Author: Chuck Mindenhall

There was a time when Blagoi Ivanov rained on Vladimir Putin’s parade. This was back in Nov. 2008, when the president of Russia was on hand to award the country’s monk-like national treasure, Fedor Emelianenko, his gold for the world sambo championships in St. Petersburg. In those days, Fedor was always accompanied by orchestral swells, because — as heroes go — he didn’t lose at anything.

But there stood in his way an obstacle in the semifinals round, a hulking and relatively unknown Bulgarian who proved to be an immoveable object even for the mighty Fedor.

“Blagoi was the 22-year old that came out of nowhere, nobody knew who he was,” says Ivanov’s manager and interpreter, Ivaylo Gotzev. “When he beat up Fedor Emelianenko, who was considered invincible, Blagoi was the He-Man in his beloved sambo, where he was undefeated for so many years. Putin was supposed to award Fedor his championship that day, and Blagoi stopped him in his tracks. That’s where Blagoi’s name came up.”

Ivanov would end up beating Germany’s Janosch Stefan for the gold, and Putin was left without a ceremony for Emelianenko. That night in St. Petersburg was as dark and grim as anything that had ever come off of Dostoevski’s quill.

At the same time, Ivanov was already making a name for himself in MMA. After the Fedor feat, he became a bit of a star in his native Bulgaria. And it wasn’t long before the grand surveillancers of eastern European MMA talent, Bellator, signed Ivanov to a deal.

Ivanov made good in his stateside debut, needing less than three minutes to dispose of William Penn at Bellator 38 via TKO. He followed that up by choking out Zak Jensen at Bellator 52 in October 2011. On Christmas Eve of that same year, Ivanov slowly battered one of the UFC’s past glories, Ricco Rodriguez, who was the heavyweight champion for a brief few moments in the early-Zuffa days.

“That wasn’t one of my better fights,” Ivanov says. “The styles weren’t right, and Ricco didn’t really want to put up a fight. He was trying to be tricky and not fight, trying to clinch and grapple — he wasn’t really looking to get into a fight.”

Even if it was unspectacular, Ivanov won that night in Russia to raise his record to 7-0-(1). As he was getting prepared to face Thiago Santos in the semifinals round of a four-man heavyweight tournament, just as a small share of the North American spotlight was finally about to find him, things faded to black. Deep black.

Eighty-six days of darkness, to be exact. Eighty-six days of external pause, as he lay in a medically induced coma in the hospital after being stabbed under his left armpit in a wee hours melee in Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. His livelihood began to drain out of him at just 25 years old.

But the worry at that point in time wasn’t would he ever fight again — the imminent concern was is there enough fight in him to live?

*

It was a cold, late February night in 2012 that Ivanov and a group of friends — teammates of his, boxers who had won a big tournament — went out to celebrate. They began with dinner, and then headed off to the clubs.

“We ended up staying the night out,” he says. “This is Europe, everybody stays the night out on a Saturday night. At five in the morning we went into this club, and there’s this group of people who at that point were causing trouble and they started a fight with us. Our group was a lot fewer. They knew who I was, and there’s some cowards out there who knew they couldn’t face me punch-for-punch. As I tried to interrupt and stop the fight, somebody stabbed me from the back, really from the side of the back.”

The blade that went into Ivanov’s side was long enough to pierce his heart and lance part of his lungs. He put his hand over the wound and the 250-pound Ivanov began to stagger away from the melee, which was now in full force around him. As the blood seeped down his hand, he made his way out front, where he had the presence of mind to get a cab. The driver, seeing his condition, rushed him to Pirogov hospital.

“It was a 10-15 minute ride to the hospital, and I was losing a lot of blood,” he says. “So once I got to the hospital, I sat down and crawled into a room where doctors were and right there passed out from a loss of blood.”

That’s when things went from dark to better to bleak. Ivanov underwent a five-hour surgical procedure to repair his damaged organs. It was a life-saving surgery. The blood loss was so significant that it was touch and go. His vital organs that were damaged, and the surgeons were multitasking to piece everything back together. Ivanov probably should have died. And even if he didn’t, his fighting days — so impossibly carefree — belonged to a different lifetime.

