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Former referee turned Bellator analyst ‘Big John’ McCarthy showed his support for Gina Carano in her alleged spat with UFC president Dana White.
On Monday’s episode of the Ariel Helwani Show, Gina Carano revealed she was offered to fight a prime Ronda Rousey for $1 million in the early 2010s. But according to the former Strikeforce women’s featherweight title challenger, it was instantly killed by a single text message from UFC president Dana White.
As explained by Carano, she asked White to give her six months until she found a team to train with. White, however, did the exact opposite and announced her upcoming UFC signing the very next day.
To make matters worse, she says she also received a text message from White calling her a “b-tch.”
“When people hold money over your head, which they have done since I was a little girl, it’s just never been a turn on for me,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with authority, I just have a problem with abused authority.”
In a recent episode of the “Weighing In” podcast, hosts Josh Thomson and “Big John” McCarthy agreed that Carano should not have been in the receiving end of the abuse that she explained.
“Gina’s a different person. She’s very shy. She’s very quiet,” McCarthy said (transcript by BJPenn.com). “She has her people that she talks to and she wasn’t happy about it. One of the people she used to talk to a lot was Randy Couture. Then there was a text that was sent.
“It wasn’t meant to be sent to her but it was a mistake. Somehow it got sent to her. It basically was saying she wasn’t being easy-going in this negotiation and what was going on. And she sent it back to Dana and he said that was sent to you. And from that point she didn’t talk to him, she just iced him out.
“That’s the kind of person she is and that’s the way she should be,” he continued. “She should not take abuse from anybody over anything when it comes to the negotiation of a fight. She had agreed to something, they had agreed to something, and someone didn’t hold up their end of the agreement. And then they’re upset about the fact that someone’s not being helpful to them when they haven’t held up their end of the agreement. That’s what happens.”
As a former UFC fighter himself, Thomson chimed in to support Carano’s claim about White’s nature as a promoter.
“There’s a level of mistreatment, abuse, that you have from your promoter the athlete,” he said. “It doesn’t go that way with all promoters. But we’ve seen it time and time again with Dana.”
Carano last fought in 2009, when she faced Cris Cyborg for the inaugural Strikeforce women’s featherweight title. She lost via first-round TKO, marking her only career defeat.