Ronda Rousey’s WWE career to date has been a career of two very different halves.
After stepping away from the octagon and into the squared circle full-time in 2018, Rousey was incredibly popular with fans and won the Raw Women’s Title. She also became one of the first women to headline WrestleMania when she competed in a Triple Threat Match against Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair in 2019.
This was Rousey’s last match until she made a surprise appearance at the 2022 Royal Rumble. The star won the women’s match and faced Falir at WrestleMania 38. Although Rousey went on to add two SmackDown Women’s Title wins to her CV, she has been criticised by many fans for her attitude and in-ring performances.
Alundra Blayze Defends Ronda Rousey
Speaking with Joey Karni on The Angle Podcast, Alundra Blayze has now claimed that despite this Rousey deserves credit for taking WWE’s ‘Women’s Revolution’ to a whole new level. Blaze wrestled for WWE in the early 1990s winning the Women’s Title three times. Following her departure, women’s wrestling was treated as something of an afterthought for a number of years before the likes of Paige, AJ Lee, The Bellas, Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks (Mercedes Moe) Bayley and Charlotte Flair forced it to the forefront of the company.
Blayze stated that adding Rousey to that mix helped push the revolution further.
“I really love the fact that Ronda Rousey came in and they hired her. They couldn’t have picked a better person. She put in the work, and she shows up, and she does her job. She knows what it means to train, to put your head in it, to focus, to do whatever. Look at her background.
There’s gonna be a lot of people that disagree with me out there, but this is just my opinion, that when they brought in Ronda, everything skyrocketed, it really did. It was becoming to be on the map, you could feel it. But I really feel that it would have took a lot longer without Ronda, or maybe it wouldn’t have turned the page. She escalated it. [She made it] more legit. Like, ‘Oh crap, Ronda Rousey, she’s gonna bust somebody. I gotta watch this.’ Just her name put some legitimacy in there. I think it’s badass. I wish I was younger, and I would love to go toe-to-toe with her. If I was younger, absolutely,”
Ronda Rousey hasn’t wrestled since losing the SmackDown Women’s Title to Charlotte Flair on the December 30th episode of SmackDown.
H/t to Fightful