Three Tonight Show appearances between 2015 and 2016, and why the first one still matters in 2026.
Ronda Rousey has been a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon three times, all within less than a year, and not once since February 2016. There’s no reported relationship beyond those three bookings. The clips tend to circulate on their own, an armbar demonstration here, a Sports Illustrated cover joke there, without much sense that they connect to anything. Watched in the order they actually aired, the three visits add up to something the clips alone don’t show. A little over five weeks before Rousey lost her UFC title to Holly Holm, she told Fallon, on his own show, almost exactly how it was going to happen.
At a glance:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| March 24, 2015 | Armbar demonstration, live Mario Kart match |
| October 6, 2015 | Game face demo, prediction about Holly Holm |
| February 16, 2016 | Sports Illustrated cover, Marine Corps Ball story, photo controversy |
Table of Contents
The first visit was just a bit
That first appearance came in March 2015, about a week and a half before Furious 7 opened in theaters and seven weeks before her memoir, My Fight, Your Fight, hit shelves. Fallon spent part of the interview asking Rousey to demonstrate her signature armbar on his own arm, the judo hold known as a juji-gatame that had already ended nine of her 11 professional wins by that point. He picked a safe word first, landing on Rumpelstiltskin, which turned out not to buy him much. TIME reported that he was tapping his own desk within seconds.
Separately, that same afternoon, Fallon livestreamed a Mario Kart 8 match against Rousey using Meerkat, a video app that had a brief run in early 2015 before it faded out. He won. That loss became a running joke the next time she came on the show, that October.
She told him how she was going to lose
Rousey came back on October 6, 2015, sharing the episode with Lady Gaga, to talk about her upcoming title defense against Holly Holm at UFC 193. She brought up the Mario Kart loss on her own, said she’d bought a Wii specifically to prepare for a rematch, and gave Fallon grief about a hand injury that had put him in the hospital for 10 days that summer. She also showed him her game face, something she said she’d learned from her godfather as a kid.
Then the conversation turned serious. Fallon asked about Holm, a 15 to 1 underdog by the odds at the time. Rousey, whose fight promotion up to that point had been heavy on trash talk, didn’t dismiss her:
“She’s the type of fighter you have to be very patient with. She’s going to try to keep distance and keep far away from me and keep me frustrated to the point where I’ll make a mistake and she’ll try to kick me in the head. But it’s not going to go like that.”
That’s close to word for word what happened. On November 14, 2015, Holm knocked Rousey out with a kick to the neck, 59 seconds into the second round, ending a 12-fight unbeaten run and taking the UFC bantamweight title. Rousey had described the finish out loud, on national television, a little over five weeks earlier. Bleacher Report pointed out the overlap once the fight was over, citing the original quote from USA Today’s Mike Foss.
The third visit wasn’t really about the fight
The third appearance came just over three months after the loss, and it’s still Rousey’s most recent Tonight Show visit. She’d just landed on the cover of the 2016 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, painted rather than dressed, which Fallon brought up right away. She told him she’d fight Holm again if the chance came up.
Then she told a longer story: a Marine named Jarrod Haschert had asked her to the Marine Corps Ball over Facebook before the Holm fight, and she kept the promise that December, about four weeks after the loss. Afterward, she said, they went to Hooters, where a waitress who didn’t recognize her spent several minutes defending Ronda Rousey’s honor while Rousey pretended to hate her own guts. She left with free wings.
Two days after that taping, a promotional photo from the same appearance started drawing criticism online over what looked like a digitally slimmed arm. Rousey posted a side by side comparison of the original and altered version, along with a statement. The Washington Post covered it that same week:
“This goes against everything I believe, and I am extremely proud of every inch of my body.”
She never said who had edited the photo. Nobody pushed her to.
The same move finished the comeback
She spent the years afterward in WWE, and in 2024 published a second memoir. She didn’t fight again until May 2026, when, at 39, she came out of a retirement that had lasted nearly a decade to face Gina Carano at MVP MMA 1, streamed live on Netflix. CBS Sports reported that she won by armbar in 17 seconds, the same hold that made Fallon tap out on a talk show desk 11 years earlier, and said afterward she was retiring again, this time to focus on her family.
