Ronda Rousey has seemed like a natural fit in the WWE ring thus far.
The former UFC women’s bantamweight champion knocked fans’ expectations out of the park at WrestleMania 34 during her first showcase inside the squared circle. Rousey teamed up with RAW General Manager and Hall Of Famer Kurt Angle to defeat the team of Triple H and Stephanie McMahon in a Mixed Tag Team match. A few months later Rousey made her official singles debut when she faced Nia Jax for the RAW Women’s Title at the Money In The Bank (MITB) pay-per-view (PPV).
Rousey and Jax put on a tremendous performance, but unfortunately Rousey was blindsided by Alexa Bliss who cashed in her MITB briefcase to leave Chicago with the RAW Women’s Title. Rousey will get her shot at redemption next month in Brooklyn, when she meets Bliss inside the ring with the RAW Women’s Championship at stake for SummerSlam.
Triple H, who has seen what Rousey can do inside the ring first-hand, recently commented on her WWE career thus far during a media conference call. “The Game” said Rousey has “no right to be anywhere near as good as she is,” and compared her natural ability to adapt to professional wrestling to that of Kurt Angle’s back in the early 2000s:
“Having spoken to her since the beginning, her passion and her drive for this to me made it perfectly reasonable that she might be this good at it. Once I kind of got in there with her for the first time and got a feel for her natural movement in this, I’ve been saying it since the day she signed with us and we started talking about it, but she’s going to shock everybody.
“I’ve never seen anybody grab it as quickly as she has. I mean, Kurt Angle would probably be the closest to it because he just took to it like a fish to water with it. But she has no right to be anywhere near as good as she is, but she just gets it. I mean she gets it on more than just a physical aspect, across the board.
“She wants to entertain and she’s loved this from probably before anything else […] she truly believes all she’s done is to get to [WWE]. When I used to hear her say that before I used to think, ‘oh that’s a cool way of saying it.’ But legit, it is like this is what she was supposed to be doing. Her route to get here was different than everybody else’s. Her route to get here was going through judo and coming up through MMA and the whole thing to get to where she is right now. It truly is like she is, it’s amazing.”
H/T Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions
