Shayna Baszler can finally make good on a promise she made to Ronda Rousey as their friendship began to bud nearly a decade ago – just not in the way she envisioned.
With Rousey at the height of her UFC prowess dispatching opponents in a minute or less, the two become close on UFC’s “The Ultimate Fighter” series in 2013, on which Baszler was a contestant.
Around that time, Baszler – who had been fighting professionally since 2006 – hit a low point in her career, breaking her ankle before she was supposed to make her UFC debut.
She was going through a breakup and trying to come to terms with the uncertainty of what came next.
Rousey flew Baszler out to her home in California and told her to live there with her so she could focus on healing and training without financial worry.
After one of the former UFC women’s bantamweight champions fights, her group of friends were out to dinner – each giving an extended toast. Thanks when Baszler made her a promise.
“It was my turn, I said, at the time, ‘The best way I can thank you for changing everything for me is to give you the fight you deserve,” Baszler said in a Zoom interview. “At the time, we think I’m gonna clean out the UFC division and we’re gonna meet for the title and it’s gonna be epic and it’s gonna be the first fight Ronda has that lasts over a minute.”
Instead of in the octagon, Rousey’s and Baszler’s first televised one-on-one meeting in combat sports will happen in a WWE ring in an MMA rules match at SummerSlam at Detroit’s Ford Field on Saturday night (8 p.m. ET Peacock).
“Now I have to give her the fight she deserves and it has a totally different meaning than we originally thought, but I think it’s a full-circle moment,” Baszler, 42, said.
The story they are telling around the match connects right back to their time in MMA, which the two laid out in a well-crafted video package this week on “Monday Night Raw.”
Back then, Baszler accepted being part of a team Rousey led – despite her helping to pave the way for women’s MMA – that was an integral part of getting the then-champ ready for her UFC fights.
She saw things repeating themselves in their wrestling careers as Baszler was a high-profile women’s MMA fighter transitioning to the sport in 2015 and signed with NXT in 2017.
There she become a two-time women’s champion, holding the title for the most combined days – 549 – in the promotion.
Early on, Rousey and her fellow Four Horsewomen of MMA, Marina Shafir and Jessamyn Duke, were often shown as fans ringside supporting Baszler’s matches.
It all reignited a love for wrestling in Rousey, who jumped into the sport with her first match at WrestleMania 34 in 2018 with Baszler still in NXT until February 2020.
Rousey went on to win the SmackDown women’s championship twice and the Raw title once.
Finally becoming WWE women’s tag team champions in May with Rousey, 36, is what Bazsler said sparked the need to attack her friend in storyline at Money in the Bank – even if it meant losing the titles to Liz Morgan and Raquel Gonzelez.
It’s an attempt to finally move out of Rousey’s shadow — something Baszler feels is “long overdue.”
“I think you could see the pattern since we have been alongside each other in WWE, I was forever gonna be the sidekick, again,” Baszler said. “I gave her that in MMA, but I think when it comes to wrestling it’s my thing now. I don’t think there was anyone who was gonna beat me and Ronda [for years] when we were on the same time as a tag team. I just came to this slow realization that I’m the sidekick. This is the thing I’ve always dreamed of and worked for and I’m the sidekick?”
Baszler is a three-time WWE women’s tag team champ but has never held singles gold in the main roster even after her NXT success.
In fact, she has only had two televised singles title matches on the main roster.
Baszler believes a win over Rousey at SummerSlam can be a springboard toward pushing her way into the championship picture.
“Once all eyes are on me, then it’s a matter of solidifying my spot as that person that if I can beat up Ronda Rousey then who can’t I beat up,” Baszler said. “You look at Ronda, even the losses she has had [in WWE] they have been a little bit of people capitalized on a mistake or a fluke type of thing. I want to beat Ronda Rousey definitively in a fight so there is no question when my music hits (that) someone is getting hurt, win or lose.”
Rousey has never been submitted in WWE and Baszler, whose finishing move is the Kirifuda clutch submission, said she “would love” to tap her former friend out.
She, however, thinks that might not be her best path to victory because “you will have to tear both of Ronda’s arms off and beat them unconscious with them in order for her to really say you won a fight.”
“I have to be willing to do what it takes to make Ronda physically incapable of continuing to fight and the same with [Ronda for] me,” Baszler said. “I’m not even sure [tapping] is something she’s capable of doing. We’ll find out. We’ll push the limits.”
The bulk of their story has been jammed into the last two months as Rousey missed some time with an elbow injury earlier this year – delaying their pursuit of the tag team championships.
It’s something they had talked about since Rousey’s return in January 2022 and she did everything she could to be cleared earlier, Baszler said – even being “in the back doing one-armed push-ups trying to convince them to “let us go!”
Now, it’s Rousey who could be leaving WWE soon as the Wrestling Observer reported she has a “hard out” date for an exit that comes before WrestleMania 40 in April.
Baszler said they don’t usually talk about that stuff, but left the door open for Rousey to be leaving soon, saying “maybe her plans have changed” now that they are no longer tag champs.
“If we had the titles, Ronda’s an athlete, she would have fulfilled the commitments she had,” Baszler said. “She would have never left had we held the titles for two or three more years. I think with Ronda, it’s very ‘I don’t know we’ll see what happens.’ There’s no title on the line [at SummerSlam], I beat the snot out of Ronda, who knows.”
The two have purposely not tried to portray themselves as babyface or heel in an effort to make it feel more like a true combat sports fight where fans just root for whoever they like best.
Baszler does admit that the scales have been tilted toward her as a babyface and she could leave this feud with some audience goodwill around her for her first time in WWE just because fans “love to hate Ronda” and “more people hate Ronda than hate me.”
“I think if I take care of Ronda and shut her up and maybe she does go away I think for a second people are gonna appreciate me a little bit,” Baszler said. “I don’t think I’m the type of person who’s ever gonna be a babyface face in the way a Liv Morgan is or a Kairi Sane, these super sympathetic [figures]. But I think I can be people’s hero if they want it to be. Am I trying to do that, not necessarily.”
No matter who fans are rooting for, Baszler plans on making good on her promise to Rousey and giving her the fight she deserves and that means “win or lose, we ain’t coming out of this unscathed.”
“Mentally and emotionally I have to be able to flip a switch and get to this different level of intensity and accept the fact that this is gonna hurt, this is gonna be a physically charged match, this is gonna be an emotionally charged match,” Baszler said. “And it’s gonna be something that maybe puts me in bed for a week afterward just how exhausting it is.
“If I can get to the place where we both dragged each other into the mud to try to drown each other, I think regardless of who wins this fight we are not going to be able to deny the other is the toughest person we’ve been in the ring with, whether that’s fight or pro wrestling.”