Originally published on ProWrestlingSheet.
Raw Women's Champion Ronda Rousey says she never expected to main event WrestleMania upon signing with WWE and in a new interview the former UFC fighter also revealed how long she initially planned to wrestle for the company.
When asked by her website if she ever dreamed of headlining WrestleMania, Ronda said:
"I didn’t think I’d be able to have a full-blown career in the WWE. Me and Trav wanted to start having kids really soon and I wanted to be able to be a full-time stay-at-home mom and I pretty much just put aside a couple of months for me to go wrestle and just have fun and do whatever I did. I didn’t think I’d be able to be a great wrestler and have singles matches within 8 months. I honestly thought I’d only go until November. And I completely just fell in love with the business. And I really love it and I kind of took to it a lot faster than I thought I would. I thought that every match I would have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks of rehearsal, with just like the first WrestleMania and then I had no idea that by that December I was having matches called on the fly with Nattie. You know what I mean? I didn’t know it was going to turn into this."
"I’ve just kind of been swept up in the momentum of everything that’s happened since I got here and I don’t really know what the aim is or where we’re going, and then as things went on and as those little victories started piling up, it started to become more and more feasible that women main eventing WrestleMania could happen. I thought, maybe I could be part of it. Maybe I could help make it happen sooner. Maybe I could be one of the gimmicks of the match, that I could help and be part of it and help push the publicity for it or something. I always thought maybe I could help out some day."
Rousey says as the feud between Becky and Charlotte began to heat up on SmackDown, she realized the idea of their match closing out the show went from an "abstract dream in the future to almost a certainty."
"I’ve seen enough impossible things happen to know that nothing is impossible," Ronda continued. "But I really think that we all exceeded all of our own expectations this year. And it’s so invigorating just to have that feeling that this is just the beginning, this isn’t the peak of the Women’s Evolution, this is just one more ceiling being shattered, one more bit of progress. This isn’t going to be the last women’s main event of WrestleMania, this is just the first, and that is the most encouraging thought to me."
Fun fact: Ronda says she was planning to announce she was pregnant and out of the WrestleMania match on April Fools Day, but Paul Heyman nixed those plans after telling her WWE was going to announce beforehand that the women would be closing the show.