When I fought Gina Carano on Feb. 10, 2007, I made a rookie mistake: I made the walk barefoot.

The “EliteXC: Destiny” walkout started at the bottom of a backstage staircase that ascended to a platform located inside a giant replica of a dragon’s mouth. The idea was to climb the stairs and pause at the top, striking a pose as flames blazed out of the dragon’s nostrils and smoke billowed around the platform, creating a kind of mythic, spellbinding pageantry surrounding the journey to the cage.

This was a live promotional trick that EliteXC was really never given enough credit for, but even at the first show, you could witness MMA’s singular gift for somehow always subverting its own interests.

It’s a shame you can’t see this in the replay, but Charles Bennett (at that time called “Krazy Horse”—I’ve lost track of his subsequent nicknames) decided to create his own pageantry and pulled out a cell phone while making the walk as slowly as possible, as if strolling out of a fire-breathing dragon’s mouth was a normal Saturday night for him. As a self-promotional act, his was funny and fresh. But maybe not so great from the perspective of a timed live broadcast.

I did not have his composure. As a fighter, one of the clearest messages you will ever have in life is a backstage handler pointing at you, making a rolling motion and whispering loudly, “OK, go.”

The walkout is a special, very specific time. Your entire job is to get from point A to point B, with anywhere from 10 people to tens of thousands staring at you. There isn’t any possibility of turning around – and why would you want to? Stepping in the cage has been the fixed point of your consciousness for weeks.

That’s why it always surprises me when fighter walkouts are edited from digital replays of an event. It’s one of the few times when fighters, coaches, audience, producers and commentators are completely unified in one goal. For several distilled and concentrated moments, everything to everyone hinges on you putting one foot in front of the other. “Krazy Horse” understood this and exploited it. But I was too inexperienced to get it.

I may have had a few more fights than Carano, but the night we fought, it was the first time I had ever experienced fighting in a show that big, that high in stakes. My inexperience and I’m-just-lucky-to-be-here naivety resulted in several things one must never put up with as a professional:

You must never allow a promotion to shame you into believing it’s OK for your opponent to miss weight. Instead, you must insist that she strip and weigh in again. Don’t let them tell you: “She’s on weight under her clothes. You don’t want to embarrass her by making her strip, do you?” You must demand your own mats in the locker room. I was not given a locker room at all, but rather a corner of a dressing room reserved for the inexplicably large number of stiletto-booted ring girls, whose main job during the broadcast seemed to be gyrating to songs playing in their own heads. These dance routines neither synced with each other or the music playing in the arena. But the ladies were very nice about giving me space to warm up, and they even moved their purses over after my frustrated coach finally stole mats from another locker room. You must never allow yourself to feel like it’s OK or somehow your fault if the promoter grabs you in the lobby after the fights and tries to stick his slimy tongue in your bruised and swollen mouth. You must NEVER walk to the cage barefoot.

But these were lessons I learned after the fight. When the handlers hissed at me to go fast go fast up to the dragon head, I scurried forward, as eager to please as I was clumsy. And my bare feet skidded on the wooden steps, whose rough surface met my skin with a sharp poke.

There was enough adrenaline pulsing through me to ignore the bright throbbing in my right foot during the fight, and it was aided further by the amount of alcohol I used to treat the pain and welts from Carano’s punches and kicks after the fight, but during the 11-hour car ride home to Indiana with my coaches the next day, I tore at the skin of my heel and pried out a good half an inch of ragged wood. That dragon had teeth.

Related Julie Kedzie named matchmaker for Invicta Fighting Championship

No fighter makes the walk to the cage believing she will lose, but there are times when you become aware that a lot of people want you to. I arrived in Tunica, Miss., fully intending to spoil the plans of this new promotion. I was going to beat Gina Carano.

Although I wasn’t really aware of the historical significance of being the first live female MMA fight on cable television until I was doing press for fight week, once it sunk in I became determined to take over her spotlight. She seemed nice enough, but the amount of attention I noticed the promotion giving her while I skulked around the hotel hallways alone and unsure, that still stung.

Feb10.2007 11 years ago today, Gina Carano & Julie Kedzie competed in the first Women's MMA fight in history to air on live television pic.twitter.com/71kMtbOH28 — MMA History Today (@MMAHistoryToday) February 10, 2018

I was positive I was going to win. So much so that while filming the pre-fight promos, I told the producer that a line in the ridiculous script – “pretty girl isn’t going to look so pretty when I get through with her” – was a very unsportsmanlike thing for me to say to someone who would be getting her first loss at my hands.

Clearly, things went a little against my expectations here. But as much damage as I sustained to my face, legs and pride that night, I’m proud to have lost to an extraordinary woman.

I can watch the fight today and see what I did right and what I did wrong (tenacious timing on a couple of my takedowns; spirited ground work; terrible footwork and I simply never kept my chin down … though, damn it, I kept getting back up and coming at her, didn’t I?), but to be honest the actual memory is a blur. This is partially because Gina hit very hard, and also because she knocked out both of my contact lenses in the second round.

Later that night, Gina slipped an incredibly kind thank you note under my hotel room door with a quote from Mother Theresa that she had seen on my MySpace profile (hey, it was 2007). Years later, when we ended up training together for a brief period, my heart was far more broken by her leaving my gym than by losing that fight to her. Some people teach you grace just in the way they live day to day. And, let’s be honest here, aside from being the better fighter, you can even tell from our post-fight interviews that she had the charisma to carry the burden of that absurd nickname – “The Face of Women’s MMA.”

The right woman won that night, and the sport was the better for it.

The quote on the card Gina left me said, “I have found the paradox: that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only love.” Whether you are a Mother Theresa fan or not, it’s a beautiful sentiment. Whether you are a Gina Carano fan or not, it was a beautiful gesture. And whether you are a Julie Kedzie fan or not, you have to agree with me that all we can do sometimes is make that walk from point A to point B, regardless of who is watching, or what splinters we’ve acquired.

And remembering the walk I made 11 years ago reminds me of how much love and gratitude I have for MMA, for the fighters who have come before me, the fighters I have faced, and the fighters who have come after me, as well as for the training partners, foes and frenemies.

So if I could slip a note under all of your doors, I want to tell you to keep stepping forward. A decade after I lost, five years after I couldn’t stop losing, broke and broken, I can still assure you it was worth every damn splinter.

Julie Kedzie is the color commentator/analyst for Invicta FC and a retired UFC, Strikeforce and HOOKnSHOOT fighter. Follow her on Twitter at @julesk_fighter.

* * * *

“Today in MMA History” is an MMAjunkie series created in association with MMA History Today, the social media outlet dedicated to reliving “a daily journey through our sport’s history.”