Coming from a prefight photo shoot at Strikeforce 23 in Fresno, Calif., Jorge Gurgel – one of the headliners on MMA show – happened to walk past Zoila Frausto, an undercard competitor who was coming in for her camera session.
“My favorite color is hot pink and she walked in wearing a hot pink skirt,” Jorge said. “When she passed, I kinda looked back and complimented her on her skirt.
“And all she says is, ‘Maybe I’ll let you wear it sometime.’”
Zoila smiled and shrugged off his account of their first meeting nearly three years ago: “It was weigh-in day and I was ready to fight. I was feeling real feisty right then. And the way I saw it, I was sure he used all kinds of lines on girls.”
Jorge remembered his reaction as Zoila walked off that day: “I said, ‘Coooooach, did you see that!’
“And he just goes to me, ‘Jorge, get your freakin’ head outta wherever it is. We got a fight tomorrow!’ But I was like, ‘I’m just saying….sheeee’s good lookin’.”
The next night Jorge watched Zoila’s fight from his dressing room and said he was impressed by her gritty fighting style. Although she won her bout over Elisha Helsper that night, Zolia didn’t get to watch Jorge: “I ended up going to the hospital after the fight. I broke my foot.”
Regardless, her pink skirt seduction struck a chord with Jorge and since then he’s certainly helped her accessorize her look with some statement pieces.
Now Zoila has a:
• Big gold championship belt.
• Wedding ring.
• And, this Friday night at the Nutter Center – when she steps into the cage against Casey Norland at the Bellator Fighting Championships 78 show – she’ll be wearing Jorge’s homecoming crown.
Jorge and Zoila married 15 months after that chance meeting in Fresno. Today, they live in Springdale, train at Jorge’s JMG MMA Academy in West Chester Twp. and, it’s safe to say, there is no sports couple in the area quite like them.
Zoila – who has an 11-1 record and is the Bellator 115-pound women’s champion – is just returning to action after a broken right hand and then a torn ACL sidelined her for nearly 20 months.
Jorge – a well-travelled veteran who has fought in the upper levels of several MMA groups – owns a dozen mixed martial arts clubs in Canada and across the U.S. His centerpiece facility in West Chester is home to some 600 students and over a dozen nationally-acclaimed fighters.
And while almost everyone who follows MMA events has now heard of the Gurgels, that wasn’t always the case.
Especially not here in Dayton a little over a dozen years past.
Jorge’s career takes off
Jorge grew up in Fortaleza, Brazil, a city of 2.5 million on the country’s northeast coast. His older brother Bebeto came to Yellow Springs as a high school exchange student and then enrolled at Wright State.
After his own exchange experience in Illinois, Jorge returned to Brazil for two years of college and then wanted to move to California, but his mother insisted he join his brother at WSU.
He arrived in Dayton with little money, but soon found a job at The Diner on St. Clair. He was a busboy and cleaned the toilets.
“I didn’t have a car back then, so I rode the bus or walked and I can remember going through the snow from the Wright State campus to the Woodman Park Apartments where we lived,” he said “I was so poor back then and there were times when I was working where I saw a piece of chicken someone left so I’d wrap it up and bring it home for dinner.”
Later he became a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in Centerville and a bouncer at local night clubs.
He started teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu at a Centerville school and finally in November of 2002 he had his first pro bout - submitting Elvin Rodriguez in just 70 seconds at a show in St. Cloud, Minn. Three years later he got a lot of exposure when he was featured on the reality television series The Ultimate Fighter and lasted five episodes.
That’s actually where Zoila first saw him.
“We had a guy from Fresno fighting in the show, too, so we all watched and there was Jorge looking all Brazilian,” she said with a laugh. “And he had that funky red hair…Yeah, I saw him.”
After they shared that card in Fresno in 2009, they met again a few months later at a party in Las Vegas and Jorge invited her to Ohio for a visit. She ended up staying and Jorge became her trainer, her boyfriend and, in February 2011, her husband.
Zoila the warrior
Zoila is from a Mexican-American family and grew up in Madera, Calif. She was a four-sport athlete in high school, then played soccer at Fresno City College. Her father has a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do and that helped stoke her mixed martial arts interest. It did the same for her younger sister Stephanie, who is now 8-0 as a pro.
“When I was young, kids in school used to butcher my name and somehow from Zoila they got Xena, like The Warrior Princess from the TV show,” she said.
When she finally entered the MMA cage, the nickname followed her and so did that warrior reputation. Debuting in February of 2009, she won her first five bouts, lost once and then triumphed six more times with Jorge as her trainer.
Two years ago she won her Bellator title with a split decision over Megumi Fujii, who had come into the fight 22-0. In her next bout againt Karina Hallinan five months later, Zoila broke her right hand early in the first round, but fought through two more five-minute rounds and won the decision.
It took several months for that to heal and then, as she prepared for a November 2011 fight, she torn her ACL and underwent surgery. Jorge – who has had three ACL surgeries in the past seven years – helped her through her long arduous rehab.
Although Zoila couldn’t unleash full force kicks until recently, she did work daily with Jorge on her grappling skills and said she now “feels amazing” and is a more complete fighter than before.
Fighting at 115 pounds, though, was taking too much of a toll on her body – she was being forced to drop 20 and sometimes 30 pounds before fights – so she’s making the transition to a 125-pound. fighter.
And Jorge thinks that will lead to another championship.
Coming full circle
The other day – after Jorge and Zoila finished one of her final training sessions for Friday night’s fight – they sat down to talk in a corner of their West Chester academy. Behind them, Jason Butcher, a chiseled middleweight from West Virginia who calls Gurgel’s club his home, continued to work out for his undercard bout on the show.
“Zoila wants to become the first woman to hold two world titles and I think it will happen,” Jorge said. “I’m not saying this because she’s my wife. I truly believe there are only a handful of women from all weigh classes combined – say like Ronda Rousey and maybe four others — who can compete with her.
“Her fights are a real spectacle and it’s just going to get bigger and bigger now that she’s back.”
But just as Friday night’s fight is a launch pad for what’s ahead, it’s also a touchstone for what is past.
“I always wanted to fight in Dayton, but I never did,” Jorge said. “To come back now with a wife who is a champion and someone who is such a dominant fighter – and someone whose name is known by everybody – well, it feels like me fighting out there myself. To hear the whole crowd cheering for her, I get the same joy as if they were yelling for me.
“Every time I come to Dayton I have this humongous sense of pride. And Friday night my heart will be filled with feelings of accomplishment and joy.
“People say Jorge you’re living the American Dream and maybe I am. I have my own fighting career, my schools, my students, a great family, a great wife. I truly am blessed. I couldn’t ask for much more.”
Not even that pink shirt.
It now hangs in the closet.
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