The Early Life of Ronda Rousey

Ronda Jean Rousey was born in Riverside, California[31][32] on February 1, 1987, the youngest of three daughters of AnnMaria De Mars (née Waddell) and Ronald John Rousey,[33] after whom she was named.[34] Her mother, a decorated judoka, was the first American to win a World Judo Championship (in 1984). Rousey is of English, Polish, and, through her maternal grandfather, Trinidadian and Venezuelan ancestry.[35] One of her maternal great-grandfathers, Alfred E. Waddell, was a Trinidadian doctor who emigrated to Canada and became one of the first Black physicians in North America, while a maternal great-grandmother was born in Caracas, Venezuela.[36][37] Her stepfather is an aerospace engineer.[38] Her biological father, after breaking his back sledding with his daughters and learning that he would be a paraplegic, committed suicide in 1995 when Rousey was eight.[34][39] AnnMaria pursued a PhD in educational psychology at the University of California, Riverside as her daughters grew up.[34][40]

For the first six years of her life, Rousey struggled with speech and could not form an intelligible sentence due to apraxia, a neurological childhood speech sound disorder.[41] This speech disorder was attributed to being born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. When Rousey was three years old, her mother and father moved from Riverside, California, to Jamestown, North Dakota, to obtain intensive speech therapy with specialists at Minot State University.[42][43] Rousey dropped out of high school and later earned her GED.[44] She was raised between Jamestown and Southern California, retiring from her judo career at 21 and starting her MMA career at 22 when she realized that she did not want to spend her life in a conventional field of work.[45]