BEVERLY HILLS, California - At 12, Laila Ali told her mother she was going to move out when she turned 18 and open a nail salon. She did just that.

So when Muhammad Ali's daughter announced her intentions to box professionally, there was nothing her parents could say to deter her.

"If I want to do something, I just do it," she said. "I really don't care what anybody has to say. I've always done everything that I wanted to do."

Ali and Veronica, his third of four wives, aren't thrilled about their 21-year-old daughter's professional debut next week.

Laila will fight April Fowler in a four-round bout Oct. 8 at Turning Stone Casino in upstate New York, on a card featuring Donovan "Razor" Ruddock.

It will be Laila's first bout; Fowler is 0-1 as a pro.

"My dad never had this much attention on him when he was first fighting," she said. "It's a lot of pressure on me."

Laila couldn't resist imitating a bit of her father's famous rhyming for the 18 TV cameras and gaggle of photographers and reporters who came to see her.

"There are so many expectations that I must meet, but there is only one promise that I can make. On Oct. 8 in Verona, New York, April Fowler will suffer a painful defeat," she said, prompting laughter.

She said her father, who has Parkinson's Syndrome, hasn't decided whether to attend.

"My father being at my fight would take a lot of the attention away from me, and there will be a lot of media surrounding him," she said.

"It's also not going to be easy for him to watch me get into the ring. But whether he's there or not, I'm coming to the ring to do what I need to do and I'm serious about it."

She said her parents, who divorced when Laila was seven, are skeptical about her new profession.

"He doesn't want me to get hurt, but he's going to support me 100 percent as a father," she said. "My mother is not comfortable with me going into the ring, but she knows that I know what I'm doing."

The elder Ali painted the worst possible picture of boxing for the youngest of his nine children.

"He always wants to make sure that I know what I'm doing is not easy, and you're going to get hit and bruised and the wind is going to get knocked out, but that's just my father," she said.

"He always takes your mind to the worst possible scenario to see if you're going to still want to go forward with it."

Laila, who runs her nail salon in Los Angeles, decided a year ago that she wanted to box professionally after picking up the sport as a form of exercise. She's even sparred with her father.

"I just love how it feels," she said.

And what about somebody roughing up her attractive face?

"I'm going to get hit, I'm going to get my face swollen, it's going to happen," she said. "I'm just going to deal with it."

Laila's six-day-a-week training regimen involves running three to four miles, jumping rope, sparring and working on punching bags.

Laila was too young to see her father fight in person, but she's watched tapes of his bouts and says her favorite is Ali's knockout of George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.

"My footwork is very good like my father's. I'm also very strong and very confident," the 5-foot-10 (178-centimeter), 168-pounder (75.6-kilograms). "My movement in the ring is just like my dad."

Dub Huntly said he trains Laila like he would any male boxer.

"When I get in the gym, I don't look at her as a lady, I look at her as a fighter," he said. "She's mean and she's tough. She's not in it just for the money; she wants to be a champion."