by Ronda Rousey
I hauled my bags four blocks and sat down at a bus stop, but bus service didn’t start until later in the morning so I called a cab and a few minutes later a yellow taxi stopped in front of me. As the cabbie drove toward the airport, I waited for the relief to set in, for the feeling of liberation that I was so certain would accompany my escape.
I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt like a coward. I had run away. I may have won the match, but I had been competing for points, not fighting with honor.
DON’T RELY ON OTHERS TO MAKE YOUR DECISIONS
I used to have a teammate who always needed the coach to tell her what to do. She could execute that instruction almost flawlessly. The problem was, she was only as good as the person coaching her and as good as the information that she was receiving.
My mom purposely sent me to tournaments without a coach all the time. When I was on the mat, I had to think for myself. If there was a bad score, there was no one to correct it. If a call went against me, there was no one to speak up for me. I would just have to do better and do it again. If I was in a bad situation, I had to problem-solve and figure it out.
I had carefully planned my escape from L.A., but hadn’t put much thought into what would come next. Lillie’s family was surprised when I basically showed up on their doorstep, but her parents agreed to let me stay. So I hauled my two duffle bags up to her room.
When I first got to New York, I talked a lot about the injustice of my situation, how my mom and Big Jim were so unfair, how every element of my life—from what I ate to how I trained—was regimented by someone else, how no one believed in my relationship, how no one ever asked for my input, how people treated me like I was a kid. The more I talked about it, the angrier I got. I wasn’t a kid. I was an adult, as recognized by the US government. Hell, I was a goddamned Olympian. Lillie listened. Lots of nights, we would stay up late talking, sharing a bed. Other nights, it felt like we were just two kids having a sleepover as we stayed up watching romantic comedies and giggling over inside jokes.
Lillie went to Siena College, and I accompanied her to campus on the days she went to class. I bought a Siena College hoodie at the bookstore and wore it to the gym, where they let me in assuming I was a student. While Lillie was in class, I worked out. As I rode the elliptical, I tried to figure out how everything had spiraled so out of control, why I had run away, if I could ever go back, how I could prove to everyone it wasn’t about Dick, what the future held for him and I, where I was going to go from here. I didn’t have any answers.
The third Thursday I was there, Lillie and I were heading out to practice when Marina Shafir called and said she wasn’t going to make it. Marina was one of the top girls in her division and, along with Lillie, was one of the few girls I really liked in judo. She was one of the few elite competitors who weren’t concerned with the politics of the sport. We were about halfway to the club when Nina, another girl from the club, called and said she wasn’t going to make it.
“It’s going to be a slow practice if hardly anyone is there,” Lillie said.
“Fuck it. Let’s not go to practice.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” Lillie asked.
Out the window I saw the familiar orange and pink sign.
“Let’s go to Dunkin’ Donuts,” I said.
The wheels screeched, Lillie made a sharp right turn, and we pulled into the deserted parking lot.
“I’d like four dozen Munchkins,” I told the clerk.
“What kind?” he asked, gesturing to the wire containers behind him.
I paused. I felt as if I was making a very important decision.
“Just give me some of all of them,” I said.
“Will that be all?” he asked.
I looked at Lillie. She shrugged.
“And two chocolate milks,” I said, grabbing them from the refrigerated case by the counter.
He rung me up, then handed me the two cardboard boxes with handles that contained my forty-eight-plus donut holes. Lillie and I sat at one of the tables, each opening a box.
I popped a donut hole in my mouth. It was doughy and delicious. I laughed out loud. Lillie looked at me inquisitively, as if she had missed the joke.
But here, sitting at a Dunkin’ Donuts as the counter clerk mopped the floor around us, I had found the freedom I had been looking for. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt like I had control.
I felt a surge of motivation, possibly due to the sugar-rush of twenty-five donut holes, rushing through my bloodsteam.
I love judo. And I want to do judo because I love it. I want to do it for me. The realization washed over me. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.
The next day, I went to practice because I wanted to. I trained harder than I had in a long, long time.
Not only did I look forward to training, but I wanted to train as much as possible. In addition to Hrbek’s, one of the best clubs in the area was run by Jason Morris. Jason had won a silver medal in the 1992 Olympics. He was a member of the US national team coaching staff. He opened his own “club,” where aspiring Olympians would come to live and train. Or at least that’s how he spun it to their parents.
The dojo was actually just the basement of his house with a judo mat thrown down. Space was so tight that when everyone was on the mat, you were constantly bumping into other people and taking care not to get slammed into one of the walls. Still, the level of training was decent and they practiced every day.
Jim Hrbek had been Jason’s coach, helping Jason develop and succeed. Then their relationship fell apart.
One day after practice, Jim called me aside. “I know you’re training at Jason’s,” he said. “That’s your choice. But if you’re training there, you can’t train here.”
It was an ultimatum. I do not respond well to ultimatums.
“Got it,” I said, without saying anything else. But the only thought that went through my mind was, I’m going to train wherever the hell I want to train.
I finished practice.
I told Jason what Jim had said.
“I’m not going to tell you where to train,” Jason said.
