My Fight / Your Fight

by Ronda Rousey

  It felt incredibly unfair.

  I had gotten $10,000 from the US Olympic Committee for earning a bronze medal, which came out to roughly $6,000 after taxes. I used all of my Olympics money to buy a used, gold, four-door Honda Accord, and I still had to finance half of it. I was crashing at my mom’s house while I looked for a job.

  I finally found a bartending job working at a pirate-themed bar called The Redwood. It was something, but before I’d made it through my first two weeks I was on thin ice. I had been late one day, so my shifts had been cut for the week. Then the manager asked me to come in that weekend. The message was clear: If you don’t, you’re fired.

  I had promised the guy who ran the judo club in Baldwin Park, the club where I first started judo, that I would grand marshal a local parade. He was a friend of my mother’s and had wrangled me into doing it.

  I didn’t want to get fired, especially over a parade I hadn’t really wanted to do in the first place. I told my manager I would be there. I told the parade people nothing. Every time their number came up on my phone, I sent it straight to voicemail. I was hoping they would give up. Then, Blinky Elizalde, my first judo coach, called. I explained the situation to him. He understood, but no one else did.

  When I got off my shift Saturday afternoon, there were six missed calls from my mom. I was putting my phone back in my pocket when she called a seventh time. I hesitated, then answered. She ripped into me, demanding to know how I could think of ditching out on the parade.

  I had a knot in my stomach. I couldn’t answer her. She was fucking pissed. Mad enough that I didn’t want to go home. I drove to Hollywood and went to a bar. I drank by myself and realized that I couldn’t go back to my mom’s house. But I had nowhere else to go.

  I am a homeless Olympic medalist, I thought to myself.

  After several hours of drinking, I walked to get a pizza and ate it in the back of my car. Then I curled up in the backseat. The next morning the whole car smelled of pizza and I had a crick in my neck.

  It was midday. I just lay there, sweating in the backseat, staring at the ceiling.

  I camped out in the car for a couple of nights until I got paid. I deposited my money in the bank and set out on my mission to find a non-automotive home. By the end of the day, I had signed the lease on an apartment.

  The apartment was a step up from the car, a baby step. My first apartment was a twelve-by-twelve-foot, first-floor studio. The only sink was in the bathroom and it constantly fell out of the wall.

  I picked up two more jobs just to make ends meet; even then things were tight. I was a cocktail waitress at The Cork in Crenshaw, and on Sundays I’d work till the predawn hours, then crash for a few hours before working a morning bartending shift at Gladstones, a fancy restaurant in Malibu.

  On more than one occasion, sewage would come up out of the toilet and shower, and I’d come home from work to an apartment filled with shit.

  I didn’t think I could get any lower. Some days I would come home, look around and promise myself that this was temporary, remind myself that I was better than this moment. I knew I would make something of myself. I just had to decide what that was going to be.

  YOU CAN’T RELY ON JUST ONE THING TO MAKE YOU HAPPY

  For years after Claudia Heill beat me in the 2004 Olympics, I harbored all this animosity for her. I convinced myself that if only I had won the medal, everything would have been better.

  Years later, Claudia jumped off a building and committed suicide. Her death hit me hard. The main reason I was so angry with her is that I felt like she had robbed me of not just an Olympic medal, but of happiness. When I lose, I feel like that win, that happiness, is still out there and that the person who took it from me is walking around with it. But Claudia had that medal and whatever was making her unhappy was still there. By the time she died, I had my own Olympic medal. And I had quickly realized just how little happiness it brought me.

  When I came back from Beijing, I decided to take a break. I spent a year doing everything I could to destroy all the work that I had put into my body. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew that I needed things to change. Building up my body and chasing the Olympic dream had made me unhappy. I wanted to have a normal life. I wanted to have a dog and an apartment and to party.

  From the end of 2008 well into 2009, I did not aspire toward anything. My plan involved drinking heavily, not working out, and cramming everything I thought I had missed into as short a time as possible. I was going to take a year off from judo, from structure, from responsibility. I was going to do what I wanted for a change.

