Ronda Rousey talks about … manager Darin Harvey

We asked UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey to discuss some of the people chiefly responsible for her success. We will post one each day leading up to Rousey’s first defense of her 135-pound title Saturday against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 at the Honda Center in Anaheim.

Today, Rousey talks about manager Darin Harvey, president of Fight Tribe Management:

“Darin’s been fantastic. He believed in me from the very beginning.

I’m not the type to accept charity. When I was training, if I asked him to, he would’ve paid for my rent and everything and made everything easy on me, but I wouldn’t accept that from him.

There was a point where my strength and conditioning coach Leo (Frincu) asked, “What’d you eat for dinner last night?” I told him Top Ramen. He said, “WHAT? What the hell are you doing eating that?” I told him, “I’ve eaten that pretty much every day. I’m broke!” And he said, “This is totally not acceptable.” And he called Darin and talked to him.

I told him, “I’m not accepting money from anybody.” And he was like, “You let me take you out to dinner and lunch and stuff, don’t you? Well, think of this as Darin taking you out to a very extended lunch.”

And so every two months or so, Darin would take me to Costco and we would build the grocery cart up with unperishables. Frozen vegetables, frozen salmon burgers, frozen everything. I pretty much had the same meal every day. Frozen salmon or frozen chicken or frozen vegetables. But it wasn’t Top Ramen.

He really helped me in that way in the very beginning, getting proper nutrition and being able to train properly so I would have money left over to actually put the gas on in our apartment. That’s the other reason why we only had Top Ramen. Because I couldn’t afford to turn on the gas. So all we had was like the hot water from the sink.

And there was a point where our hot water got cut off so I had to just put it in cold water and let it sit forever so the noodles would get soft. It was bad. It was bad for a while. And Darin taking care of the groceries like that really helped us to cut a lot of expenses out. He made it so where we weren’t living a destitute lifestyle. We were living more of a spartan lifestyle.”

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