There’s a new “Ronda on the Road” video from Ronda Rousey’s YouTube channel, embedded above for your viewing pleasure.
This one chronicles last weekend, when the Raw Women’s champ worked a house show in Toronto on Fri., Mar. 8 and then snuck into Cleveland for her run-in at Fastlane on Sun., Mar. 10.
It’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect from this layer of Ronda’s character. You’ve got glimpses of the joy she gets from performing (which now includes watching herself playing a heel in the ring and saying “I love being bad”), and her frustration with life on the road, made bearable thanks to behind-the-scenes playing & joking we see her doing with traveling companions - especially husband Travis Browne. There are gracious interactions with adoring fans, and a few worked shoot comments meant to make us wonder is Rousey has or will truly “go rogue” during her WrestleMania 35 feud with Becky Lynch & Charlotte Flair.
That last aspect has been examined to death by now. There aren’t really new arguments to be made, and there doesn’t even seem to be much passion behind the debate. Ronda using her own online channels to call wrestling “scripted” and “fake” generated some mainstream media headlines and gives the program a little edginess for casual fans, but the shock value’s worn off for those of us in the wrestling bubble.
Rousey herself is almost winking at her own comments in this episode of “Ronda on the Road”. When she talks about how she’s “writing the script now” when explaining her actions at Fastlane, she’s speaking figuratively. The one time she point blank says “wrestling’s scripted” is immediately followed by a cut to her sporting an ear-to-ear grin...
It’s like we’ve reached the point they’re shooting on the worked shoot, or being meta about having been meta. The brief scene of Ronda and the alleged mastermind of the angle, Paul Heyman, sharing a laugh may be the most telling part of the whole saga:
And so it goes. Hopefully this, and a week of relative Twitter silence, signals we’re focused on the on-screen story now, with the possibility of the MMA legend intentionally hurting pro wrestlers (who are no threat to her because what they do is fake) because she’s mad at them and/or the business receding further into the background.
We shall see.