  One of the things that I wanted was a dog. I had my heart set on a Dogo Argentino, or an Argentinian mastiff. They’re a big, white, beautiful breed and the kind of dog you don’t have to worry about hurting if you accidentally step on it on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t have many requirements; I just wanted a girl.

  A breeder in San Diego, a married couple, sent me an email with photos of two girls from a recent litter; they were too big to be show dogs, so they were being offered at a discounted price.

  I clicked on the first attachment.

  “That’s the one,” I said. “That’s my dog.”

  I didn’t even look at the other photo. There wasn’t a single doubt in my mind. I just knew. I went out that afternoon and bought her a crate, bed, the best dog food they had, and a couple of chew toys.

  Three days later, I drove down to San Diego to pick her up. The breeders lived in a subdivision out in the suburbs. They were waiting for me in the open garage with the puppy’s mother. She was a gorgeous dog.

  Then the wife brought out my puppy and without even realizing it I cooed aloud. This was her. This was definitely my dog.

  “You can hold her,” the breeder said.

  I scooped up the puppy. She sleepily opened her eyes, then nuzzled against my chest, settling back to sleep. She was a big, fat, white puppy.

  “You’re not too big,” I whispered to my dog. “You’re absolutely perfect.”

  I named her Mochi after the Japanese ice-cream balls covered in rice cake, and true to her name, she is the sweetest dog, not to mention loyal and loving and one of the most grounding and comforting presences in my life. I instantly fell in love with Mochi, but being in charge of another living thing took some getting used to.

  The night I took her home was her first time away from her mom. She cried all night. I relented and let her sleep in my bed.

  “Don’t get used to this, Mochi,” I said.

  She slept in my bed for the next few weeks. Then one morning, I rolled over sleepily and opened my eyes. Mochi was already awake next to me, resting her head on her paws.

  “How’s my little puppy?” I asked in a baby-talk voice.

  She lifted her head when she saw I was awake, opened her mouth, and threw up a pair of my underwear she had eaten out of my laundry basket.

  I had gotten a dog with absolutely no understanding of how much responsibility it would actually be. But I committed the first $35 of every shift I worked to pay for her doggie daycare. That was probably the only responsible decision I made that year.

  I started my morning with a smoke on the way to work. Camel menthols were my cigarette of choice. After I dropped Mochi off at doggie daycare, I smoked menthols up Pacific Coast Highway on my way to Malibu. When I got to Gladstones, I would go behind the bar and start my day with a concoction I called “Party Like a Barack Star.” Obama had just been elected, and the drink was a mix of dark and light ingredients. It tasted like the most delicious iced mocha with vodka in it. I would sit and drink that all morning.

  * * *

  PARTY LIKE A BARACK STAR

  2 shots espresso

  1 shot (or 2) Stoli Vanilla

  1 shot Kahlua

  1/2 shot Baileys

  1 tablespoon cocoa powder

  2 shots ice cream milk (half-and-half and simple syrup can be used as a substitute)

 
Combine ingredients with ice. Shake. Blend. Enjoy. (Unlike I did, please enjoy responsibly.)

  BARTENDER TIP: How much is a shot? Pour and count to four.

  * * *

  On Sundays, these two hip-hop producer dudes would pedal up on Tour-de-France-caliber racing bikes and order surf-and-turf and Cadillac margaritas. They tipped me thirty dollars in cash and enough marijuana to get me high for several days. During the week, one of the regular bar patrons sold Vicodin to servers and would slip me one or two for passing the cash and pills between him and the waitstaff, without our boss knowing.

  I would gaze out at the ocean while rolling on Vicodin, drinking whiskey at noon, and watching dolphins in the waves. The TV over the bar played an endless loop of SportsCenter. I was riveted by the MMA highlights.

  “I could totally do that,” I would say out loud.

  Everyone at the bar kind of nodded to humor me. It was obvious that no one believed me. The fact that I was doing absolutely nothing with my life was apparent to everyone.