“Then began the big battle,” says Gotzev. “Once the doctors operated and got everything back intact, the hard part started. In surgeries like that, people get infections, and Blagoi did too. Because of that, he spent a total of 86 days in a medically induced coma.”

Ivanov would continue to live with a machine breathing for him, in critical condition. He would go from a robust 250-pound frame down to 160 pounds in the next two-and-a-half months. His muscles atrophied, and his body sagged. The world began to move on without him. Neil Grove stood in for him against Thiago Santos in his Bellator tournament spot. Prayers were issued from his family and friends and the small lot of people outside of Bulgaria that knew him. And in Sofia, police apprehended a man named Dampela, charging him with the stabbing.

“In the doctor’s own words, they told me a person with this kind of an injury, one in a million would survive,” Ivanov says.

If those odds are accurate, Blagoi Ivanov might be far luckier than he seems.

*

When he came out of the coma in May 2012, he was a husk of the person who went out to celebrate that night with his friends. What had once been a barge of a man was now unable to walk on his own, nor breathe particularly easily — breathing was no longer second nature. He had to, essentially, fight just to speak. He was drastically reduced in size. And yet within his first waking moments, he was plotting his return.

Not just a return to normal health, but a return to the cage again. To resume his career in mixed martial arts. He was already of dreaming of putting his recovering body through voluntary trauma.

“It’s true, immediately when I came out I was driven to come back to the ring,” he says. “It’s always been my will. I felt very bad about the incident, and I couldn’t believe what had happened. I was in such great shape for the fight and getting ready to come back to the States when it happened.

“I just wanted to get back in the ring, and I went to the doctors and asked, what’s the prognosis? And basically they told me they had never experienced anything like this, so they can’t give me a prognosis. So that was on my mind. I wanted to make my return. And it hasn’t left me, from that day until now, I’ve been pushing for that come back. I’ve been through all the precautions, all the medical tests with the doctors.”

Gotzev, his manager who traveled back and forth to Bulgaria from Southern California, remembers his re-emergence into conscious life.

“He was still in the hospital learning how to walk, and he really had to learn to breathe again because he was on a machine. The machine was breathing for him,” he says. “While he’s learning how to do those things again, he asked me immediately for some exercise rubbers, those latex pull ropes, the kind you pull and push and do exercise with. He was exercising his legs with that. He didn’t want to wait any longer.

“After that, when he checked out, within a week he got back in the actual gym and slowly started getting things back in motion. Within a month, he was a regular at the gym. It was crazy.”

Thus began his slow return to fighting. From late February to late May, Ivanov slipped into a state of zero. But through it he had protected the urge to fight in him like a precious mineral. In the coming weeks he gradually put on weight and improved his conditioning. His pigment returned. Within a couple of months, he was able to do things in the gym that would have seemed impossible earlier in 2012. He was wheeling towards his improbable return.

And now he was able to testify against the man who nearly killed him. That, too, came with an unexpected plot twist.

“After he was stabbed, he actually got a glimpse of the guy,” Gotzev says. “Blagoi turned around and saw the guy who actually stabbed him, and it was a different person altogether. Dampela was arrested and then they tried to prosecute him, but once Blagoi was up and back on his feet he testified against a whole and different person. There’s a process going for this guy. They are prosecuting him.”

As Ivanov entered 2013, it was no longer “if” Ivanov would make it back into the cage, it was “when.”

“Blagoi’s story is nothing short of amazing,” Gotzev says. “Now with his undefeated record in MMA, and his incredible story. He’s got a lot of guts and determination and a purpose. He has a special purpose. He not only lived to tell the story, but he made it back to the cage. That’s nothing short of amazing.”

He did. Gotzev told me this on Wednesday.

On Friday night, at a small resort in the wine country of Temecula, California, Ivanov arrived to the Pechanga Casino just as everybody else — with the odds stacked against him. In front of the afternoon crowd, and to the attention of almost nobody, Ivanov stepped in to fight Manny Lara in a preliminary bout at Bellator 99. He weighed 252 pounds heading in. He was in “terrific shape.” He was just a guy trying to climb up the rungs and make a name. And that’s what he fought for the last year and a half — a chance at an extension, to make a name in the sport he loves.

