by Ronda Rousey
As I climbed the fence with my heavy backpack on I felt a twinge in my right toe, which I’d hurt at judo. When I jumped off the fence I realized I had underestimated the distance to the concrete sidewalk below. I landed, with all of my weight plus the weight of my backpack, on my good foot. As soon as I hit the ground I knew my left foot was broken.
I refused to accept defeat. I had skipped school to skip school, and I was going to do something during that period to make it worthwhile. I limped the quarter mile to Third Street Promenade, which is an outdoor shopping mall. I sat on a bench watching the stream of midday shoppers and tourists, my foot killing me.
This is bullshit, I thought. I felt my foot swelling up in my shoe. I angrily got up and shuffled the nearly mile-long walk home and climbed into bed. I knew there was no way I would be able to train that night. Fortunately, my mom was in Texas for work. That evening, I told my stepfather Dennis that I wasn’t feeling well. More than happy not to have to drive me through two hours of traffic to practice, he didn’t press the subject.
But I had a tournament the next day against a rival club from Northern California. The Anthonys, another family from my club, picked me up to take me to the tournament. I tried to walk normally to their car, but every step was like stepping on a shard of glass.
I have never been less excited to compete. We walked up to the table to register and Nadine Anthony started filling out the forms for her children and me. The guy working the table looked up. He looked at Nadine, then at me. Nadine is black.
“She needs a parent or guardian to register her for the tournament,” he said, gesturing to me.
Joy surged through my body, but Nadine’s expression hardened.
“What are you talking about parent?” Nadine spat. “I’m her mother. You got a problem with that?”
The guy’s eyes widened. He looked around the registration table as if hoping to find an escape route.
“OK, then, of course,” he said, taking the registration forms.
My heart sank.
When I was twelve years old we were at practice when one of my teammates twisted her ankle. She limped off the mat, and both of her parents descended upon her in concern. Her dad rushed out to their car, returning with a pillow. With her mom massaging her shoulders, my teammate sat with her foot propped up. Less than twenty minutes later, I jammed my foot doing randori, the judo version of sparring. I limped over to my mom, who was running the practice.
“I hurt my toe,” I said. “I think it’s broken.”
“It’s a toe,” she said dismissively.
“But it hurts,” I said crying. “Do you have a pillow for me?”
My mom looked at me like I had lost my mind.
“What the fuck do you mean a pillow?” she asked.
“She got a pillow,” I said, pointing to my teammate.
“You’re not getting a goddamned pillow,” she said. “Go run laps.”
My eyes widened.
“I’m serious,” my mom said. “Go run.”
I hobbled away, more hopping than running.
“I said ‘run laps,’ not hop laps,” my mom said. “Run.”
I shuffled around the mat, my toe throbbing.
In the car on the way home, I stared out the window pouting, because I had such a cruel mother.
“You know why I did that?” my mom asked.
“Because you hate me.”
“No, it was to show you that you could do it,” my mom said. “If you want to win the way you say you do, you need to be able to compete, even when you’re in pain. You need to be able to push through. Now you know you can.”
In the years since then, I have competed with broken toes and sprained ankles—not to mention with the flu and bronchitis—but a broken foot was my biggest challenge to date. It took all of my focus to simply block out the pain, leaving me little ability to concentrate on each match. I was competing solely on instinct to carry me through. The day went on and the pain grew worse. Beads of sweat started forming on my forehead every time tournament officials called me “on deck.” By pure determination, I won the double-elimination tournament, but en route, I lost a match. My lone loss came to Marti Malloy. Marti would win a bronze medal in the 2012 Olympics.
My mom called that evening to see how I did. Hearing I lost to Marti, my mom was shocked. I never lost, especially not at some local tournament.
“What happened?” she asked.
Considering my capacity for lying is pretty terrible, I had no choice but to explain.
“Mom, I jumped over a fence while ditching school and broke my foot,” I said.
“Instead of telling someone, you competed on it?” I couldn’t tell if my mom’s tone was incredulous or angry.
“I didn’t want to get in trouble,” I said quietly.
“Well, that’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” my mom said. “But competing on a broken foot is a pretty good punishment.”
“So I’m not in trouble?” I asked.
“Oh no, you’re totally grounded,” she said.
My punishment lasted a month. Knowing I could push through pain and succeed has lasted a lifetime. Pain was just something I became accustomed to as part of life. If you’re an athlete and want to win, something always hurts. You are always dealing with bruises and injuries. You’re testing how far you can push the human body, and whoever pushes it the furthest wins. Since the very first time I stepped on the mat, I was determined to be the one who wins.
TURN LIMITATIONS INTO OPPORTUNITIES
I’ve seen a positive benefit from every negative thing that has happened in my life, including every injury. My career has been filled with injuries, but not derailed by them. Too many people see an injury as something that prevents them from progressing. I’ve used every physical setback to develop in another area I wouldn’t have otherwise addressed. When I broke my right hand, I said, “I’m going to have a badass left hook when this is all said and done.” When I ended up with stitches in my foot days before a fight, I was driven to make sure I ended that fight definitively and fast.
