Tell you what, Jake Paul isn’t one to let ex-fighters slip off into that good night, and nobody taps into “old age raving at the close of day” better.
His Most Valuable Promotions surprised an MMA world waiting on news of the UFC’s White House card Tuesday by announcing a mega-fight between Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano, which will take place May 16 in Los Angeles in the year 2026. If his intention was to make 2014 rage with envy, he of course came through with flying colors. This is a booking that comes a full decade beyond the time when it would’ve been considered, without hyperbole, the biggest women’s fight in MMA history.
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Still, even if you heard that news and typed out the only three appropriate letters to meet the occasion — WTF? — to see those two names together somehow carries a magnitude that defies even the passage of time. In a single fight, which is scheduled for five rounds, the lineage of women’s MMA will try to do harm to one another live on Netflix. This is Typhon vs. Zeus for women’s MMA. If there had been no Gina Carano in the aughts, there wouldn’t have been a Ronda Rousey in the teens. If there was no Ronda Rousey in the teens, there might still not be women in the UFC today.
That one baton pass gave a thousand women their livelihoods. They are the authors of an era, of an avenue for possibility, and they steered a sport with so many happy machismos and misogynies into a place that other sports have failed to reach. Which is to say, they not only leveled the playing field, but they seamlessly showed the blockbuster potential of women’s fighting. Rousey’s reign was transcendent in a way that can only be rivaled by Conor McGregor, and together that tandem drove up the $4.2 billion asking price in 2016 when Zuffa sold to WME-IMG.
Significance of that kind sells itself, and a Rousey-Carano fight — even so many years past its expiry — will do big business. MVP will hammer home every legacy angle possible, to give as much dream to the “dream fight” as they can about the Pioneer and the Trojan Horse who opened up and ultimately changed the sport of MMA. Yet, as we well know, séance bookings of this kind, where fighters are dredged up from the past, can so easily become sad affairs.
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Which brings back us back to the broader question of … WTF?
It’s kind of funny, at least through a lens of gamesmanship, that this fight should fall under Jake Paul’s MVP banner rather than the UFC’s. If the UFC hadn’t blown Rousey up as it did beginning in 2013, there’d be no MVP jumping in to cash in on the residuals in 2026. And make no mistake, ’26 is an apt year to hold the event, as Carano and Rousey haven’t competed in a cage for 26 years cumulative years.
Twenty-six years.
If we were a nation easily spooked by red flags, this might be a dealbreaker. Fortunately that ain’t us, and MVP flies red flags just as high and proud as the American sky will hold. There’s a good chance that Rousey-Carano wouldn’t seem as anachronistic if Paul hadn’t brushed off the relic of 57-year-old Mike Tyson in late 2024 for a record-breaking boxing match on Netflix. Once you slug it out with a proud member of AARP for viewing pleasure — 108 million live global viewers — the lines of decency begin to blur.
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This one is tame by comparison.
Still, Carano last fought in the summer of 2009, which was a mega-fight for the times against the overlapping Strikeforce champion Cris Cyborg. As expected, she was walloped in that fight. In part because she was undersized for the matchup, and in part because … well, let’s just say that Carano in her prime would very likely find herself an underdog against many bantamweights on the UFC’s active roster right now. She didn’t really stand a chance against Cyborg.
It should also be mentioned that Carano had a grand total of eight professional MMA bouts, not counting the ones that occurred against the Klatoonian Raiders on “The Mandalorian.” The great thing about early pioneers — especially those who can double as Hollywood stars who can appear elegantly on the red carpet and tastefully topless on the cover of “ESPN the Magazine” — is that they don’t need to be the best. They merely need to be first.
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From her perspective, MMA was a chapter of her life. She’s not coming back to see if the old blunderbuss still fires straight, she’s coming back for the many zeroes that didn’t appear on those earlier checks.
Rousey last fought in December of 2016, and even the come-latelies might remember how that went against Amanda Nunes at UFC 207. She was knocked out in 48 seconds. That fight is all-the-more memorable for her coach Edmond Tarverdyan screaming out “head movement!” in the same tragic tone as Herbert Morrison cried “Oh, the humanity” at the Hinderberg disaster.
It was her second straight loss, and she disappeared from the Octagon for good.
Or at least, from unchoreographed competition until now.
But man, the red flags are waving if you are to believe her that she suffered long-term brain damage from successive concussions in her career spanning back to her days as an Olympic judoka. They wave for anyone who saw the limitations of her game beyond Plan A of judo-throwing an opponent into an armbar submission.
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Perhaps we’re nitpicking, as the intervening years as a pro wrestler might’ve given her better perspective on things. Perhaps this is a chance for her to go out on top, which ate away at her for so long.
As for the rest?
The good thing about fighting is we can do away with all the missteps and cancellations of the principals and focus on the more sellable narratives. It is true that Carano got fired from her gig at Lucasfilm for posting comparisons between the current political climate to that of Nazi Germany on social media, sentiments that would barely raise an eyebrow a few years on. Rousey, who at one point during the height of her boom, echoed sentiments that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a hoax, yet she still ended up breaking news for her fight with Holly Holm live on “Good Morning America.”
In fighting, bygones can be bygones.
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What remains is Rousey’s bad reputation with fans in the MMA space. She was vilified for the petulant way she left the sport that she once championed so well. At a remove of a decade, those sentiments have remained intact. Many fans haven’t forgotten. Rousey hasn’t done herself any favors by blaming the media and fans for her actions.
Maybe it was inevitable that she’d come back for one last fight, if even for a payday that she simply couldn’t pass up. To reappear close to a decade after her prime, there’s a chance at some closure there. Or at least, that’s an angle they might consider in the build-up to May.
In any case, Rousey-Carano is a fight we never thought we’d get, and we’re getting it a decade late. Is late better than never? MVP suspects it knows the answer, even if many of us think we know better.