Two days later, I was training at Jason’s when Lillie came by. She had an uncomfortable look on her face.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Lillie looked down at her Converse.
“It’s just with everything with Jim and Jason and all that. We’ve just been with Jim a long time.” She sounded apologetic.
“I’ve got your stuff in my car,” she told me.
“You’re kicking me out?” I asked.
“We didn’t really know how long you were going to stay, and my mom . . .” she trailed off.
“I get it,” I said.
I got my stuff out of her car and brought it into Jason’s club. I looked around. I had nowhere else to go and no idea what I was going to do.
PEOPLE AROUND YOU CONTROL YOUR REALITY
When you and everyone around you are immersed in one small community, it is easy to mistake it for the whole world. But once you break away, you realize that no one outside your tiny circle gives a shit about the stupid stuff that was at the center of your little world. When you understand that, you discover there is a much bigger, better world out there.
After Lillie drove away, I dragged my bags into Jason’s house.
It was a three-level house. Jason and his wife lived on the third floor. There were a couple of bedrooms on the second floor, with two to three athletes in each room, and then two to three more people crashed in the living room. In the basement was the judo room.
As the newest member of the house, I was assigned to the living room, where I slept on a futon on the floor.
Jason marketed his club as an elite training center. For admittance, you needed high potential (optional) and parents with deep pockets (mandatory). My roommates were a bunch of good-not-quite-elite-enough athletes who wanted to make the Olympic team, but not as much as they wanted to drink, hang out, and
hook up. As far as I was concerned they were just a bunch of users. Then again, it seemed like everyone was using someone. Jason and I were certainly using one another—since I was actually winning at the international level my affiliation with his club made him look good and, in exchange, I had a place to live and to train.
I wasn’t getting a free ride either. I was receiving a small stipend from the New York Athletic Club, where I was a sponsored member, and an even smaller stipend from USA Judo.
All of the mail went through Jason first. He had a long silver letter opener and opened every letter, addressed to every resident of the house.
“I do it so the envelopes lie flat in the recycling,” Jason explained. “If people rip the envelopes open themselves, then they won’t stack flat.”
In the morning, the athletes who lived in the house would race out to get the mail, trying to get to their own letters first. But often, Jason beat us to it. Any checks for me, he took as payment for lodging or other expenses. Jason intercepted and deposited every single one of my checks from USA Judo and the NYAC the entire time I was there. I didn’t even know what was coming in or what the cost of anything was. I just had to take everything at his word.
Even worse, I didn’t feel myself getting better at Jason’s. He wanted every fighter to fight exactly like him—that was his coaching strategy. He does very straight standup judo and little matwork, with an emphasis on timing over strength. I excelled at matwork and used my strength as an asset on the mat. I tried to find a balance between our two approaches, but Jason’s style didn’t fit my body type, didn’t fit my personality, and just didn’t fit me.
At Big Jim’s, any input I tried to offer was dismissed. At Jason’s, my input wasn’t just dismissed, it was ridiculed. I was treated like I was fucking stupid.
“What are you doing?” Jason shouted at me one day during practice.
I stopped what I was doing, an o-goshi, which is a relatively basic hip throw that worked well for me as a left-handed fighter when I went up against right-handed opponents.
“O-goshi,” I said.
“Ooooh o-goshi,” he said, condescendingly. He adopted a high, lilting voice with a joker-like smile and started waving his hands in the air. “Do o-goshi again. Do it again. Just do o-goshis all day.”
The other fighters laughed.
Fuck all of you, I thought. I did the throws all day.
At Jason’s, I was rarely alone, but I felt incredibly lonely. I hadn’t spoken to my mom since I had left home three months earlier. Dick IttyBitty and I were together, but he was one thousand miles away in Chicago. I had Lillie, but things had become strained after her family kicked me out. One of the girls at Jason’s club, Bee, had been really nice to me since I had arrived, but she was no Lillie.
My relationship with my housemates was cordial, but not warm. I never really fit in. I was younger than everyone and I was a better, more dedicated athlete, and my success exposed their shortcomings. But the list of clubs I was not welcome at was rapidly growing—Pedros’, Hrbek’s, home—so Jason’s it was.
That May, Dick moved from Chicago to New York to train at Jason’s club. I was at a local high school gymnasium where we were setting up mats for the Morris Cup, an annual tournament Jason had named after himself, when Dick walked in. A wave of relief washed over me. A huge smile crossed my face. I felt my cheeks blush.
Dick shared the living room futon with me. He settled right in at Jason’s, and became the bridge between me and the other athletes in the house.
A month after Dick arrived, I went to Planned Parenthood to get birth control. A few days later, my phone rang.
“Your test results came back abnormal,” the nurse said.
My face felt hot.
“Are you telling me I have an STD?” I asked. I could hardly get out the words.
“It could be a number of things.”
“Like an STD?”
“We need you to come in for a follow-up exam.”
“Sure,” I said. My hand shook as I jotted down the time and date of my next appointment.
After hanging up the phone, I stormed into the other room. Dick was sitting on the couch.
“Who have you been fucking?” I screamed.