To simply exist in normal light.

At 27 years old, Ivanov has scars on his upper body that take on added meaningfulness and attest to something in him that can only be described as a “fighting spirit.” Those scars are symbols of something extraordinary. They are a lesson for Ivanov, and a reminder that he won’t be denied.

Those scars are equally meaningless. They were never meant to be there. They are the signatures of a coward.

In a fight that hardly anybody watched, during the daylight prelims, Ivanov defeated Lara by submission (guillotine) at 1:17 mark of the first round to run his record to 8-0-(1). That’s his official record.

Unofficially, he’s the only man on Earth who’s had his arm raised after encounters with the great Fedor Emelianenko as well as the shadowy figure with the scythe. In this way, Blagoi Ivanov is perhaps more remarkable than we know.

The World Series of Fighting’s middleweight title eliminator between Jesse Taylor and Elvis Mutapcic at WSOF 5 was canceled in Atlantic City just minutes before it was set to happen.

The New Jersey State Athletic Commission discovered prohibitive prescription medicine in the Bosnian-American fighter’s Mutapcic’s locker room. One official discovered the medication just as the fighters were about to walk out for their main card bout at the Revel Casino. Nick Lembo, the head of the commission, was therefore forced to cancel the fight.

During the telecast, NBCSports’ in-ring reporter Joey Varner broke the news, saying that a Mutapcic cornerman was discovered with a bottle of unspecified pills which had not been approved by the commission. An official was said to have witnessed the cornerman give Mutapcic the medication, which left Nick Lembo no choice but to scrap the fight from the card.

WSOF president Ray Sefo later said that there were at least six different kinds of pills in the bottle, and put the blame on the “incompetence of the corner.”

“There were some prescriptions that weren’t given to our doctors during the physicals and that weren’t approved by us, the commission,” the commission said in a statement. “So since we don’t know what they are and what they do, we cancelled the fight.

“We can’t take that chance to have that fight go off, so those things need to be looked at, and they need to be talked about. We just feel that we’re not going to have a fight in New Jersey when we don’t know what someone is taking.”

In mid-August, Invicta FC’s burgeoning young fighter Bec Hyatt made a confession through Fighters Against Child Abuse Australia about domestic abuse that had been ongoing in her own house. She detailed her life with fellow fighter and boyfriend Dan Hyatt, who had become increasingly demeaning and violent towards her in a short time.

Having met Dan already with a child from a previous relationship — her boy Zake — Hyatt wrote that the situation with her new boyfriend grew uncomfortable when arguments would erupt over Zake and Zake’s father. Things went from uncomfortable to intolerable when she found out that she was pregnant with Dan’s child just three months into the relationship.

“Another month passed and I fell pregnant,” she wrote. “Dan was happy and so was I, but now I see why Dan was happy. He had his power now. He owned me because no way would I leave him to be a single mum of two. He would remind me of that and tell me that no one would want me. He would tell me that I have ‘two kids to two different dads’ and I ‘should be thankful that he wants me.’ He would say that I’m ‘used and abused’ and that I was ‘damaged goods.’”

The verbal antagonism then turned to physical abuse, which she recounts in unsettling detail in the post. “The abuse would get more extreme,” she wrote. “He would kick me, pin me down and elbow me, grind his elbow down my face and choke me unconscious.”

That picture is obviously very grim, and took a lot of courage to come out publicly with.

So, what prompted her to do so?

“The founder of Fighters Against Child Abuse Australia, Adam Washborn, actually contacted me because he saw some passing comments and he obviously put two and two together,” Hyatt told MMA Fighting. “He contacted me, and I told him the truth, and he said it would helpful so many people if I came out with my story.

“It also added a little bit of closure for me, because a lot of people were throwing rumors around saying that I’d left [Dan] for another person. Or that he’d left me. Lots of different rumors going around, so I felt like the truth needed to be known, and if it helped other people out there, then good. Adam assured me that everything would be okay and that I wouldn’t regret doing it and it would offer closure. So I’m glad that I went ahead with it.”

