and stuff like that to be able to get people into this.”
Ronda Rousey Thinks Alexa Bliss Rivalry Made Her Into a Better Wrestler
As Rousey continued talking about the feud with Bliss, she admitted that it made her a better wrestler as she was learning about competing as a pro wrestler, which is a lot different compared to her run as an MMA athlete.
“So it definitely made me into a much better wrestler and much more diverse in the ring and not just leaning on athleticism and spots and stuff like that when I’m dealing with somebody who is not only smaller than me and can’t support my weight or anything like that but she was also suffering from different kinds of injuries and things like that.
There were just a lot of things that were prohibitive and off limits. I’m used to working with people that are supposed to be able to withstand me actually trying to hurt them with my bare hands. Then I’m getting in there with somebody like ‘Okay I have to make this physical and believable but also take care of her.’
So that was something completely new. I learned a whole lot from that but I wish that there was a lot more thought put into it from the very top. But they were just setting the tone of like ‘Okay this is what it’s going to be. We’re going to throw stuff at you without putting any thought into it and you guys are going to have to put in the thought to make it work.’”
In the same interview, Ronda Rousey revealed that WWE wanted to do an Evolution 2 PPV with her against Becky Lynch in late 2019, but Rousey turned it down since she left the company after WrestleMania 35 in 2019 to spend more time with her family.