Arguably two of the biggest fighters in all of MMA are Gina Carano and former UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion Ronda Rousey.
A bout was nearly put together between the two after Carano met with UFC President Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta.
“When Ronda Rousey became popular, I remember they (Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta) had finally called for a meeting, and I walked in this restaurant, and they looked like these two big muscly guys at the table in like the middle of Hollywood,” Carano said on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show (via Danny Segura of MMA Junkie). “I remember thinking, ‘What took you guys so long? I’ve been … what took you so long?’ So they were like, ‘OK, we’d love to offer you a million dollars. We’d love to have that fight.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that sounds great, but I’m going to need you to do me a favor, then, because I’ve been acting, I’m not active in any gym. So it’s going to take me, you know, you re going to have to give me some time to build a team or join a team.’ And it’s not an easy thing, as I’m sure all the fighters know. You have to find a team or build one that’s going to be into what you’re doing, and if you haven’t actively been a part of anything, you can walk in as Gina Carano or whoever, but you’re still going to have to find the people who are really going to be there for you, and that takes time. So I told them, ‘You got to be able to just sit on this for about six months, Dana. You can’t say anything and let me get situated with that, because that sounds great and I’d love to do it.’ So it was a nice dinner, and we all left positive. I left stoked, and I was like, ‘OK, well this makes sense. This is my moment to come and be back in there.”
If the bout would’ve come together, it would been the first time Carano fought since a loss to Cyborg at Strikeforce: Carano vs. Cyborg in August of 2009.
However, an errant move by White, who would discuss the yet to be signed bout with the media, would discourage Carano from accepting the fight.
“Then like the next day, Dana was out there talking about me, talking about my name, and telling people that he was going to sign me – and I don’t even have a team yet,” Carano explained. “I was like, ‘That’s not what we discussed; you were supposed to give me at least six months to kind of find a team.’ Then he started trying to put on the pressure through the media, and it was a bummer, because I told him over text message that’s not what we talked about. I need time. Now I’m going to walk into a gym, and people are going to know that’s what I’m doing. I need to build trust if I’m going to find people. So then he kept on doing that, and I was still kind of searching for a team and feeling all that pressure, and then he sent me a text message saying, ‘This (expletive) is something, like (expletive) us around,’ something like that. And I sent a text message back and I sent, ‘I think you sent this out to the wrong person,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think I did.’ That was the last conversation that we had over text message. Because I don’t think that was the kind of environment that I wanted to come back into. I cut all communication after that text. Then I remember seeing him when Mike Tyson and my dad were getting honored at a sports hall of fame in Las Vegas, and he did come over and genuinely apologized. But, yeah, I just don’t think even $1 million, you shouldn’t, when people hold money over your head, which they have done since I was a little girl, it’s just never been a turn-on for me. I don’t have a problem with authority; I just have a problem with abused authority, and that’s my thing, so that was the end of that conversation.”
Carano admitted in the interview that she still thinks about fighting, but would rather accept movie roles in the end.
