Gina Carano has spoken openly in the past about how her communications with Dana White broke down.
On May 16, Carano will face Ronda Rousey in what will be her first MMA bout since 2009.
The news of both women making their comebacks was surprising enough but the other details also turned some heads following the announcement.
Jake Paul reacted to the Rousey vs Carano news due to the fact that this fight will headline his promotion’s first MMA event and bring the sport to Netflix for the first time.
We could’ve seen these two fighters meet in a dream bout way back around 2014 if the president of the UFC had handled things differently.
LATEST NEWS: Gina Carano details conversation with Ronda Rousey that convinced her to end 11-year retirement
Gina Carano said that Dana White’s handling of her UFC fight with Ronda Rousey saw it collapse
Making a return to MMA in 2014 would’ve already been a big step for Gina Carano to take following a loss to Cris Cyborg in 2009 being the final fight on her record.
However, the UFC showed significant interest in pitting her against their bantamweight champion, Ronda Rousey.
Carano detailed what went wrong to stop this fight from happening when saying in a 2019 appearance on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show that Dana White had offered one million dollars for the fight.
She said that while she was “stoked” about the idea, her message to the UFC president was that she’d need them to be patient because it would take her a while to build a team, return to regular training and start cutting some weight.
“So I told him, ‘You’ve got to just be able to sit on this for about six months, Dana,’” she recalled. “‘You can’t say anything and let me get situated with that in mind because that sounds great and I’d love to do it.’”
Things immediately spiraled when White spoke about this in the media the very next day, which Carano says only made things more difficult for her.
Any chance of the fight happening ended when she claims to have received a text message from White that used explicit language about her holding the fight up.
Her response questioning whether it was sent to the wrong person was met with the UFC boss doubling down that it was meant for her, though Carano did add that he later apologized for this in person.
“I don’t think that that was the kind of environment I wanted to come back in to and so I just cut all communication after that text,” she…
2026-02-17 22:30:00
