Ronda Rousey Thought WWE Fans Would Hate Her When She Returned at the Royal Rumble

Ronda Rousey has been back with the WWE on a consistent basis since January, winning this year’s Women’s Royal Rumble and feuding with Charlotte Flair over the SmackDown Women’s Championship. Rousey was positioned as a heel leading up to her WrestleMania 35 main event against both Flair and Becky Lynch and, given the comments she made about wrestling fans during her hiatus, she assumed she would be brought back as a heel. She explained as much during an appearance on the latest Wives of Wrestling podcast. 

“I guess the feedback I get is a live audience,” Rousey explained (h/t Wrestling Inc). “There’s a lot of times where what you think is coming online and what the live audience is expressing are two opposite things. Case in point, Royal Rumble, I left as a heel and was getting booed out of every stadium, and I was like, ‘okay, so I assumed everyone thought I was still a heel.’ And any interviews I gave any time I was talking — on the fans. Like, being in character for in case I come back, and that’s what I assumed I would come back to. When it ended up being not that reaction, I was really, really surprised.”

The most infamous of those interviews came when she spoke with Steve-O in 2020 about how fans turned on her during the latter half of her initial run with WWE. She took a hiatus after losing at WrestleMania 35 in order to start a family with her husband, Travis Browne. The pair welcomed their daughter last September. 

“So it’s just like … what am I doing it for if I’m not being able to spend my time and energy on my family, but instead spending my time and my energy on a bunch of f—ing ungrateful fans that don’t even appreciate me? I love performing. I love the girls. I love being out there … but, at the end of the day, I was just like, ‘F— these fans, dude.’ My family loves me and they appreciate me and I want all my energy to go into them. So that was my decision at the end of the day. It’s like, ‘Hey girls. Love what you’re doing. I’m gonna try and take all my momentum and push you guys as far as I can … fly little birds, fly! I’m going f—ing home!’ And that was basically it,” she said at the time.