Hyatt and her sons (Zake and Enson) have since left Dan, and now more than a thousand miles separate them in her native Australia. She lives in Queensland, and he lives in Tasmania. Four months removed from that abusive situation, she says she’s focused on training and recovering from a torn MCL that she suffered prior to her last fight in Invicta against Mizuki Inoue.

For a relative unknown before signing with Invicta, she has made a splash with the Kansas City-based promotion. Why not? She is a well-spoken, charismatic fighter with a swoosh of blonde hair and cheetah-skin pattern sleeve on her arm. She has natural magnetism, which in the fight game goes a long way.

It doesn’t hurt that she puts on exciting fights. Even though she’s gone just 1-2 since coming over to the States — including a loss to Carla Esparza for the inaugural strawweight title — she been a big reason for Invicta’s uptick in visibility. For a young fighter who lives on a far-off continent, it’s been a dream come true.

“I love going over there,” she says. “Invicta treats their athletes like they’re one of their family members. I get royal treatment when I go over there. Knowing that they genuinely care about you, that’s the feeling I love about Invicta – they honestly care about you and how you’re going. Obviously, they want you to put on a good fight so they make sure that they can possibly do for you, they do.”

That feeling of support helped her to overcome her trouble. Since sharing her story of domestic abuse, Hyatt says the outpouring from friends, family and fans has been heartening.

“Initially I was quite embarrassed and I didn’t want to tell anyone or anything,” she says. “I was really worried about leaking the story and didn’t know what kind of feedback I’d get from it. But yeah, it’s definitely a huge weight lifted off. I was so good at hiding it for so long. It was lies after lies and just covering it up, so it felt nice not to have to hide it anything anymore. Everyone knew it was out there for everyone to see and I didn’t have to cover it up or make excuses for something.

“When the story came out, though, I received a lot of messages and comments just saying how proud they are for me just to speak the truth and how brave and everything I was.”

Here she giggles shyly.

“I still don’t feel I’ve done anything special. It’s just the way life took me, and it was just another challenge for me to get through.”

Not that the challenge is over. Though a safe distance lies between where Hyatt was and where she is, both physically and mentally, she says that Dan continues to try and plague her in new ways.

“A lot of my social media — my YouTube channel, my web site — was hacked by him,” she says. “That’s his way of still getting to me, still trying to hurt me. But that’s it. He hasn’t personally contacted me other than to talk about Enson, or anything like that. But yeah, that’s his way. He’s not saying it’s him. But it’s him. You know it’s him, because it’s been turned into a big rant.

“But I know I’m safe now. I know the kids are safe. He can attack me on social media, he can say or threaten or whatever, and it’s not going to bother me at all because I know we’re in a safe place now and he can say whatever he wants.”

On Saturday night, Alexander Shlemenko defended his middleweight title against Brett Cooper at Bellator 98. That’s one way of saying it. Another is: Alexander Shlemenko survived a bloody back-and-forth war against Brett Cooper in what was a heathen’s classic, fraught with blood and guts and impossible determination, where bearings were scrambled and games plans were fleeting and white towels were never thrown.

Depends on how you look at it.

The battle between Shlemenko and the fill-in Cooper was a lot of things. If you have a bias against Bellator, it probably was a sloppy out-and-out bar brawl with zero technique and even less consequence. Most likely you didn’t even bother to watch it if you’re in this camp. In this case, you have an alibi: Michigan/Notre Dame was going on at the same time.

Yet if you’re somebody who enjoys a fight based on mettle, ability, chin, heart, Adam’s apple and a zombie’s ability to keep moving forward with limbs dangling, this one was for you. There was nothing not to like about its violent plot, in which both men where buckled and left for dead on several glorious occasions, and the Russian’s spinning backfists kept coming. Cooper, who had lost to Shlemenko back in his “wild” early days in 2011 when, as Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney says, he fought “exacerbated bar fights,” was going to “go out on his shield.”

That’s what we want from “gladiators.” We want “nothing to lose.”

