My Fight / Your Fight (9 page)

I went out to the Pedros' club on a trial basis. Walking off the airplane at Logan Airport, I felt a wave of nervous excitement. Big Jim had left an impression on me.

I was also going to be training with Jimmy Pedro. A month or so after I had met Big Jim, Jimmy came to L.A. to do a clinic. I was coming off my knee surgery, but determined to attend. Jimmy Pedro was one of the most decorated American athletes in judo history and the guy I looked up to as a kid in the sport. I could not wait to meet Jimmy, but was disappointed that my injury limited my ability to participate.

I spent the day relegated to what I referred to as “Ronda's Happy Corner of Matwork,” where I grappled the entire time. I couldn't use my leg at all. As the afternoon session wrapped up, the event organizer made an announcement.

“Following this session, we ask you all to stay as Jimmy Pedro will be presenting awards,” he said. “These are awards that Jimmy has determined himself. Afterward, Jimmy will be signing autographs.”

The disappointment I had felt on the way to the clinic returned, only worse.

“Can we leave?” I asked my mom.

“I thought you wanted him to sign your belt,” my mom said.

“I just want to go,” I said.

“OK,” she shrugged.

I was hobbling over to get my bag, when Jimmy walked to the front of the room.

“First of all, thank you so much for coming out here today,” Jimmy said. The room cheered.

“I was really impressed by everyone,” he continued. “I see a lot of potential when I look around this room.”

Dozens of kids sitting cross-legged on the mats suddenly straightened up. I felt my eyes start to burn. There were more than one hundred kids from around the L.A. area at the clinic, and I knew I was better at judo than every single one of them. I also knew there was no way I was getting an award.

“The first award, is one that I hope will soon be near and dear to my heart,” Jimmy said with a smile. “This is the ‘Future Olympic Champion' award.”

The room laughed as if Jimmy had told a hilarious joke. A three-time Olympian who had won bronze in 1996, Jimmy was making one final push at an Olympic gold.

Jimmy called the name of a boy who jumped up, cheering as if he had actually won the Olympics.

I shoved everything into my bag as fast as I could.

“The next award I want to give out today is one that is certainly near and dear to my heart—‘Future World Champion,'” Jimmy said.

At the mention of world champion, the room burst into applause.

“And the winner is . . .”—Jimmy paused for dramatic effect—“Ronda Rousey.”

I froze, then dropped my bag. I felt my cheeks flush as every head in the place turned to look at me.

“Go up there,” my mom urged as the room applauded.

I limped up to the front of the room to shake Jimmy's hand.
He picked me as future world champion
, I thought.
Me
. I was thrilled and flattered and in disbelief.

I waited in line to get his autograph after the impromptu ceremony.

“Ronda Rousey,” he said, grinning when it was my turn to approach the table.

I still couldn't believe he knew my name.

He grabbed one of the photographs provided by the event organizers for him to sign.

He scribbled out a message with a Sharpie and handed the paper to me. I looked down at the photo in my hands.

To Ronda, Keep training hard and see you at the top. Jimmy Pedro.

I read and re-read the words “see you at the top” the entire way home. I was overwhelmed by the idea that he had faith that I had so much potential that someday I would be at the pinnacle of the sport like he was.

When we got home, I taped the photo on my wall, where I looked at it through the rest of my recovery.

Now a blast of cold air hit me as I stepped onto the Jetway, pulling me back into the present. But reality seemed surreal. If this worked out, Big Jim was going to be my coach. I would be training with Little Jimmy.

After two weeks, I called my mom.

“This is the place,” I said. “Big Jim is the coach.”

“OK,” my mom said. “We'll figure something out.”

People love the idea of winning an Olympic medal or a world title. But what few people realize is that pretty much every second leading up to the actual win is uncomfortable, painful, and impossibly daunting—physically and mentally. Most people focus on the wrong thing: They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it is all the hard parts—the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.

I didn't want to move away from my family at sixteen. And I certainly didn't want to move away to some little town along the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border to live with people I didn't know. But I wanted to win the Olympics one day. I wanted to be the world champion. I wanted to be the best judoka in the world. And I was willing to do whatever it took.

My mom, Big Jim, and Jimmy decided it would be best if I stayed with Little Jimmy and his family.

“Ronda's going to be like your new big sister,” Jimmy's wife, Marie, said to their three young kids the day I arrived at their house.

I slept on a futon in their home office, which should have been a warning that the arrangement wouldn't last. At first I ate too much food. So my mom paid Jimmy more money for more food, but the situation got worse, not better. The closet where I was keeping all of my things was deemed too disorganized. I left too much water on the floor after I showered. I forgot to put dishes in the sink. I tried my absolute hardest, but it felt like the harder I tried, the more I messed up. I called my mom crying every day.

The final straw came three weeks later when the son of a family friend of the Pedros asked Jimmy if he could stay at their house for a week while he came to train at the club. The guy, Dick IttyBitty (possibly not his real name), was in his early twenties, and we had met at a camp in Chicago just before I moved to Massachusetts. My mom didn't like the idea of a twenty-something guy staying at the same house as me. Big Jim also thought it was a bad idea. Still Little Jimmy and Marie were debating whether to let him stay when Marie sent my mom an email asking what she would do.

My mom typed up her reply:
You asked me what I would do. I would never allow it in a million years. It's a terrible fucking idea
. Then my mom hit Send.

The next night Jimmy, with Marie standing beside him, told me, “It's just not working out.”

I stared at them both, speechless and embarrassed. I was a sixteen-year-old kid who just wanted to do judo. I was heartbroken. I had finally found my place, my coach, and now, it was being ripped away from me. I made another tearful phone call to my mom.

