Willa Ford

So how did you spend your Super Bowl halftime? Were you watching the Rolling Stones through your fingers, hoping with all your might that this year's spectacle wouldn't end in another wardrobe malfunction? Or were you glued to the sight of Willa Ford and her beautiful friends playing full-contact football in their panties? In case you foolishly fumbled the chance to witness the unmistakably buff 25-year-old playing quarterback in the annual pay-per-view celebration known as Lingerie Bowl, we'll let Willa herself let you know how to recognize her more easily in future contests. "A lot of the other girls go out there to smile and be cute," she says. "I'm always the one with war paint on."

Feats of athleticism come naturally to the intensely driven, no-holds-barred Florida native. A lifelong tomboy and an amateur boxer to boot, Willa hosted the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, a reality-TV competition in which amateurs compete for a contract with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. She considers herself the first female UFC personality sufficiently qualified to analyze the bloody battles of the Octagon for devoted home viewers. "In the past they'd hired Lisa Dergan and Carmen Electra, and the fans basically chewed them up and spit them out," she says. "I live and breathe the sport, so I know what I'm talking about." Growing up in the rural town of Ruskin, near Tampa, Willa came of age playing softball and riding go-karts, but at the age of 11 she was recruited into the same Florida teen-pop farm system that would also yield Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore. By the time she was 20, Willa had already racked up an album, Willa Was Here, a hit debut single, (text concluded on page 131)Willa Ford(continued from page 63) "I Wanna Be Bad," and a serious relationship with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter. But soon after, she gave it all up. "Music became this corporate world where you have to compromise everything, and I'm uncontrollable," she says. "I was recording in New York, and I got in a cab, called home and said, 'I'm finished. I'm not doing this anymore.' I mean, I had so much more fun taking my clothes off for Playboy than I ever had sitting in a studio writing a song."

Instead, Willa spent the next year and a half reinventing herself: She took up boxing, began working with the UFC and discovered a best friend (and sometime boyfriend) in the UFC's hulking six-foot-two, 205-pound Chuck "the Iceman" Liddell, the light-heavy-weight champion as of press time.

Don't assume, though, that muscles are the only way to win Willa over. "I like tough boys because I'm tough," she says, "and if I can take you over--either mentally or physically--we've got a problem. But I like somebody who's brilliant, too, and if a guy can really out-smartass me, then I'm totally in love." But be warned that in the time she's spent with her UFC pals, she's picked up a few fighting strategies of her own. "I'm more of a verbal fighter, but if somebody ever hurts one of my friends or lays a hand on me, they're going to get laid out."

Willa once came close to testing her fighting skills outside the ring, on a night when she and onetime nemesis Paris Hilton--who also once dated Nick Carter--found themselves in Las Vegas's Hard Rock Hotel at the same time. Willa happened to be backed up by her UFC entourage. "We were sitting in a private booth," she says, "and Paris wouldn't stop walking back and forth in front of us. Chuck went over to her security guards and said, 'Listen, you see all those guys over there? We're with Willa Ford. If Paris comes closer and Willa snaps, I can't help anything. If you get in there and you touch Willa, we're all throwing down on you guys.'" Needless to say, when Paris and Willa next crossed paths, at the Playboy Mansion Halloween party, the celebrity heiress was eager to bury the hatchet. "She was so apologetic," Willa reports. "She took the high road, and we're cool now."

With a film and TV career coming into focus, Willa says she's much more at ease with herself than the teen-pop princesses who were once her peers. "If you look at all of them right now--Britney, Christina, Jessica, Mandy--and what they're doing, honestly, how happy are they?" she wonders. "I just think they're burnt. They didn't take time to slow it down for a minute, decide what they really wanted and then figure out how they were going to get it."

Judging from what we're seeing, Willa's got what it takes to get wherever she wants to go. Brains and beauty--a knockout combination.

See more of Willa at cyber.playboy.com.