In the back, Zingano rearranges her gear -- duffel bags, clothes, shoes, a bedroll with a woolen blanket for sleeping between workouts. "People at the UFC have been calling this a warm-up fight," she says of her bout with Nunes. "But there's no warm-up fight at this level. Everyone's tough." And besides, "I feel like this is the most important fight of my life."
Months earlier, Zingano had been at the dog park with Brayden and their corgi-shepherd mutt, McKenna, when she heard from UFC president Dana White that she was being passed over for a title shot at Rousey a third time. "He said I'd become 'irrelevant,'" she recalls. "That I had disappeared."
White wasn't interested in the circumstances surrounding her hiatus. Zingano says she understands. "He has a company to run." But the words still burned, so she did the only thing she could think to do: She used them to flagellate herself. She repeated the claim of her irrelevance in her brain like a bizzaro-world mantra, determined to make it a lie. She was not going to allow pain to erase her.
"Life is tough, but I'm tougher. It was time to make fucking lemonade."
