$4.5 Million Purse Pulled Rousey Into Holm Fight
02/28/2025 08:32 AM
Rousey agreed to step in and fight Holm in Australia on a months notice, which would lead to the end of her UFC career.
The UFC really wanted Ronda Rousey to headline their big UFC 193 show in Melbourne, Australia, and they were willing to pay her millions of dollars to do it.
Rousey was already the biggest star the company had. While Conor McGregor would sell more pay-per-views, no one had crossed over into mainstream popularity the way "Rowdy" Ronda Rousey had. So when Robbie Lawler was forced to withdraw from the promotion's big stadium show in Australia on a month's notice, the UFC knew who they had to call.
According to VICE TV's 'Dark Side of the Cage,' Rousey was offered over $4.5 million to fight Holly Holm in Melbourne.
"I think we had like 28 or 29 days," her coach Edmond Tarverdyan told 'Dark Side.' "It's so hard for you to compete at that level in those circumstances. So, I said, 'Are you asking me should we fight, or did you already agree? And she said, 'You know what I did already.'"
Tarverdyan had previously worried about the pace Rousey was keeping and all the side-missions she was doing like acting.
"For me it was difficult to balance all that," he said. "I told her sometimes it's difficult to carry two watermelons at once. One might break and we don't want that to happen."
The watermelons finally dropped on November 14th, 2015 when Holly Holm knocked Ronda Rousey out in the second round of their UFC 193 fight. Rousey disappeared from the public eye for over a year, and when she finally returned for a disastrous comeback fight against Amanda Nunes, "The Lioness" TKO'd her in under a minute, sending her into retirement.
Only recently has Rousey revealed that she suffered a career ending amount of concussions in her judo career before even stepping into the cage. By the time she was fighting in MMA, she would get concussion symptoms just from training. Shortly before the Holm fight, she said she fell down the stairs and suffered yet another concussion.
The moment other fighters realized she couldn't take a punch, her aura of invincibility was gone and she was no longer able to compete. But at least she got paid on the way out of MMA, which is more than she can say about where she was left homeless after winning an Olympic medal.
