Gianna is, to put it simply, a cocky little shit. She's prone to bouts of taunting her opponents, making a show of the fight rather than just fighting, and she talks. My God, she talks. She talks, the entire fight. With every dodge, with every parry, with every sprawl, she gets more and more confident, and more and more provocative.

 

And, frankly, she doesn’t have the pedigree to be as cocky as she is. She’s no national champion wrestler, she’s no muay thai world champion, nor is she a black belt in BJJ that’s won the worlds. She’s a kid from Arizona that discovered she has good reflexes to avoid taking much damage, and she’s parlayed that into a fighting career. Undefeated as an amateur, she gave herself the nickname “The Ghost” because her opponents “hit nothing but air.”

 

With every win, her confidence grew, until she decided she was done being an amateur, and she had to make a choice: she could dip her toes into the professional scene, get a little experience before trying to take on the big names--or she could dive in head-first, and see what happens.

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Born Joanna Hayes, the woman that became Gianna Howard was, at least outwardly, the “perfectly normal” girl growing up. She was everything you would expect from a small town girl, albeit more of a tomboy than might’ve been expected. Then...something happened. “Something” isn’t clear--she never tells the same story twice. In some instances, she ran away from home; in others, she got kicked out for...breaking whatever rule; in still some others, she just left home because she wanted to.

 

What she keeps consistent is that she changed her name once she turned 18, and moved to Phoenix. It was there that she discovered fighting, through Impact MMA. She was chiefly interested in just “throwing hands,” so she started training in boxing--then, eventually, took up kickboxing. After only a couple months, with no prior experience and only the confidence of youth on her side, she took her first fight--and won, by decision, notably only getting hit 6 times in 9 minutes.

 

To say her ego got boosted by the win would be to say the ocean is “a little damp;” she would keep taking fights, and kept winning them. She started training in grappling, purely as a defense originally, but eventually she started taking MMA fights as well. After a combined 14 amateur bouts, she decided to tryout for--and eventually be accepted into--Throne MMA, and turned pro.