Gina Carano: Not your ordinary knockout

BY JOE FERNANDEZ | joe.fernandez@newsday.com

8:18 PM EDT, June 25, 2007

Gina Carano (left) fighting Julie Kedzie in February. (Photo by EliteXC's Tom Casino)

She leaves the fighter in the cage.

When talking with mixed martial artist Gina Carano, you forget that she holds a perfect MMA record because she laughs at your corny jokes. You don't realize that she had a 12-1-1 mark as a professional Muay Thai fighter because she's as charming as she is dangerous.

Her beauty can floor you just as fast as one of her roundhouse kicks, but the EliteXC fighter wasn't always a knockout that knocked people out.

"I was about 179 pounds my first year of college," the 5-foot-8 Dallas native said. "Eating, drinking and all the other stuff that goes with the 'Freshman 15', well I put on the 'Freshman 30'. Then I got back to Las Vegas and I walked into Master Toddy's and my old trainer, Master Chan, was working there at the time and he walked up to me and he was like (in Carano's best Thai accent) 'Oh baby, baby, you look fat, you need to work out'. And I was like 'Oh God'. You know, your dad, your boyfriend or anyone else can give you [stuff] about being a little overweight and a little chubby, but when a little Thai man comes up to you and is like 'You're a fatty', he has no motivation except to tell me the truth so I got to fix that."

Well, it's fixed.

In four professional mixed martial arts matches, the 24-year-old has seen nothing but victories. Her exciting unanimous decision victory over Julie Kedzie in February on Showtime, which was the first nationally televised women's MMA event ever, earned a standing ovation from the DeSoto Civic Center (Miss.) crowd and cemented Carano as a rock star in mixed martial arts.

"There's nothing that's ever going to touch that fight," said Carano, who also fought the first women's fight sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commision, last June against Leiticia Pestova. "That made a big impact on the females in the sport and the sport in general. And the more I look back at it I'm like 'Wow'the response I've gotten back from people has just been insane."

So when is Carano fighting again? Probably this summer, according to sources at Showtime. Carano, who has lived in Las Vegas for the past 15 years, was scheduled to fight Ohio's Jan Finney on June 2nd in the L.A. Coliseum, but during filming of a reality show in Thailand, Carano took a hit of her own.

"I guess you can say I was having some stomach issues," Carano said with a laugh. "I was losing vitamins daily."

After passing out at a WEC event in May, Carano decided to call off the fight.

"This guy was hitting on me," Carano said again with a laugh. "I was just trying to watch the fight. I started getting sick to my stomach so I took a step forwardand all of a sudden the whole room started going dark. And I was like 'Damn, they got bad lighting in here'. But then I started falling down so the guy that was hitting on me actually helped me out to the [paramedics]."

In the meantime, Carano has been working as a broadcaster. She was a commentator for this past weekend's Showtime/EliteXC pay-per view undercard. Also in February, she was part of the broadcast team for the Fatal Femmes Fighting event, which will start to roll out a series of MMA fights as DirectTV pay-per view specials later this summer.

Carano, along with her world-renowned Muay Thai teacher Master Toddy, are featured on "Fight Girls," a reality show that airs on the Oxygen network and pits 10 Muay Thai women fighters against each other for a chance to fight in Thailand against some of the world's top kickboxers. The show was spawned from a 2005 independent movie called "Ring Girls," in which Carano was featured.

"Ten girls get picked to live in a house together," said Carano, who is a mentor on the show. "They fight against each other [until they're] down to five. Then the five that win go to Thailand. I was mentoring each girl that had to fight. Me and another mentor would take each fighter and kind of babysit them for a whole week and try to help them as much as possible. At the end, we'd corner them in their fights and one of them would win and the other one would go home. We took the five finalists to Thailand and they fought there."

It's a family affair when it comes to professional sports in the Carano household. Gina's dad, Glenn, was the Dallas Cowboys' backup quarterback from 1977-1983. So does the former QB give sound advice to his daughter before fights?

"He starts not making any sense after a while," She said. "All that goes through his head. I'll get random messages from him that say 'Jab, jab, jab', Keep that girl off of you' or 'Get off first'. That's where I get it from."