Bethe Correia vs. Ronda Rousey
As one of the UFC’s biggest ever stars, Rousey’s troubled childhood, and in particular the tragic death of her father due to suicide when she was just 8-years-old, was already well documented by the time she was preparing to fight Bethe Correia in 2015.
With that in mind, common decency would dictate that the subject was off-limits, even for a fiery opponent like Correia, but apparently she didn’t get the memo.
“She is not mentally healthy, she needs to take care of herself,” Correia stated in a pre-fight interview. “She is winning, so everybody is around her cheering her up, but when she realizes she is not everything that she believes she is, I don’t know what might happen. I hope she does not kill herself later on (laughs).”
Correia’s cold-hearted remarks were met with almost unanimous disapproval from fellow fighters, fans and the media, to the extent that by the time the fight took place in ‘Pitbull’s’ own home turf in Brazil, it was Rousey that was being treated as the hometown hero.
The taunt also only served to make Rousey even more determined to defeat Correia in devastating fashion, and she did just that by knocking her out in just 34 seconds, before echoing what the Brazilian had told her at the weigh-ins a day earlier by telling her, “Don’t cry.”