  I had endured so much to get to the Olympics. All along the way, I told myself that the result would be amazing; that it would all be worthwhile. But the truth was that it had been amazing, but it hadn’t been worth it. Realizing that crushed me. I had dreamed of the Olympics since I was a little girl. I won an Olympic medal, and yet I felt like I had been let down.

  My disappointment haunted me. I didn’t know how to cope with it. I was trying to drink myself into contentment, but I still wasn’t happy and I didn’t understand why. I spent that whole year lost. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but there was something missing.

  DISREGARD NONESSENTIAL INFORMATION

  When I am in a fight, my brain is picking up a million things at once. The volume of the crowd. The brightness of the lights. The temperature of the arena. Every movement in the cage. Any pain my body is feeling. A lesser fighter would be overwhelmed.

  I take all the information in, but I only process the pieces that matter. The distance between my back and the cage. Every move my opponent makes. The effort in her breathing. The impact of my fist as it hits her face. Anything occurring around me irrelevant to whether I succeed or fail is completely disregarded.

  Everything in the world is information. The information you choose to acknowledge and the information you choose to ignore is up to you. You can let outside factors beyond your control throw off your focus. You can let aching muscles hold you back. You can let silence make you feel uncomfortable. By choosing to focus only on the information that is necessary, you can tune out every distraction, and achieve far more.

  I was trying to figure out my life. I wanted to be content with being a bartender, but pouring cocktails for the next several decades was definitely not it.

  Judo hadn’t made me happy. But not doing judo wasn’t making me happy either. I worried nothing would ever make me happy, that I had missed my chance at happiness. I just tried to get through each day. Now that I was no longer doing judo, I learned quickly who my real friends were. One of those true friends was Manny Gamburyan. We had done judo together since I was eleven, and Manny was the one who opened the gym and spent hours working with me after my knee surgery. He was good at judo, but hadn’t pursued it. Instead, he went into MMA. After the Olympics, Manny would call me occasionally to check in.

  “You should come out and grapple with us,” Manny said.

  “OK, I’ll come,” I said. I needed the exercise. I looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump and inflated me to a larger version of myself.

  “I’ll meet you at Hayastan,” Manny said. It was the same club where we had developed my matwork after my ACL repair years before, but it had moved to a new location. Still, walking back into the club felt familiar. It smelled the same: sweat and an ocean of cologne. The place had gotten a facelift, but many of the faces were the same. Several guys I knew from youth judo were there doing MMA. They were bantering back and forth in Armenian. I dropped my bag by the side of the mat, surveying the room. A dozen guys were already grappling. There wasn’t a girl in the place.

  “Ron, you came!” Manny said. He gave me a hug. “You ready?”

  “I was born ready,” I said. We wrestled for over an hour. Manny came at me full strength. I met him with the same energy. By the time practice ended, I was covered with sweat and had a few burgeoning bruises.

  “Not too bad, Ron,” Manny said. “Lucky for you, I took it easy.”

  “You wish,” I said, laughing. Being back on the mat felt good.

  After the first workout, I decided to get back to grappling with Manny regularly. I loved it just as much as I had before.

  I grappled on Tuesdays, but between work and heading out to Hayastan in Hollywood, I would swing by doggie daycare, pick Mochi up and take her to the dog park.

  Mochi was now four months old, and I had just started taking her to the park. I saw Dog Park Cute Guy there most days, but I never spoke to him. He was a tall, dark, handsome, tattooed surfer guy who made a little voice in my head say with a French accent, Ooh la la. When I caught myself staring, I would quickly avert my gaze and pretend I had nothing but a laser focus on Mochi.

  One day, his dog came over and started punking Mochi. Mochi ran behind my feet to hide and Dog Park Cute Guy had no choice but to come over. Privately I was screaming, Oh my God, Dog Park Cute Guy is coming over here.

  We got to talking about our dogs, then we made the kind of small talk that you don’t remember later. Eventually, he invited me to come surfing. Yes, he was cute, but I wanted to learn how to surf, honestly. It was one of those things on my bucket list. After so many months of drinking and smoking, I was craving a physical challenge, and the ocean seemed strong enough for me to take on.