“Don't worry about it,” my mom said. “We'll figure something out.”

Big Jim ended up taking me in. Mom offered to pay for my living expenses, just like she had paid Jimmy, but he refused to accept any money. Big Jim lived in a small house on a lake in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire, right outside the greater Boston area. Living at Big Jim's was boring as hell. But more than that, it was lonely.

Big Jim knows more about coaching judo than possibly anyone else in the country, but he's not exactly the social type and we didn't have much to say to one another anyway. He was a several-times divorced New England fireman who liked to smoke cigars (or cig-ahs as he called them). He had a permanent tobacco stain in his white mustache. I was a girl who read science fiction and drew pictures in a sketchpad.

The days at Big Jim's blurred into one another. The eight months I spent there in 2004 were marked by boredom, soreness, silence, and hunger.

To compete in the sixty-three-kilogram weight division I had to weigh no more than sixty-three kilos before each tournament.

Virtually no athlete competes in a division that is actually their weight. Most athletes walk around considerably heavier than competition weight in daily life. In the UFC, I fight at 135 pounds—and for about four hours a year, I weigh 135 pounds. My actual weight is closer to 150. I can make 135 pounds because the weigh-in process is very different in MMA. I only fight every few months and weigh in the night before and then have a chance to recover from the physical strain of cutting weight before I fight again. When I was doing judo, I was constantly competing. I had to make weight as many as four weekends in a row and I might only have an hour from weigh-in to fight time.

Because I was always struggling to make weight, Big Jim limited the food we had in the house, which made it even worse. When the weather was warm, Big Jim's family and members of the club would come to the lake house for a barbecue and to swim in the lake. I wasn't supposed to eat, but I would sneak graham crackers and eat them in the basement. In the morning, Big Jim would see the crumbs.

“You have no discipline,” he would say.

I started making deals with myself when it came to food. I would figure out exactly how many calories I ate, then determine what I needed to do to burn them off. But it got to the point where I would binge eat and not go run; it was just too much on my body to run off all that I put in it. Once it got to a point where I ate so much and I felt like I couldn't compensate for it through exercising, I would just throw it up.

The first time I tried, I failed. While Big Jim was at work, I ate a bagel, some chicken, a huge bowl of oatmeal, and an apple, but instead of being glad to be free of my constant hunger, I was overcome by guilt. I went to the bathroom and stuck my hand down my throat. I heaved, but nothing happened. I tried again, and again, nothing.

I guess I'm not doing it right
, I thought.

The next few times I overate, I tried to make myself throw up again but with no luck. Then a week later, there was a barbecue at Big Jim's house. I ate until I was full. Two hamburgers, watermelon, a bunch of little carrots, chips, a couple of cookies.

I went into the downstairs bathroom, determined to undo the damage I had just done. That particular day I ate so much that I felt incredibly guilty and terrible that I wouldn't give up.

I stood, doubled over the toilet, shoving my hand down my throat. Sweat broke out on my forehead as my body tensed. My stomach strained, trying to maintain its contents. I tried, and tried, shoving my hand farther down. My eyes were tearing up, snot was coming out of my nose. Then it happened. It finally worked. The contents of my stomach came hurling back up. Relief.

The next time I forced myself to throw up, it was easier.

I was still mindful of limiting what I was eating, but my weight refused to budge. Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw huge shoulders, giant arms, this hulking body reflected back at me. I started forcing myself to throw up more often. A couple times a week, sometimes every other day.

I was scared of being caught. Once when Big Jim had a couple of visiting athletes staying in his downstairs apartment, I heard a sound outside the bathroom door and froze. I turned on the water in the sink to try to muffle the unavoidable retching sound.

My constant hunger was the result of trying to maintain an unrealistic weight while executing a grueling training schedule. I woke up between eight and nine in the morning. My muscles were sore from the day before. My body always ached. I reached my arms above my head and heaved myself out of bed. Big Jim always got up before me and when I emerged from my room, a hot pot of coffee was brewing and my mug was set out next to it.

Mornings were reserved for conditioning. Everything I owned fit in two duffle bags, the contents of which were usually strewn around my room. I dug through the piles looking for something clean enough to work out in.

In his basement, Big Jim had set up the world's smallest workout room. It was probably no more than ten feet by ten feet, in which he had managed to cram in a set of free weights, a bench press, a treadmill, an elliptical machine, and a few other workout machines that looked older than I was. He had created a circuit for me that incorporated cardio, weight training, and judo drills.

The elliptical and treadmill were so old that they didn't have any digital readout. For those parts of the circuit, I had to count four hundred to eight hundred steps, then move on to the next area. The ceiling was so low that when I did the elliptical, I had to duck my head. When I did cleans, I had about three inches of clearance on either side. Anything but perfect form and I was hitting the wall or nicking a cardio machine. The only thing not in that tiny room was the bungee cord for doing
uchikomis
(a judo throw drill). That station was set up right outside the workout room, next to the washer and dryer. The whole time Big Jim would be upstairs with his stopwatch.

There was no clock anywhere in the workout room, which was part of Big Jim's strategy. Every day, I was supposed to complete the circuit faster than the day before. If I didn't beat my time, then the next day Big Jim would add another set on to the end of the circuit and my time would start all over. Without a way to time myself, I had to try to keep pace in my head. The first day of a new circuit, I would go as slow as humanly possible. But as the days passed, I had no choice but to go faster. After I was done, I would head back upstairs, where Big Jim never told me my time, just how much I beat or missed my time by.