AnnMaria De Mars, the mother of UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion Ronda Rousey has gotten a lot of attention this week. First, an interview clip was released showing her blasting Edmond Tarverdyan, her daughter’s head coach and striking coach, as a “terrible coach and a bad person.”
Next, another clip went out (briefly, before being pulled) where she said ” I would run him over with my car if there wasn’t a law against it.” Now, she’s done another interview this week (the original interview for LatiNation was shot several weeks ago) to further explain her animosity towards Tarverdyan.
Speaking to her old friend Rhadi Ferguson (a judoka who happens to be Kimbo Slice’s cousin) of Pro MMA Now, De Mars went into more detail. The beef originally stems from Tarverdyan being “extremely disrespectful to women,” explaining that “If you read in Ronda’s book, you know when she walked into his gym she had been a junior world gold medalist, Olympic medalist, world medalist in judo and he didn’t give her the time of day. And he has had that exact same pattern with many women in the gym and I have seen it with my own eyes where they train there and it’s basically a waste of their time. And they’re talked to in a way that just makes my jaw drop.”
That said, she has a lot of reservations about the way her daughter’s success is used to attract fighters to Tarverdyan’s Glendale Fighting Club, “causing harm to other people by being used as bait to lure people in there.” Elaborating, she noted that “People actually do worse, but he keeps telling them how great they are, how great they’re doing and they stay there. It’s pathetic.” She compared it to a young judo student she had whose parents moved him to another gym, were told by the coach how great he was doing, and didn’t notice he was sliding down the rankings.
Since Rousey blew up as a superstar, Jake Ellenberger (Reign MMA and Kings MMA), Travis Browne (Jackson/Winkeljohn MMA), and Clay Guida (also Jackson/Wink) moved to GFC, as did Jessamyn Duke (AFS Academy/10th Planet Richmond) from Rousey’s Ultimate Fighter team. All but Guida (who was splitting time with Team Alpha Male and only did one camp there before moving to Team Elevation) and cases can be made for all of them regressing since making the change.