  “Cool,” he said. “We leave at five a.m.”

  I couldn’t even speak; I was too afraid, “Five a.m.?! Are you fucking kidding me?” would slip out.

  “Cool,” I echoed, while I did a happy dance in my mind.

  The next morning, I arrived at his house before the sun. I was nervous, but excited. We drove up north along the Pacific Coast Highway in his old Pathfinder. The windows were cracked and the air was humid and cool. We drove in complete quiet.

  He knew I had no idea how to surf, but when we got to the beach he handed me a surfboard and wetsuit and said, “OK, then.” And that was it; he headed out into the water. I watched him paddle out into the ocean and then dragged my board over the sand into the freezing-ass water.

  Bam. A wave knocked me off. I tried to get on again. As soon as I laid myself on top of the board—bam. Freezing salt water surged through my sinuses, and I came up coughing and gasping for air. Another wave. Bam.

  I felt like I was in a washing machine with a surfboard tethered to my ankle.

  I got my ass handed to me by the ocean for over an hour. Then Dog Park Cute Guy caught one last wave and paddled in. I waited a minute or two so I didn’t look overly eager to get out of the water, then I ungracefully hauled myself and the board to shore.

  We loaded the boards back into the car, then drove home in comfortable silence. I had no idea whether he was interested in me or not. But I was interested in him and I really did want to learn to surf. We planned to surf again in two days.

  I still didn’t have any idea of what I wanted to do with my life, but the drinking and smoking was getting old. I’m supposed to start training again in August, I reminded myself. But instead of being motivated by a potential return to the sport I had dedicated my life to, the idea of staging a comeback made me miserable. Regardless, I decided I should get back in shape.

  After a half dozen of our silent surf dates, I asked DPCG to run hill sprints with me. He said yes, but the night we were supposed to meet, he didn’t show. I waited for almost an hour, checking my phone, convincing myself he got stuck in traffic. For a moment I almost let the self-pity creep in, but instead I called another guy who had recently given me his number and set up a date for the next weekend, and then I ran the sprints. With e
ach hill, I cycled through a new emotion.

  Hill 1: Denial. He’ll be here. He’s just running late. Maybe his car broke down.

  Hill 2: Sadness. I really liked him. I can’t believe he didn’t show.

  Hill 3: Confusion. Could I have gotten the wrong signal? Did he see me in the friend zone? Was it something I said?

  Hill 4: Rejection. He doesn’t like me. It was ridiculous for me to ever think he would.

  Hill 5: Anger. You know what? Fuck that guy.

  Hill 6: Apathy. Whatever. I’m over it.

  Just as I was finishing up, DPCG pulled up at the top of the hill. His car was crammed full of white garbage bags that looked like they had been hastily stuffed with various belongings. His dog, Roxie, was wedged between bags. He couldn’t even see out the back window. I was midway up the hill when he got out of the car and stood next to it, waiting for me. I reached the top of the hill and stood with my hands on my hips as I caught my breath.

  “I got kicked out of my place,” he said. It wasn’t an apology, just an explanation.

  Then DPCG went AWOL. Two weeks later I saw him at the dog park. When he looked my way, I pretended he didn’t exist. He came over anyway. “I wanted to apologize. I’m going through some shit right now.”

  “Uh huh,” I said coolly.

  “Do you still want to hang out?”

  I did. I couldn’t help it. I was drawn to him. So we made a date, and then it was on. We started spending all our time together. I never even called back my replacement date. I never gave him an explanation.

  DPCG and I resumed our surf dates, but this time there was no longer silence. I would drive to the house where he was staying with a friend, smiling the entire way there because I was so happy to be seeing him. Driving up the coast and back, we talked and listened to music. He took me to hang out at his friends’ houses, where sometimes we watched MMA fights. He was always interested in my observations. He asked me questions and respected my analysis. I mentioned I was interested in doing MMA. “Yeah, girl, go for it. You should do it,” he said.