If Ronda Rousey had her druthers, WWE fans would be booing her enthusiastically every time she came to the ring.
That may come as a bit of a surprise considering that one of the first images that comes to mind of the SmackDown Women’s Champion is her smiling and slapping fans on her way to the ring as “Bad Reputation” blasts through a crowded arena.
But as Rousey told former UFC champion Daniel Cormier during a recent episode of The DC Check-In, her heart is really with being a heel in the classic sense: someone for fans to hate and help the face get more cheers in return.
“I want to be heel the whole time,” Rousey said, reminding Cormier that Rowdy Roddy Piper was her idol, and that people would threaten him with physical violence because they disliked him so much. “That’s the kind of heel I want to be. I want to be the heel that really inspires that vitriol and really gets the other person liked.
“It’s so much easier to get people to hate someone than to like them. I think a lot of people forget that the job of a heel is to get the babyface over. It’s not for everyone to think that you are a cool heel.”
That kind of perspective, as well as Rousey’s WWE success, makes it easy to forget that she’s only been in the pro wrestling business for four years (a big chunk of which she took off for the birth of her first child) and really only spent a month as a heel, leading up to WrestleMania 35.
The biggest obstacle to Rousey exploring her ability to get crowds to hate her right now is that WWE needs her desperately as a fan favorite. Becky Lynch shows no signs of ending her memorable heel run, Charlotte Flair is likely to resume her villainous ways when she returns, and one of WWE’s most popular women’s stars, Sasha Banks, famously walked out last month. That leaves only Rousey and Raw Women’s Champion Bianca Belair as top babyfaces at the moment.
That said, the landscape shifts often in pro wrestling, so it’s not hard to imagine a time a few months ago when a turn makes sense for Rousey. Thanks to her interview with DC, you can be sure that if and when it arrives, she’ll be 100% in favor of it.