Some selected highlights from our friends around the MMA blogosphere. E-mail [email protected] for details on how your site can join the MMA Link Club…
– ‘Rampage’ Jackson’s Toughest Role? Convincing Us He Still Wants to Fight (MMA Fighting)
– Five Fights You Shouldn’t Miss at UFC 130 (LowKick)
– MTV Is Planning a New MMA Reality Show in the Vein of a ‘Redneck Jersey Shore’ (MiddleEasy)
– Eddie Wineland vs. Joseph Benavidez Booked for ‘UFC Live 5’ in August (Five Ounces of Pain)
– Antonio McKee Thinks He May Have Been Cut by UFC Because He ‘Rubbed Joe Silva the Wrong Way’ (MMA Mania)
– UFC 129 ‘St. Pierre vs. Shields’ Did Really Big Business (MMA Convert)
– Zoila & Jorge Gurgel talk MMA & Marriage (TheFightNerd)
– ‘Strikeforce Challengers’ Headed to Las Vegas (NBC Sports MMA)
Some selected highlights from our friends around the MMA blogosphere. E-mail [email protected] for details on how your site can join the MMA Link Club…
– ‘Rampage’ Jackson’s Toughest Role? Convincing Us He Still Wants to Fight (MMA Fighting)
– Five Fights You Shouldn’t Miss at UFC 130 (LowKick)
– MTV Is Planning a New MMA Reality Show in the Vein of a ‘Redneck Jersey Shore’ (MiddleEasy)
– Eddie Wineland vs. Joseph Benavidez Booked for ‘UFC Live 5′ in August (Five Ounces of Pain)
– Antonio McKee Thinks He May Have Been Cut by UFC Because He ‘Rubbed Joe Silva the Wrong Way’ (MMA Mania)
– UFC 129 ‘St. Pierre vs. Shields’ Did Really Big Business (MMA Convert)
– Zoila & Jorge Gurgel talk MMA & Marriage (TheFightNerd)
– ‘Strikeforce Challengers’ Headed to Las Vegas (NBC Sports MMA)
Thanks so much to everybody who sent in submissions for last week’s Trash Talkin’ Kids t-shirt design contest. We were overwhelmed by the number — and sheer stupidity! — of your designs, and we honestly had a blast going through them. With the help of our friends at Trash Talkin’ Kids, we picked out eight finalists based on humor, creativity, and effort. To see all of the submissions, head over to facebook.com/trashtalkinkids, where they’ve uploaded the finalists plus a bunch more entries that didn’t quite make the cut.
And now we need your votes to make this thing official. Please check out the Elite 8 after the jump, and vote for your favorite in the poll at the bottom of the page. The two highest-voted designs will both be receiving actual TTK shirts. Winners will be announced Thursday. Aaaaaand go!
(The “Ace”: Coming soon from Trash Talkin’ Kids.)
Thanks so much to everybody who sent in submissions for last week’s Trash Talkin’ Kids t-shirt design contest. We were overwhelmed by the number — and sheer stupidity! — of your designs, and we honestly had a blast going through them. With the help of our friends at Trash Talkin’ Kids, we picked out eight finalists based on humor, creativity, and effort. To see all of the submissions, head over to facebook.com/trashtalkinkids, where they’ve uploaded the finalists plus a bunch more entries that didn’t quite make the cut.
And now we need your votes to make this thing official. Please check out the Elite 8 after the jump, and vote for your favorite in the poll at the bottom of the page. The two highest-voted designs will both be receiving actual TTK shirts. Winners will be announced Thursday. Aaaaaand go!
Before his fight against Nate Marquardt at UFC 109, Chael Sonnen was just another UFC middleweight — far, far away from challenging Anderson Silva for his belt. But the charismatic Oregonian had plans of his own; Sonnen used his second-to-none trash-talking skills and the interest in Nate Marquardt’s campaign for a rematch against Anderson Silva to call out the Champ, eventually forcing himself into the mix for a shot at the title. Of course, Chael Sonnen backed up his talk by bulldozing Marquardt during all three rounds, to earn a spot in line against the winner of UFC 112’s Silva vs. Maia match-up.
Whether you like him or not, it’s hard to deny that Chael Sonnen has an exciting personality. But Sonnen has suffered his share of setbacks, and now finds himself in an ongoing battle against his toughest opponent to date – the Nevada and California athletic commissions. When looking for another UFC middleweight even remotely as controversial and charismatic as Chael Sonnen, the only name that comes to mind is Michael “The Count” Bisping. It’s no surprise that the pair were originally set to resurrect The Ultimate Fighter series, something that even Brock Lesnar has struggled to do this season…
Before his fight against Nate Marquardt at UFC 109, Chael Sonnen was just another UFC middleweight — far, far away from challenging Anderson Silva for his belt. But the charismatic Oregonian had plans of his own; Sonnen used his second-to-none trash-talking skills and the interest in Nate Marquardt’s campaign for a rematch against Anderson Silva to call out the Champ, eventually forcing himself into the mix for a shot at the title. Of course, Chael Sonnen backed up his talk by bulldozing Marquardt during all three rounds, to earn a spot in line against the winner of UFC 112′s Silva vs. Maia match-up.
