Ronda Rousey has a split personality.
There’s the world-class athlete half of her and the pin-up model half. The former has allowed her to become the first UFC women’s champion and the first American woman to win an Olympic medal in judo. The latter has landed her a pair of blockbuster film roles and put her on the cover of ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue “artistically” nude.
The two versions don’t usually intertwine.
“When I get feisty, I get really f—ing feisty,” Rousey told The Post. “When I get girly, I get really f—ing girly.”
That quote exemplifies Rousey. She has no filter, she’s irreverent and she sometimes talks like she’s back in the Olympic Village hanging out with the guys.
When asked last week about public perception, she said she knows it changes regularly, because “how long ago did Kim Kardashian have d—- in her mouth and now she’s selling my little sister shoes?”
And she told Fox Sports that she would give Miesha Tate, her challenger Saturday at UFC 168 in Las Vegas, a very explicit Christmas gift, implying Tate wears the pants in her relationship.
Yeah, Rousey is MMA’s bad girl. Inside the cage, she’s just as aggressive. The California blonde is undefeated at 7-0 with every win coming by armbar inside of the first round. The last time she fought Tate, in March 2012, Tate refused to tap out, so Rousey broke her arm.
Rousey is a better than an 8-to-1 favorite for this fight, so she increased the level of difficulty for herself. This fall, she traveled to Bulgaria to film “The Expendables 3” and then Atlanta for “Fast & Furious 7” before returning to the Los Angeles area for training camp.
“I want to do what no one else has done before – what no one else has done at the same time,” Rousey said. “I want to be a bad ass in the movies and be a bad ass in real life.”
Making history has been commonplace for her. There were the Olympic milestones, and then she convinced UFC president Dana White to bring women into his organization, something he said he would “never” do.
“You could line up all the greatest girls on earth from here to f—ing Pluto and she’s the one that, when I met her, I said this chick is insanely competitive and just a different animal,” White said last month. “She’s what it took to get women in the UFC. Hate her or not, the reason all these girls fight in the UFC is because of her.”
Now, she’s arguably the biggest draw in the company, co-headlining one of its largest events Saturday with a men’s middleweight title fight in which the best of all time, Anderson Silva, tries to get his belt back from the man who knocked him out, Long Island’s Chris Weidman.
That’s a lot of superlatives. Rousey plans to tack on a few exclamation points.
“That will be a hard one to show up,” Rousey said of the men’s bout. “I have to do something shocking and mind-blowing to have people talking about our fight.”
Weidman motivated to beat Silva – again
When Weidman knocked out Silva in July, there was such disbelief that people had to come up with excuses. Well, they said, Silva dropped his hands and dared Weidman to punch him, so it was a fluke. Or they said the fight was obviously fixed.
Never mind that Silva employs those theatrics in all of his fights and Weidman was the only one to make him pay. Weidman has heard all the pundits, and he says he’s ready to beat the best MMA fighter of all time for a second time in five months.
“I’m not worried about what he’s doing,” Weidman said. “I’m expecting anything – pulling guard, doing handstands, I don’t know. I don’t really care what he’s doing. Hands down, hands up, either way it doesn’t really matter to me.”