His deer-in-the-headlights look confirmed my worst fear. Rage surged through my body. Every muscle tensed.
“Uh, uh, uh,” he stammered.
“Who. Have. You. Been. Fucking?”
“It was a one time thing. I’m so sorry. It didn’t mean anything. It was months ago. Not since I’ve been here. I’m so sorry.” He was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“Who have you been fucking?” My voice was cold.
“I’m so sorry. Sorry. Oh God, I want to kill myself. I love you so much.”
I was not in the mood to have to repeat myself again.
“Who?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“Bee,” he said.
My mouth suddenly felt dry. My face was burning. My anger mixed with embarrassment.
“Everyone knows about this, don’t they?” I asked.
He nodded.
I had to leave the room. I stood in the yard. The last thing I wanted was to go back into that house. But I had nowhere to go. I had burned all my bridges and I was stuck on an island.
For days, Dick begged me to forgive him. I felt like I had no other choice. I felt like he was all I had. Soon we were sharing the futon again like nothing happened. But it was never the same. This time I knew he was no good, and I knew I was lying to myself.
A week later, after my follow-up appointment, I called for my test results.
“Turns out it was nothing,” the nurse said. “Sometimes these tests come back abnormal, then we do them again and it’s fine.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I had dodged a bullet, but things in my life were far from fine.
The only reprieve from life at Jason’s came when I went to tournaments and training camps. I won the US national championship, Pan American championships, the Rendez-Vous, and the US Open, but winning wasn’t making me happy. The low point came when I lost the 2005 world championships in Cairo, Egypt, to an Israeli girl who had no business beating me.
Compounding everything, I was struggling to make weight. I was establishing myself as one of the world’s best fighters in my division, but I had grown two inches since making my senior-level debut at sixteen and getting down to sixty-three kilos was getting tougher.
Then one night, as I lay next to Dick, a third roommate stretched out on the nearby couch, his leg dangling over the side, it hit me. I was with a guy who cheated on me in a house full of people who knew about it and said nothing. I was training under a coach I couldn’t stand and who was taking my money. I was starving. I was not improving.
“What the fuck am I doing here?” I asked myself out loud.
The next day I called my mom.
“Hello?” I wanted to cry at the familiar sound of my mom’s voice. There had been so many times in the intervening eight months that I had wanted to talk to her.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, casually. “It’s been a while.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve been busy,” my mom said.
Through her network of judo gossips/informants, my mom had been tracking my movements since the day I left home. She had heard about Dick’s cheating. She wasn’t going to make it easy.
“I was thinking about the holidays,” I said. “The Ontario Open is the day after Thanksgiving, but maybe I could come home after that.”
“You’re always welcome here,” my mom said. I wasn’t sure if she meant it. Still relief swept through me. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed home.
A few weeks later, I won the Ontario Open and caught a flight back to L.A. My mom met me at the airport. I had hoped she would be happy to see me, but instead her brow was furrowed in disapproval.
“Thanks for picking me up,” I said.
“Yeah, Maria had to fly back on the red-eye for work. Jennifer is flying b
ack to San Francisco tonight to go back to college, so I’ll get to make the trip again,” she said.
“Fortunately traffic doesn’t seem too bad,” I said, in an attempt to make small talk.
“Well, there’s noticeably more traffic than when you slip out of the house in the middle of the night and ditch out on your family and head to the airport, but it’s not too bad.”
“Look, I feel really bad about that, but it was just something I felt I had to do.”
“Oh, well that makes everything better,” my mom said sarcastically. “Do you know how bad I felt to wake up and find that you had left? Just left everyone? Me. Your sisters. Your cat.”
“Beijing never liked me anyway,” I said, half-joking.
“Maybe she knew you were planning to abandon her,” my mom said, without missing a beat.
At our house, I grabbed my two duffle bags and lugged them to the front door. “I’m home,” I said cheerfully as I threw open the front door.
Silence.
I was hoping my little sister, Julia, would be home. I expected everyone else to be mad at me, but Julia, who was only seven, would be glad I was back.
Jennifer was packing her bag in the living room. She stopped and glared at me.
“You’re wearing my shirt, take it off,” she said, coldly.
“Nice to see you too,” I said with a forced laugh.
“Take off my shirt,” Jennifer repeated.
“God, Jen, why do you have to be such a bitch?”
“Well, at least I don’t have genital warts!” Jennifer said. My abnormal test results had come to my permanent address and Jen had drawn her own conclusions. She shot me a smug look and something inside me snapped.
“I do not have genital warts!” I shrieked.
Jennifer ran in the only direction she could, to a dead end in the kitchen. I chased her. Jennifer screamed. My mom, who was two steps behind me, coming in the door, grabbed me from behind, catching me in a choke and giving Jennifer enough room out of the kitchen. I threw Mom over my shoulder and chased after my sister. Our longtime housekeeper, Lucia, a small Mexican woman, came in with the laundry. She dropped the basket and blocked me from getting to Jen. Mom caught up to me and tried to restrain me as Jennifer ran up the stairs and locked herself in the bathroom. Mom grabbed my shoulder and shook me.