Don’t focus on what you can’t do. Focus on what you can.
I was sparring at my club, Venice Judo, which despite its name is actually located in Culver City, California. One day this kid, who would randomly come to practice, showed up. He was my age, but way bigger. We had been going to the same club for years, and I had always wiped the mat with him. Then he hit that high-school growth spurt, which gave him about five inches and sixty pounds more than me. I still wiped the mat with him, but whenever we trained it turned into a battle for teenage pride.
I was still favoring my left foot. The break was largely healed, but my foot was still sore. We approached the edge of the mat. (In an actual match, you don’t let approaching the edge of the mat stop you. But in practice, you stop at the edge of the mat because you don’t want anyone getting hurt on the ground.) This was practice. I stopped. He did not.
He came in for a throw, but because I had stopped at the edge of the mat, instead of coming in for my leg straight on, he came in sideways. He went in to sweep my foot, but caught my knee. All of his momentum crashed into my stationary right knee. The joint immediately buckled. I knew it was bad right away.
I tried to stand up, but collapsed. My knee felt like Jell-O. I sat on the mat, uncertain what else to do as my mom and coach rushed over.
I started to cry.
“It hurts,” I said.
“You’re always crying about something that hurts,” my mom said unsympathetically. “Ice it when we get home.”
I finished practice, favoring my left leg.
My knee was still bothering me when my mom brought me to practice the next morning. It was worse than it had been the day before. I couldn’t train on it. I asked another of my coaches, Hayward Nishioka, to look at it. I pulled up the leg of my gi pants.
“AnnMaria, you better take her to the doctor,” he told my mom.
The next afternoon, I sat on
the white crinkly paper they pull over the doctor’s table waiting for the results of my MRI.
It was the first of many appointments I would have with Dr. Thomas Knapp, knee-repair surgeon extraordinaire.
He pulled out the black-and-white image and put it up on the backlit board.
“Well, your ACL is definitely torn,” Dr. Knapp said.
My stomach surged into my heart, my eyes started to burn, and suddenly I was sobbing. Standing next to me, my mom patted me on the shoulder. I had expected this news, but hearing it said aloud felt like a punch to the stomach.
“The good news is it is relatively straightforward to repair,” he said. “I see these all the time. We’ll get you all fixed up and back out there before you know it.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Depends on how quickly you recover, but as a general rule, I would say no competition for six months.”
I started doing the math in my head. It was April. The senior nationals scheduled for later that month were out. The Junior US Open—the most competitive youth tournament in the nation—this summer was a warm-up for my senior international level debut at the US Open in October.
“What if I recover really quickly? The Junior US Open is in August . . .” My voice was hopeful.
“August, huh?” Dr. Knapp said. “You know what that means right?”
I looked up. I had been staring at my knee as if I could will it healed.
“You won’t be going.”
This was supposed to be my breakout year. I was supposed to go to the high school nationals and senior nationals. I was already dreaming of the 2008 Olympics. An unbearable feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed me. Was my judo career over? Would I ever be one hundred percent? If not, would I still be good enough to succeed? I worried about how long I’d be out and how much momentum I would lose and how much skill my competitors would gain while I was stuck in bed. I grappled with the realization that I was not invincible.
Four days later, I was lying on a gurney, hooked up to an IV, and ready to be wheeled into surgery. The anesthesiologist came into the room in his blue scrubs. He started the drip into my IV.
“Now, count backwards from ten,” he told me.
I lay my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. I said a silent prayer that the surgery would go well and that my entire life would not be changed when I opened them back up again.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .” I drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I awoke in a nauseous anesthesia-induced haze. My knee hurt. My mouth felt dry. There was the whir of the cooling machine, pumping ice-cold water through a brace wrapped around my knee. The beeping of the monitors. I looked down at my leg in the large black brace, and once again, tears started to pour down my cheeks.
“It only gets better from here,” the nurse said.
After the surgery, my doctor told me the most important thing I could do for my recovery was to do all of the physical therapy and not to do anything stupid as far as trying to get back out on the mat sooner.
I started physical therapy later that week, and my physical therapist assured me he would do everything he could to get me back out competing and as good as new. “Everything” involved a lot of range-of-motion exercises and minor stretches. The “workouts” were a far cry from the training sessions I was used to, but at the beginning left me tired and sore. My coach, Trace, told me it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt that way. And I told myself I’d be back, that this was just a temporary setback. But it was my mom who saved me.
For the first few days after I came home from the hospital, I sat on the couch and iced my leg, kept it elevated, and generally wallowed—watching Animal Planet and playing Pokémon games. Then a week after the surgery my mom came into the living and told me, “That’s enough.”
“I just had knee surgery,” I said defensively.
“It’s been a week,” she said. “Time to get over feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Didn’t you hear the doctor?” I snapped. “I’m not supposed to overdo it with my knee.”
