Ex-UFC heavyweight standout Brendan Schaub is responding to accusations that he played “mind games” during his relationship with Ronda Rousey.
Earlier this week, an excerpt from Rousey’s new book, Our Fight: A Memoir began making the rounds. In the text, the women’s MMA pioneer spoke about a fight between her husband, Travis Browne, and another UFC fighter she had dated beforehand. Though Rousey never mentions Schaub by name, it didn’t take long for fight fans to know exactly who she was talking about.
Rousey accused Schaub of being insecure during their relationship and admitted to reveling in his first-round shellacking at the hands of Browne during a 2014 Octagon encounter — the final fight of Schaub’s MMA career.
While it’s clear that ‘Rowdy’ still holds some animosity toward her former beau, Schaub has moved on and doesn’t see the point in rehashing the details of a relationship from more than a decade ago.
“But to bring it up 14 years later? I mean she has kids and it obviously worked out and like it’s just life, we weren’t a match so like when she says mind games, no it’s not mind games,” Schaub said during the latest episode of his The Fighter and The Kid podcast. “The mind games came from, in all honesty, her camp like that was the trouble she had and that’s a whole other issue that she can address.
“I have nothing to do with that, I didn’t train at her camp, I don’t know the coach, I have nothing to do with that. I guess when she means mind games, that would mean it wasn’t a match so yeah and you were around during that time and you knew this. I’d be like ‘Dude, I don’t know what to do. Love the girl as a friend but when it came to that like dude, it’s just not, she’s not my person, I found my person.'”
Producer Chin on @FighterNtheKid broke some news during the show. Apparently my name was mentioned in a book 🤷🏽♂️ pic.twitter.com/b9BHUp2PDS
— Brendan Schaub (@BrendanSchaub) May 16, 2024
Brendan Schaub Looks Back on His Break-Up with Ronda Rousey
Schaub also reflected on the awkward moment when he realized that he and Ronda Rousey were simply not compatible with one another.
“I had to have that conversation and it was awful. You just know. The last conversation, the last words I ever said to her, I just told her how I felt and it’s just not gonna work. Clearly, we’re both upset and I said ‘And you will never talk to me again, I know you and we will never talk again’, and we’ve never talked again.”
Brendan Schaub’s final fight went down in December 2014. Two years later, Rousey would compete in her last fight at UFC 207, suffering a 48-second KO against former two-division titleholder Amanda Nunes.
Watch the full episode below:
