Tag: alternate history

MMA Alternate History: What if Gina Carano Beat Cris Cyborg in 2009?


(Photo via MMAWeekly)

By Matt Saccaro

There are points in MMA history that if one punch is ducked, one kick is thrown, one submission is secured, the entire fate of the sport changes.

Numerous fights hold the distinction of being important enough that history hung in the balance while the combatants tried to incapacitate one another, but one that doesn’t get much attention in the discussion of Griffin/Bonnar-level important fights is Gina Carano vs. Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos (or now Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino. Whatever, we’re just gonna call her Cyborg). Yeah, most people recognize its importance as the first BIG fight in WMMA history, but their appreciation for it doesn’t extend past that. And, historically, it shouldn’t. The fight was a big deal but it lead to nothing good. It sent the most recognized fighter in WMMA away from the sport forever. Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate, and others had to pick up the mantle that Gina Carano ran away from.

But, for a moment, let us pretend that the result of Carano vs. Cyborg was reversed. That’s what the second installment of CagePotato’s Alternate History series is based on: The fallout of Gina Carano hypothetically defeating Cyborg in Strikeforce.

What Would’ve Happened if Gina Carano Defeated Cyborg in 2009?

Before we get into counterfactuals, let’s briefly discuss what happened historically.

EliteXC (gee it fields weird to type that name again) had a burgeoning women’s division, no doubt to say “Hey, we have something the UFC doesn’t” and to draw attention away from the fact that their male roster wasn’t as loaded as the UFC’s. Not an issue though, because the women were awesome. Two specific ones were more awesome than most: Carano and Cyborg.

Carano was the most marketable female fighter at the time because she’s fucking gorgeous — and not just “fighter” hot, but seriously attractive. She could fight pretty damn well, too. Pushing Carano was therefore a no-brainer.

Cyborg isn’t conventionally attractive but she’s gifted at inflicting violence. Legitimate talent combined with an affinity for smashing fighters in a crowd-pleasing way is easy to promote.


(Photo via MMAWeekly)

By Matt Saccaro

There are points in MMA history that if one punch is ducked, one kick is thrown, one submission is secured, the entire fate of the sport changes.

Numerous fights hold the distinction of being important enough that history hung in the balance while the combatants tried to incapacitate one another, but one that doesn’t get much attention in the discussion of Griffin/Bonnar-level important fights is Gina Carano vs. Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos (or now Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino. Whatever, we’re just gonna call her Cyborg). Yeah, most people recognize its importance as the first BIG fight in WMMA history, but their appreciation for it doesn’t extend past that. And, historically, it shouldn’t. The fight was a big deal but it lead to nothing good. It sent the most recognized fighter in WMMA away from the sport forever. Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate, and others had to pick up the mantle that Gina Carano ran away from.

But, for a moment, let us pretend that the result of Carano vs. Cyborg was reversed. That’s what the second installment of CagePotato’s Alternate History series is based on: The fallout of Gina Carano hypothetically defeating Cyborg in Strikeforce.

What Would’ve Happened if Gina Carano Defeated Cyborg in 2009?

Before we get into counterfactuals, let’s briefly discuss what happened historically.

EliteXC (gee it fields weird to type that name again) had a burgeoning women’s division, no doubt to say “Hey, we have something the UFC doesn’t” and to draw attention away from the fact that their male roster wasn’t as loaded as the UFC’s. Not an issue though, because the women were awesome. Two specific ones were more awesome than most: Carano and Cyborg.

Carano was the most marketable female fighter at the time because she’s fucking gorgeous — and not just “fighter” hot, but seriously attractive. She could fight pretty damn well, too. Pushing Carano was therefore a no-brainer.

Cyborg isn’t conventionally attractive but she’s gifted at inflicting violence. Legitimate talent combined with an affinity for smashing fighters in a crowd-pleasing way is easy to promote.

Carano easily plowed through her competition while in EliteXC while Cyborg did the same. But the two never got to meet under the EliteXC banner. An off-balance jab from Seth Petruzelli straight to Kimbo Slice’s bearded chin sealed EliteXC’s fate (and, thankfully, sent the intolerable douchebag $kala back to obscurity).

After EliteXC’s demise, Strikeforce championed women’s MMA. They had Carano vs. Cyborg main event a show (the first time two women headlined a major MMA event) in August 2009. The fight wasn’t competitive. Cyborg was Gallagher and Carano was a hapless, helpless watermelon. Carano left the sport for Hollywood, never to return. Cyborg body-slammed Tito Ortiz, pissed hot for steroids, and beat up some fighters that she was way better than — a disappointing aftermath for one of the biggest fights in WMMA history.

But what if the fighter’s fortunes were reversed?

For argument’s sake, we’ll say that Carano didn’t botch the knee-bar she rolled for in the first round and managed to tap out Cyborg. What would’ve happened then?

Gina Carano (and a bunch of women for her to beat up) get brought into the UFC as soon as possible — and it ends badly.

Dana White is all about the money. He once swore that we’d NEVER see women in the UFC. But, here we are a couple years later with women in the UFC. What changed?

Ronda Rousey. The UFC realized they could hire a sexy, talented, silver-tongued woman and promote the shit out of her so that Dana White can buy more Ferraris while saying that the UFC pay scale is fine. White himself is open about this fact (well, the part about Rousey, anyway). He said so in an interview with Zuffa minister of propaganda journalist Ariel Helwani back in December:

“I’m putting my toe in the water, and I’m checking it out. There’s no doubt, for people who say, ‘Oh, this is the Ronda Rousey show,’ fuck right it is. You’re absolutely right. I’m not trying to shy away from that and say, ‘Oh no, we’re getting into women’s MMA.’ This is the Ronda Rousey Show.”

In this alternate timeline, Zuffa decides to bring the “Gina Carano Show” to the UFC as soon as possible after she beats Cyborg. Now, this is where it gets a little murky. Contractually speaking, it’s difficult to determine when the UFC could’ve poached the women away from Strikeforce. When Cyborg signed on with Strikeforce, she had a four-fight deal. After the Carano fight, Cyborg had two fights left. Finding Carano’s contract details has proved more difficult. All I can find is that she re-negotiated a new contract with Strikeforce after they purchased EliteXC’s assets. I’m no lawyer, so I’m not going to pretend to understand contractual intricacies. So, for the sake of this counterfactual, let’s pretend that the UFC lures Carano, Cyborg, and other prominent female fighters into the Octagon sometime after Carano-Cyborg but BEFORE Strikeforce can make the much-anticipated rematch.

What happens then and why does it end badly?

The UFC women’s division, in this alternate history, serves the same purpose that the current women’s division does: To act as a feeder system to the star at the top. In this alternate timeline, the star at the top is Gina Carano. Zuffa has Carano crush cans and has Cyborg do the same in order to build to an all-important rematch between the two. Maybe they even put them as coaches on a TUF season.

In the rematch, if Cyborg beats Carano, Carano takes her ball and goes to Hollywood like she did historically.

If Carano beats Cyborg in the rematch, the supply of money that can be made from the only feud in WMMA that people cared about is exhausted. Carano, sensing greener pastures and more money without having to damage her looks, leaves for Hollywood anyway. Once the cash cow at the top is gone, the feeder system no longer serves a purpose. Uncle Dana and Co. disband the women’s division (there’s a historical precedent for this; they disbanded the lightweight division in 2003).

“Never fucking again,” Dana White will tell reporters. Ronda Rousey’s emergence in 2011 isn’t even a blip on Zuffa’s radar screen. Why would it be? They tried their WMMA experiment and it failed. WMMA’s one chance in the UFC was blown.

MMA Alternate History: What if the WWE Purchased the UFC in 2001 Instead of Zuffa?


(McMahon poses with legendary WWE manager Paul Bearer (RIP). / Photo via Getty)

By Matt Saccaro

MMA history contains many compelling “what ifs” that could’ve changed the fate of the sport. If one path is taken, disaster. If another path is taken, absolution.

Some “what ifs” are more compelling than others. Not much changes if Floyd Sword or Rudyard Moncayo decides to never step into the cage. The timeline remains intact if Anderson Silva doesn’t get a DQ loss against Yushin Okami at Rumble on the Rock. But there are scenarios where the entire sport can change — where the timeline can split like in Back to the Future Part II.

This is the start of a series at CagePotato where we examine such scenarios, using historical fact to help create realistic historical fiction. Here is our first historical conundrum:

What if Vince McMahon Purchased the UFC in 2001?

In 2001, Vince McMahon’s WWE (then WWF) purchased the decaying WCW and the fledgling, bankrupt ECW. That year, McMahon’s XFL hosted its first (and only) season. It was quite a year for Vinny Mac. He destroyed his two rivals and expanded into a new sport.

2001 was also the year that Zuffa purchased the UFC from the company’s original owners, SEG. SEG was cash-strapped and could no longer carry the burden of running an MMA promotion in a country that was, at the time, hostile to MMA. The Fertitta Brothers bailed out Bob Meyrowitz and SEG, and the rest is history.

But what if, for one reason or another, The Fertitta brothers didn’t buy the UFC and give it to Dana White like they were tossing their kid the keys to the Ferrari? What if Vince McMahon decided to add another three letters to his shopping list…U, F, and C?


(McMahon poses with legendary WWE manager Paul Bearer (RIP). / Photo via Getty)

By Matt Saccaro

MMA history contains many compelling “what ifs” that could’ve changed the fate of the sport. If one path is taken, disaster. If another path is taken, absolution.

Some “what ifs” are more compelling than others. Not much changes if Floyd Sword or Rudyard Moncayo decides to never step into the cage. The timeline remains intact if Anderson Silva doesn’t get a DQ loss against Yushin Okami at Rumble on the Rock. But there are scenarios where the entire sport can change — where the timeline can split like in Back to the Future Part II.

This is the start of a series at CagePotato where we examine such scenarios, using historical fact to help create realistic historical fiction. Here is our first historical conundrum:

What if Vince McMahon Purchased the UFC in 2001?

In 2001, Vince McMahon’s WWE (then WWF) purchased the decaying WCW and the fledgling, bankrupt ECW. That year, McMahon’s XFL hosted its first (and only) season.  It was quite a year for Vinny Mac. He destroyed his two rivals and expanded into a new sport.

2001 was also the year that Zuffa purchased the UFC from the company’s original owners, SEG. SEG was cash-strapped and could no longer carry the burden of running an MMA promotion in a country that was, at the time, hostile to MMA. The Fertitta Brothers bailed out Bob Meyrowitz and SEG, and the rest is history.

But what if, for one reason or another, The Fertitta brothers didn’t buy the UFC and give it to Dana White like they were tossing their kid the keys to the Ferrari? What if Vince McMahon decided to add another three letters to his shopping list…U, F, and C?

After all, it was those letters — not anything else — that were the most important. Lorenzo Fertitta said the following to Fighters Only Magazine:

“I had my attorneys tell me that I was crazy because I wasn’t buying anything. I was paying $2 million and they were saying ‘What are you getting?’ And I said ‘What you don’t understand is I’m getting the most valuable thing that I could possibly have, which is those three letters: UFC. That is what’s going to make this thing work. Everybody knows that brand, whether they like it or they don’t like it, they react to it.’”

So what if Vince wound up with those letters and the power of the UFC brand?

It would’ve been bad — sport-killing level bad.

Commenters on MMA articles are always quick to point out that the WWE is “fake” and “gay” but what they likely don’t know is that the WWE once experimented with real, unscripted fighting in the form of quasi-mixed martial arts bouts in the late 1990s. It was a “shoot fighting” tournament called Brawl for All. And it sucked.

Don’t believe me? Here are two Brawl for All Matches: Steve Blackman vs. Marc Mero and Bart Gunn vs. “The Godfather”. Pretty shitty, right?

MMA and pro wrestling historian Jonathan Snowden explained the WWE’s reasoning behind this horrible tournament in his book Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling:

Actual mat wrestling on a professional wrestling program was a thing of the distant past. Brawl for All wasn’t a plan to bring it back either. Instead, it was busy-work for the WWF’s extra talent, guys kind of milling around in the back that the bookers had no plans for. They didn’t want to let anyone go; after all, their competitor down south could scoop them up and potentially make something out of them. WWF had taken a WCW castoff, “Stunning” Steve Austin, and made him the biggest star in the industry.

There’s also some more to the Brawl for All story. The WWE wanted “Dr. Death” Steve Williams to win the tournament. It was supposed to enhance Williams’ tough-guy street cred en route to booking him in a big-money feud with Steve Austin. The WWE learned why wrestlers started fixing fights in the first place: real fights don’t always end in the most profitable outcome. Williams didn’t win. He was KTFO’d by the eventual tournament winner, Bart Gunn. After Gunn won the tournament, the WWE booked him in a legit fight with famed gimmick boxer Butterbean at WrestleMania. Butterbean smashed Gunn’s brain into atoms. Vince’s experiment in real fighting ended…but not in our alternate reality.

From the way that Vince used “MMA” historically, we can make educated guesses as to how he’d use it in a timeline where he finds himself at the helm of the UFC in 2001. What does he do?

He botches it worse than Brock Lesnar’s shooting star press.

The WWE’s roster was bloated in 2001. They had their own WWE “superstars” and the imports from WCW and ECW. In real history, the WWE begins “brand extension” in an attempt to mitigate this problem. They treated their shows, Raw and Smackdown, as separate brands so as to create “competition” between them. They even had a “draft” where each brand chose different wrestlers.

But in the alternate reality where Vince McMahon owned the UFC, what’s to say that McMahon didn’t set up the UFC as some sort of hybrid MMA-pro wrestling organization, as Pancrase on steroids (figuratively and literally)?

In this reality, the WWE would send its mid and low carders to the UFC for the same reasons they pushed their mid and low carders into Brawl for All: A. They weren’t doing anything with them anyway. B. You could potentially turn one into a star through their abilities at beating up untrained fighters.

Thus, the UFC becomes akin to the old Toughman Contests on FX except with more marketing dollars and glitz behind it. Even if the product caught on, the WWE name would’ve tainted anything that happened in the cage. Who would believe a great comeback was really a great comeback and not a work if the UFC and the WWE were run by the same people?

Questions like this, and the constant shuffling of superstars between the UFC and the WWE, would blur the lines between real and fake, and ultimately lead to MMA and pro wrestling being seen as one in the same.

Meanwhile, legitimate MMA would live on in Japan until Pride’s demise, while in the United States, a slew of King of the Cage-level promotions would unfortunately represent the biggest organizations that true fighters could ply their craft in.

This alternate reality is a sad one for the sport. The UFC becomes a failure akin to the XFL and actual MMA fighters struggle in obscurity.