Why MMA just can't let go of Gina Carano

There are two things just about everyone seems to agree on regarding a potential fight between Gina Carano and UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey: 1) It would be a hugely profitable fight for the UFC, and 2) It would not be particularly competitive.

It seems weird that these two ideas can live together so peacefully in our minds, and yet there they are, side by side, splitting the rent and shopping for linens together.

I think part of it is this Carano-withdrawal syndrome we’ve been dealing with off and on for about the past five years. She came, she saw, she sort of almost conquered. She was a big deal, and then she left us the first chance she got. She went off and made movies, which nobody could really blame her for since they pay better and exist in a world where the wholesome-looking girl next door almost always wins in the end. So unlike MMA, where that girl just gets beat up by a terrifying Brazilian woman.

But doing movies means promoting movies, and for Carano that means going on talk shows and dropping coy hints about her fighting future. We eat it up. All she has to do is mention that she has a meeting scheduled with UFC president Dana White, and we’re ready to pencil her in for an immediate title shot.

How would you possibly justify such a fight? You can’t really argue, as promoters love to do, that it “just makes sense.” It doesn’t. Carano doesn’t even do this sport anymore. Back when she did do this sport, she didn’t compete in this weight class. And if she did manage to make a weight limit 10 pounds lighter than the one she struggled to meet back when she was in her mid-20s and fighting twice a year, she’d almost certainly get stomped by Rousey.

That’s why the only justification possible is an appeal to popularity. The UFC could do it because people would pay for it. But why would people pay for it, if they don’t believe it would be a good fight or even a reasonable fight according to any logical progression?

The only answer I can come up with is, it’s because we assume there are a lot of suckers out there, though we are definitely not among them. No way. Not us. It’s all those other jerks who’d buy this. Then we’d get to go to their houses on fight night for a change, eating all their snacks and running up their cable bill.

We act like that, but I wonder if we mean it. I know just from looking at our stats (much like White, we have numbers, you know what I mean?) that fight fans still love them some Gina Carano. I tell my boss I’m going to write a column about her, and the first thing he thinks is, “Good, people will click on that.” [Editor's note: No one likes a tattletale, Ben.] It’s gotten to where the best case you can make for her is to point out that people still type her name into Yahoo! search boxes a lot. You could make the same case for a Kardashian sister, and it would only be slightly more ridiculous.

I think the truth is that a part of us wouldn’t hate this fight as much as we claim (or would genuinely enjoy hating it even while watching it), because MMA fans still have this inferiority complex. We’ve got this weirdo pseudo-sport, part frustrating carnival and part overly earnest gladiator stuff. We want people to pay attention to MMA, and this fight would get them to do that. It would also probably make the UFC a bunch of money, which for some reason seems to be all the justification that some people need, as if they think they’re secret stockholders or something.

Seems like we inadvertently reveal something when we admit that a fight wouldn’t be any good and yet would be really popular, though. To some extent I get it. Carano’s a good-looking woman who can fight (or at least she could five years ago, right up until she got throttled by the very same woman who’s now on the UFC’s unofficial blacklist). She probably couldn’t do much to a fighter like Rousey these days, but hey, the weigh-ins alone would outdraw most other MMA events.

I guess my question is, why are so concerned with what would get other people to watch, yet not at all concerned with what they’d see once they got here? Do we still think there are that many people out there who haven’t made up their minds about MMA? Are we still telling ourselves that they’d really like us if they got to know us? I don’t know.

What I do know is that if you really want to see Gina Carano that badly, you’d probably get more for your money if you bought a movie ticket instead.