TARVERDYAN SHUFFLES THROUGH the box of prints he’s brought to hang on the bare walls here. The photos go back to the beginning of their relationship. Back when Rousey drove a beat-up gold Honda Accord with a broken window, sweat-stained seats and packets of green Tabasco sauce that she’d stash from fast food restaurants to add to whatever cheap, bland food she had at home. She basically lived in that car for a while, driving all over LA to seedy bartending gigs she’d find on Craigslist, giving judo lessons for $50 an hour, signing up for Pilates classes at different studios (“because the first class is always free”) and praying she wouldn’t have to choose between buying dog food or paying a parking ticket.
“Broke girl hustle was real,” Rousey jokes.
There’s a comfort in going back to those memories now, reminiscing between training sessions or late at night while she eats the skewers of meat that Tarverdyan grills over an open flame. Rousey’s first UFC fight was less than four years ago, and back then, she got in the cage to survive. Rousey herself had pushed White to add a women’s division to UFC, so if her first fight against Liz Carmouche didn’t sell, there wouldn’t be a second one. For her, or anyone else.
Tarverdyan comes across a picture of her win over Alexis Davis in July 2014. “Oh my god, that was the moment my knuckle exploded,” Rousey says of the injury that needed nine stitches afterward. “The only reason I don’t have pictures of it is I was hiding it from my mom.”
Next he finds a picture of her doing an armbar on Sarah Kaufman in 2012, before she even joined UFC. It was shortly after that Kaufman fight that she met her jiujitsu coach, Jason Manly. Manly hadn’t seen Rousey much the past few years, but he recently joined her camp, and it didn’t take long for them to fall into a rhythm.
“She’s probably armbarred me 200 times, and no two of them have been the same,” Manly says as they begin today’s session. “You can’t prepare for it because her transitions are always different.”
Rousey smiles. “It’s also because he doesn’t fall for the same s— twice. He forces me to be creative.”
They speak in their own language during training, geeking out over footwork and head positioning like a songwriter would obsess over chords and lyrics. Manly backs her into a corner; Rousey escapes. She’s quicker than he remembers. Lighter too. She’s been about 140-145 pounds during this camp, nearly 10 pounds under where she was during camp before the Holm fight.
Manly encourages her to throw him; Rousey crouches and uses her leverage to toss him over her hips, even though he outweighs her by a good 30 pounds. At one point the talking stops and the fighting becomes real, bodies become weapons, guided by instinct and mindfulness.
Rousey is working on fighting against the side of the cage, so she pins him in a way that renders his size and strength moot. Eventually he escapes, but she accidentally clips his mouth with her elbow during the struggle.
“Oh s—, sorry,” she says. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Are you OK?”
Manly grabs his jaw. He definitely felt that. “It’s OK. That’s what I’m here for.”
He goes to get a mouthguard out of his bag. “So you’ll feel better about it,” he says with a smile.
After about an hour, they’re both spent. Manly is drenched in sweat. Rousey is stretching again, this time to cool down.
“How do you feel?” he asks her.
“Like a ninja,” she says.
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