Whether you like him or not, it’s hard to deny that Chael Sonnen has an exciting personality. But Sonnen has suffered his share of setbacks, and now finds himself in an ongoing battle against his toughest opponent to date – the Nevada and California athletic commissions. When looking for another UFC middleweight even remotely as controversial and charismatic as Chael Sonnen, the only name that comes to mind is Michael “The Count” Bisping. It’s no surprise that the pair were originally set to resurrect The Ultimate Fighter series, something that even Brock Lesnar has struggled to do this season…
Three weeks after his unsuccessful bid for the UFC featherweight title at UFC 129, Mark Hominick was in London, Ontario, supporting his Adrenaline Training Center teammate James Haourt at MMA Live 1. Our own Brian J. D’Souza caught up with the local hero to get his thoughts on his last fight and his immediate future. Some highlights…
On his performance against Jose Aldo: “[He’s] one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, and I wasn’t supposed to get out of the first round, and if there were 30 more seconds, I’d be wearing the belt right now. It was one of those fights that like, you go back to the drawing board and there’s a few things that could have changed, but I laid my heart out on the line, I laid it in the ring, I put everything into that fight and everybody who was there knows that, and everyone who watched the fight knows that…I almost had him finished in the fifth, and it’s just that the knockdown in the third kind of took the momentum I felt I was building, and kind of took the sail out until I had to come back in the fifth.”
Three weeks after his unsuccessful bid for the UFC featherweight title at UFC 129, Mark Hominick was in London, Ontario, supporting his Adrenaline Training Center teammate James Haourt at MMA Live 1. Our own Brian J. D’Souza caught up with the local hero to get his thoughts on his last fight and his immediate future. Some highlights…
On his performance against Jose Aldo: “[He’s] one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, and I wasn’t supposed to get out of the first round, and if there were 30 more seconds, I’d be wearing the belt right now. It was one of those fights that like, you go back to the drawing board and there’s a few things that could have changed, but I laid my heart out on the line, I laid it in the ring, I put everything into that fight and everybody who was there knows that, and everyone who watched the fight knows that…I almost had him finished in the fifth, and it’s just that the knockdown in the third kind of took the momentum I felt I was building, and kind of took the sail out until I had to come back in the fifth.”
On Aldo’s punching power: “His hands are definitely harder that I thought. He’s very heavy-handed. The first uppercut he hit me with, I knew right away that I had to respect him. And I think that kind of hindered me from throwing a lot of combinations because I didn’t want to get mixing up, I wanted to score and get out, not trading punch for punch, because someone with punching power, that’s the fight they want.”
On Chan Sung Jung calling him out: “That’s a fight that I’d love to take…and I think that’s a fight that makes sense, because he’s just coming off a big win, I came off a loss, and we’re both up there, we’re both hungry, and I think another two fights and I’ll be deserving of a shot. But I just have to go out there and prove it, and that’s what I said three years ago when I started the winning streak I was on, it was like ‘there’s no more talk, I gotta go out there and prove it,’ and that’s what I gotta go back and do now. You have to win, you have to make impressive performances, and I have to go out and do that, not talk about it.”
(If triathlons allowed you to punch other racers, and the participants got paid millions of dollars to do it, well, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Props: CombatLifestyle.com)
According to a new press release, Diaz will continue pursuing his MMA career instead of professional boxing, “as it has been deemed that it be in Nick’s best interest to focus on his primary combat sport and profession…an opportunity arose for Nick to make a different sort of history in his primary field of fighting.”
(If triathlons allowed you to punch other racers, and the participants got paid millions of dollars to do it, well, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Props: CombatLifestyle.com)
According to a new press release, Diaz will continue pursuing his MMA career instead of professional boxing, “as it has been deemed that it be in Nick’s best interest to focus on his primary combat sport and profession…an opportunity arose for Nick to make a different sort of history in his primary field of fighting.”
Diaz’s coach Cesar Gracie previously made it known that “unless GSP is offered up as a sacrifice [by the UFC], Nick will fight Lacy.” At the time, Gracie/Diaz’s well-publicized interest in a new boxing career was interpreted by many to be a leveraging strategy, to convince the UFC to step in and offer Diaz a welterweight title shot against Georges St. Pierre. If that’s the case, it worked like a charm. Still, Gracie wants everybody to know that the boxing thing wasn’t just a ruse. From the press release, again:
“There are some people that have said we were just posturing to go into professional boxing and they don’t understand that this thing is something we had been working on since 2009. It wasn’t just out of nowhere but at this point in time, there’s a certain chance that comes along once in a very long while and it only makes sense to stick to MMA as of right now. Nick’s been working really hard to get to this point in his MMA career and it wouldn’t make sense for us to make that transition into boxing right now. If this were a couple months ago or if certain fights had played out differently, we’d definitely be ready to go into boxing, but that’s not how it played out. Don Chargin is a great boxing promoter and he understood our dilemma completely and I thank him for that.”
Chargin added:
“Nick is a good kid and a very exciting fighter. Right now he has an opportunity of a lifetime as it pertains to his MMA career. While I don’t doubt that Nick and his team were serious about taking the big step into boxing, it only makes sense for him to finish what he started and see how far he can go in MMA before he does anything in boxing…I’ve had a long promotional career filled with numerous big events dating back the 1960s. Taking Nick Diaz into boxing would have undoubtedly been a big one but this is Nick’s career and his legacy as a MMA fighter needs to be solidified now. I wish him all the luck going forward and know that Zuffa will have itself one very exciting fighter for many years to come.”
Rumor has it that the fight between Nick Diaz and Georges St. Pierre will be announced sometime this week. GSP is already a hypothetical 4-1 favorite against his next challenger.
In a related story, former welterweight/junior middleweight boxing champion Ricardo Mayorga is trying to get a piece of that sweet boxing vs. MMA action the only way he knows how — by calling everybody the Spanish words for “faggot” and “whore.” Mayorga, who was scheduled to fight Din Thomas last May in a Shine Fights MMA bout that imploded in spectacular fashion at the last minute, has been blasting folks on Twitter lately. Here a representative sample, via MiddleEasy:
Also? “@bjpenndotcom after I KO you, I will put a hawaiin dress on u fatty and make u do hula hula dance- remember Im a real fighter puto.” Follow this man right now.
