Gina Carano Says She Turned Down An Offer To Face Ronda Rousey Because Of Dana White

For years, fans of mixed martial arts asked why Gina Carano was not brought in to face Ronda Rousey in what would have been a mega-female MMA bout. Now, Carano has explained exactly why that match never went down in the UFC.

After Carano met with then-UFC boss Lorenzo Fertitta and UFC president Dana White, an agreement was made that would have paid Carano a great deal to take the bout. However, having been inactive for several years, she asked for time to prepare and train properly.

That is when things went off the hook.

"(White) kept (putting pressure on through the media for Carano to sign) and kept on doing that and I'm still searching for a team and feeling all that pressure," she said on the Ariel Helwani Show (thanks to MMA Fighting for the quotes). "Then he sent me a text message that said, 'This (expletive) is effin' us around' or something like that.

"I sent a text message back and said, 'I think that you sent that to the wrong person.' And he said, 'I don't think I did' and that was the last conversation we ever had over text message because I don't think that was the kind of environment that I wanted to come back into. So I just cut all communication after that text."

That meeting came in 2014 and Carano says she was offered a million dollars to face Rousey, who was in her run as UFC champion at that time. She said she asked for six months to get prepared before anything official would be made public.

Carano and Cris Cyborg, who has had her fair share of issues with White over the year, made history in 2009 when they headlined a major MMA event for the first time. The card drew almost 14,000 and generated 576,000 viewers for Showtime, with Cyborg scoring a first round TKO victory.