“Yeah, well, what about your other leg?” she asked, rhetorically. “Do some leg lifts. What about your abs? Last time I checked sit-ups didn’t involve knees. Do some curls. Those involve arms, which last time I checked are not knees.”
Two weeks later, she took me to Hayastan, a club in Hollywood where I regularly trained, to workout. My friend Manny Gamburyan unlocked the club for us. The dojo smelled like sweaty Armenians and Axe body spray. As I lowered myself to the blue and seafoam green mats, they felt firm and familiar. All of the anxiety that had been plaguing me since the day I hurt my knee faded.
I’m back, bitches, I thought to myself.
Every day I would limp to the car and into the club. Mom would have me practice pins, chokes, and armbars (a submission move where you dislocate your opponent’s elbow) with Manny. Gradually my limp improved, as did my matwork.
The pain started to fade as well, but there were many nights where I woke up to a throbbing pain in my knee. I took two aspirin, limped downstairs to the kitchen to get a bag of ice, limped back upstairs, and climbed into bed, trying to push the pain out of my head long enough to fall back to sleep. A few hours later, I woke up again, the pain back and a puddle in my bed where ice had melted and leaked out of the bag.
Before my injury, I had built up a reputation as a standup fighter. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do matwork, but if you’re really good at throwing people you can win right away, so you don’t end up grappling. I spent the whole year doing matwork. I did thousands of armbars.
Six months after having my ACL repaired, I made my senior international level debut and finished second at the US Open. I was seconds away from winning the match, having gotten Sarah Clark in a pin, but Clark escaped and ultimately beat me on points. However, I was the top American finisher in my division. I had beat Grace Jividen, the No. 1 woman in my division, by ippon. The next weekend I won the Rendez-Vous (the Canadian Open). The pair of performances catapulted me to the No. 1 spot in the country in the women’s sixty-three-kilo division.
That entire year changed me. Even more significant than the perfection of my armbar was the shift in how I thought about my skills, my body, and myself. I knew that I could emerge from adversity stronger than before. I also knew I was a true fighter; I came out of that year believing in myself.
TRUST IN KNOWLEDGE, NOT IN STRENGTH
When it comes to fighting, physical strength really has very little to do with it. One of the tenets that judo is founded upon is “Maximum efficiency, minimum effort.” That has really defined my career. It is the foundation of all the techniques and everything I do. It’s one reason why I don’t get tired. It’s one reason why I am able to fight girls who are a head taller than me, or chicks who are on steroids. People who cheat or dope lack the one thing every true champion must have: belief. No drug or amount of money or favoritism can ever give you belief in yourself.
After the US Open, I became the youngest judo competitor on the US national team. I was sixteen. The national team is composed of the top athletes in the sport and represents the country in international competition. (The Olympic and world teams are the versions of the national team that compete in the Olympics and world championships, respectively.) Competing at that level meant the stakes were higher and there were a number of mandatory events I had to attend, including meetings and training camps. The first of those sessions was part of a training camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
During the session on banned substances, a representative from the US Olympic Committee spent several hours educating us on the lengthy list of substances considered performance enhancers. The woman handed us a ten-page document containing dozens of words I had never seen before. Lots of -ines, -ides, -oids, -ates, and -anes. In fact, some of the items weren’t even words. They were chemical compounds. (I was still taking high school biology. I hadn’t gotten to chemistry yet.)
“It is not just
about avoiding steroids,” the woman said. “It is your responsibility as an athlete to be fully accountable for any substance you put in your body. This applies to vitamins, supplements, creams, shots, prescriptions. If you are not absolutely certain about what you might be taking, you need to find out. ‘I didn’t know’ is not an acceptable defense in the case of a failed drug test.”
I raised my hand. All of the eyeballs in the room were on me. The woman gave me a nod.
“What about Flintstones vitamins?” I asked.
She laughed. The room laughed. Two of the women who were my national “teammates” rolled their eyes at me. Then the anti-doping lady continued on with her speech.
I raised my hand again. Again, the head nod.
“No, I’m serious,” I said. “I take those. Are those OK?”
The woman, caught off guard, paused. “Yes,” she said. “There are no steroids in Flintstones vitamins.”
I had a follow-up.
“Anything besides steroids that might be in them that you’re not allowed to have?” I asked.
One of the women who had rolled their eyes sighed loudly. I was already performing better than all of them in competition, and this conversation was a reminder that I was considerably younger than them as well.
The woman giving the lecture didn’t even pause to think about my question.
“Nope, I feel very confident telling you that there are no banned substances in Flintstones vitamins,” she said.
Flintstones chewable vitamins with iron is the closest I have ever come to taking an unknown substance.
Doping is one of the most selfish things you can do in sports, but the reality is that performance-enhancing drugs are very much a part of the combat sports world. In judo, doping ruins the sport by stealing success from athletes who are competing with honor. In MMA, doping is almost negligent homicide. The premise of MMA is to get into an enclosed cage with another person and try to beat them into submission or unconsciousness. A person who is taking a substance that makes him or her stronger than normal could really kill someone.