Recently Strikeforce announced a reedonkously good line-up for the promotion’s upcoming April 17th show; a card that features three huge title fights in Dan Henderson vs. Jake Shields, Gegard Mousasi vs. “King Mo” Lawal, and Gilbert Melendez vs. Shinya Aoki. Aside from reports this AM that the UFC is looking to ‘restrict viewership’ of that show, by tossing together its own that same night, another problem that the Strikeforce card has been facing is a collective ‘how come that Russian dude aint fighting?’
Now of course we’re referring to Fedor Emelianenko, who demonstrated last November in his ‘booya’ KO of Brett Rogers, that he’s capable of packing the network television house. When Fedor wasn’t announced for the upcoming CBS show, it added more fuel to the rumour fire that relations between Strikeforce and the fighter’s management M-1 Global weren’t good.
In a recent interview with MMA Junkie, however, Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker acknowledged that the two organizations have been negotiating, and that an announcement regarding “The Last Emperor” could be coming shortly.
“I can tell you this: we’ve been having really good dialogue with M-1 Global and (M-1 Global president) Vadim Finkelchtein, and I think we’re in the final stages of buttoning everything up to make that happen again,” Coker said. “I think we’ll have an announcement soon on that, but I feel very confident we’ll be promoting Fedor here in the near future.”
Coker went on to say that Fedor would be fighting in the June/ July time frame. Sounds good to us.