Triple H says Ronda Rousey Has Picked up Pro Wrestling Faster Than Anybody in History
Ronda Rousey will soon be a Hall of Fame athlete from her UFC career but it turns out she might be even better in professional wrestling.
The former UFC women’s champion has only engaged in two matches since signing a contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) but both times she’s dazzled the audience in attendance and the millions watching around the world.
In fact, Rousey’s two matches have almost routinely been called the best of the night on the pair of cards where she’s performed.
Paul “Triple H” Levesque, the WWE executive vice president of talent, who groomed Rousey through the WWE’s Performance Center and helped guide the former UFC fighter through her earliest stages of learning the professional wrestling business has been blown away with her progression.
“Having spoken to her since the beginning, her passion and her drive for this made it perfectly reasonable that she might be this good at it, once I kind of got in there with her the first time and just kind of got a feel for her natural movement in this, I’ve been saying it since the day that she signed with us and we started talking about it, she’s gonna shock everybody,” Levesque told reporters in England during the WWE’s tour of the U.K.
“I’ve never seen anybody grab it as quickly as she has. I mean Kurt Angle would probably be the closest to it cause he just took 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.”
WWE Hall of Famer and multi-time champion Shawn Michaels wasn’t quite as shocked as his counterpart because he felt like Rousey had all the natural athleticism that would allow her to shine in professional wrestling.
“Hasn’t surprised me cause she’s a stud,” Michaels added. “If you know anything about what she’s done in her career, it’s not surprising at all. I think the only reason nowadays it’s surprising to anybody, and again respectfully, everyone has gotten so used to holding her to this unattainable standard. Sometimes you want your athletes to be more than what they are other than human people. She is a freaking athlete. She is a jock and she has been a stud athlete.”
In terms of Rousey’s evolution from the first day she stepped into a pro wrestling ring to her most recent match against Nia Jax (real name Lina Fenene), she’s been one of the most talked about superstars on the entire WWE roster.
Triple H adds that he’s never seen anyone pick up the business as quickly as Rousey has managed since first arriving after her career in the UFC was done.
“She loves this. She wants to entertain. She’s loved this probably from before anything else,” Triple H said about Rousey. “She’ll say this in interviews and I used to hear her say it interviews and I’d say it’s a nifty thing to say, but the whole ‘she truly believes that all the other stuff she did was to get to this’. When she would say it at first, I was like that’s a cool way of saying it but legit I think it is.
“This is what she was supposed to be doing. Her route to get here was different from everybody else’s. Her route to get there was going through judo and coming up through MMA and the whole thing to get to where she is right now. It’s amazing.”
