Ronda Rousey strikes a balance inside and outside the Octagon

Being the best isn’t enough for Ronda Rousey.

Since joining the UFC, the 28-year-old has dominated mixed martial arts, arm-barring her way to the Bantamweight Championship while ascending to an athletic elite. Watch her at work and you feel like she’d be tops at whatever sport she chose — including that other blood sport: branding.

Over the past two months, she has appeared in a worldwide blockbuster movie (Furious 7), stared out from the cover of Sports Illustrated, and released her first memoir. My Fight/Your Fight, which hit store shelves everywhere (except Wal-Mart) May 12, brings her to Unity Temple on the Plaza Thursday, May 28, for a Rainy Day Books reading and signing.

This year’s surge in recognition and demand would make a less-driven person sweat. But Rousey thrives on it.

“The pressure is really a necessary part of me getting pleasure out of anything,” she tells The Pitch. “If I was just stapling papers all day, there’s no pressure in that, but I would also get no pleasure out of it. I think overcoming high-pressure situations is what gives me more pleasure than anything.”

And there are plenty of high-pressure moments in My Fight, which chronicles what now seems like a fateful journey to an MMA career — even if Rousey didn’t always see it that way.

“If you didn’t know how it was going to end, it wouldn’t seem so fateful,” she says. “It would seem like I was making it up as I was going along because that’s how it felt to me when I was in it. I didn’t figure out that I wanted to do MMA for a long time.

“That was one of the lessons of the book, you know,” Rousey adds. “Through all of the worst things in my life, the best things happened as a result. By the end of it, I’ve really, truly come to believe that everything happens for a reason.”

As Rousey does round after round of interviews for her book, she keeps hearing the same question: When will you fight Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino?

“I don’t know why everyone is pushing the responsibility of making that fight onto me,” Rousey says. “She’s the one to redeem herself.”

Rousey has repeatedly said she will meet Justino, who fights at 145 pounds, when she cuts her weight to 135 pounds and passes a drug test. (Justino failed one in 2012 and served a one-year suspension. )

In a My Fight chapter titled “Trust in Knowledge, Not in Strength,” Rousey calls out Justino without naming her. In that chapter, she calls doping in MMA “almost negligent homicide.” She tells The Pitch that the chapter is meant to “address her and every other cheater out there.”

“Everybody else fights at 135,” Rousey says. “I don’t see why I should make exceptions for a cheater. She can make weight, pumped full of steroids at 145. There’s no reason that she can’t get off of them and move down.

“She’s the one that needs me,” Rousey continues. “I definitely don’t need her. I have plenty of other options out there besides her, and all that she has is me. If it never happens, that sucks. I hope that it does. I have this vision that when I beat her, it’ll be the final fight of my career, and it will be this great beautiful thing people might have wanted to see with Mayweather and Pacquiao and thought that they were missing. I feel like that need is out there for a grand-finale happy ending, but if she doesn’t step up and she keeps running away from the drug testing and everything else … there’s nothing I could do about that.”

Rousey doesn’t lack options or opponents, though, especially when factoring in pro wrestling. In March, she stole the show at WWE’s WrestleMania, making a cameo with her Furious 7 co-star the Rock to confront bad-guy authority figures Triple H and his wife, Stephanie McMahon. Of course, the war of words turned physical when Rousey, a lifelong wrestling fan, slammed Triple H and made McMahon yelp. UFC president Dana White has said Rousey won’t be going back to WWE, but Rousey says she’ll find her way back to the square circle.

“I don’t know what I want to do,” Rousey says when asked if she’d like to do a match. “I’m playing it by ear. Right now, all of the foreseeable future is planned out, and it’s starting to look like I’m going to be filming at the beginning of next year during the next WrestleMania. And to be honest, everyone keeps asking what I want to do and if I want to do it, but if you’re a real wrestling fan, you wouldn’t want to know. You’d want to be surprised anyway.”

How did Rousey’s WrestleMania moment come together? She thanks her agent — and the Rock.

“We sort of formed a team and approached WWE with it,” Rousey says. “They seemed to like it, and we creatively threw ideas back and forth. Everything was changing and evolving to the last second, and when we were out there, there were a couple of things that we were making up as we were going along. Letting things happen organically and kind of going with the flow with it all has really served me well in every facet of my life.

“Everything that we improvised went way better than what was planned,” she adds. “It was an amazing experience to see the process from the inside.”

Including throwing around Triple H.

“That was fun,” she says. “That wasn’t even a throw that I was planning to do. That was one of the things that didn’t go according to plan, and I made up a new throw on the spot, and it looked really cool.”

And there will be more opportunities outside the Octagon. Look for Rousey in the upcoming Entourage movie, and next year in Peter Berg’s action-thriller Mile 22. How will she balance her film and fight careers?

“I don’t know,” she admits. “There are very few examples to follow. It was very cool to have Rock on our team because he is the most similar model out there. It’s different, but there’s a lot that I can learn and steal from.”