Ronda Rousey Addresses Botched Finish for WrestleMania 35, Her Thoughts on Vince McMahon

– Former WWE Superstar and UFC legend Ronda Rousey recently joined Insight with Chris Van Vliet to discuss her WWE career, if she would ever come back to wrestling, her thoughts on Vince McMahon, and more. Below are some highlights provided to us by Insight:

Her thoughts on Triple H doing a better job of running WWE than Vince McMahon: “I’ve heard it’s a lot better. But yeah, that wasn’t my experience before. My experience before was like if you showed up to Saturday Night Live and no one had written the show yet, like you hadn’t been filming it and practicing it all week. It was like, you just showed up and you had to negotiate what the script was going to be until the very last second. Even if we killed it and had such a great time while we were out there, it was just the needless anxiety of getting to the finish line just made it so not fun. So, unfortunately, it’s kind of put a gross kind of a film on the incredible experience. I hear from everybody that’s so much better now, and I’m happy for them. But it’s also, I got babies, I can’t be taking them on the road. I did it for a little bit with one, I can’t do that with two. It was hard on my husband for us not all to be there all the time. I just don’t think I can ask them to sacrifice that anymore.”

Ronda Rousey on not caring about what Vince McMahon thought about her matches: “No, no. I don’t give a sh*t about that. I didn’t really give a f*ck what Vince thought, to be honest. I just wanted to have a great match. Sometimes I felt like instead of enabling us to have a great match, we were fighting against him in order to have a great match. No, once it was done and all that, once I was in there and in the moment and lost in it, there’s no better feeling than when you’re in it and you believe the story and you’re out there with your friends and you’re having a blast. It was like, we had to march through, what were the marshes called in Lord of the Rings? The Dead Marshes. Or Never Ending Story, I was just going through the Swamps of Sadness, just trying to be able to walk into the arena. Then once the music hit, I was like, f*ck you, we’re gonna have a great time. Then we come back, and then I come back to the curtain. I’m like, f*ck you, I’m going to my baby. I don’t want to hear sh*t unless you actually have a plan for next week, which you don’t. You don’t have a f*cking plan. I’m trying to get any information all week long, and then no one’s gonna tell me sh*t until I get to the arena, and I’m still not gonna hear anything for hours.”

On the botched finish to WrestleMania 35, the match being thrown together: “I didn’t think my shoulders were flat on the ground, so I was trying to scoot to get my shoulders flat because it’s so f*cking loud I can’t hear anything. But that’s the difference between a match that got thrown together the night before and the debut match, which is a match that had been put together over weeks with tons of support and practice and opinions and everything like that. Why were we putting a whole year into promoting and building this match, and then it’s just thrown together at the last second? We were still figuring it out when we were at the venue, and that’s what a lack of practice and rehearsal does.”

Rousey on wanting to use the finish to fuel a potential matchup with Becky Lynch: “I wanted to use that. I wanted to use that as, okay, this is how we lead into the next one. We bring it up on the Tron and say ‘You never got me, this is bullsh*t. The referees are all in your pocket…’ And put that into the next, you know, the singles between me and Becky that everybody wanted that got taken away.”

On the finish not being intentional: “No, no, no. I didn’t think my shoulders were flush. I was trying to flatten out. But I think that we could have used it and kept it going, but they never let us.”

Ronda Rousey departed from WWE last year after losing an MMA Rules match to her friend, Shayna Baszler, at WWE SummerSlam 2023.