Gladiators swing for the fences even as they are falling. Turns out gladiators exist in other promotions other than the UFC, too. They lay it on the line under other banners. The bearded Cooper (who nobody cared wasn’t Doug Marshall) brought Shlemenko (shark-eyed and ruthless) all he could handle, and lost a narrow (perhaps even controversial) unanimous decision in a five-round fight: 48-47, 48-47, 48-47.

There was so much to admire.

Every now and again Cooper would take a punch that would (re)activate the singlet that Mark Munoz put him in, and shoot for a takedown. Sometimes he’d get it. Meantime there was thwarting and uppercuts and dirty boxing and counter-bombs. After getting dinged, Shlemenko would literally dig his heels in and lunge forward with a sally of punches (some of which would land to places like the temple, also known as the “black spot,” yet Cooper wouldn’t fall). In the interstices, the pale Omsk creature would throw up his hands as if to say “I’m still here.” It was existential. Cooper would respond.

He, too, was alive.

If Shlemenko/Cooper had happened as a UFC main event, nobody would have cared that defense was scarce, or that technique was barely in evidence (even though both those accusations would be imaginative). Today, we’d be putting Greek laurel wreaths on both Shlemenko and Cooper’s swollen, bruised up heads in a Monday morning warrior coronation. But that it happened in the dimmer lit Bellator cage means, somehow, this battle of attrition came at discount prices. Which is a shame. Sitting cageside, and hearing the exchanges as they landed — the leather audibly decompressing with every blow and yet each man absorbing them and carrying on — was really something.

If for no other reason than it had no reason to be so good. It was meant to be a patchwork main event on a card that had so ridiculously fallen apart. But just as Matt Grice and Dennis Bermudez crawled out of the woodwork to give us a classic fight, so did Cooper and Shlemenko.

Or they didn’t. Depends on how you look at it. Or if you did at all.

UNCASVILLE, Conn. – Now that the Bellator season nine middleweight tournament is in the books, Bellator’s CEO Bjorn Rebney has tentatively set the semifinal match-ups in place.

“Barring injury — which knock on wood hopefully we don’t have —  it’ll be [Brennan] Ward against [Perry] Filkins Oct. 4 in Visalia, California on Spike, and [Jason] Butcher against [Mikkel] Parlo,” he said at the post-fight press conference.

The quarterfinals portion of the bracket were held Saturday night at Bellator 98 at the Mohegan Sun. Brian Rogers, whom Rebney identified as the favorite to win the tournament, was ousted in the first round by the Danish fighter Parlo. Meanwhile, Jason Butcher scored a TKO victory over jiu-jitsu ace Giva Santana, which prompted the veteran to retire afterwards.

In the other quarterfinal fights, Perry Filkins won a spirited battle with Jeremy Kimball via a third-round rear-naked choke, and Brennan Ward beat Justin Torrey via second-round TKO.

UNCASVILLE, Conn. – The saga between light heavyweight contender Attila Vegh and Bellator over whether or not Vegh was being replaced for his upcoming bout with Emanuel Newton due to an injury or a “business decision” was nothing more than a miscommunication, according to Bellator’s CEO Bjorn Rebney.

Vegh was slated to fight Newton at Bellator 106 in Long Beach, Calif., which will mark Bellator’s foray into the pay-per-view market. Things got murky when he was replaced with Muhammed Lawal, who was knocked out by Newton back in July 2012 in his promotional debut. Lawal, of course, has more star power than Vegh, and a rematch with Newton translates into better intrigue, especially with the interim belt hanging in the balance.

So what really happened? According to Bellator’s CEO Bjorn Rebney, who spoke to MMA Fighting on Saturday night, the report that came out on a Polish MMA web site in which Vegh said he wasn’t injured was misinterpreted.

“What honest to God happened with Attila Vegh is, Attila came to us and said, ‘I’m injured, here’s the medical report,” Rebney said. “And we went back to him and said, ‘great, tell us when you’re off the injury because we’ve got to do the Newton fight.’ Then Attila came back to us as we started to schedule the Newton fight, which we wanted to do in July, he said I can’t go in July. Because we wanted to do the finalization of the tournament in addition to the Newton fight against Vegh, but couldn’t do it.

“Then we waited until mid-August, and said look, we’ve got to start planning the fall schedule. You’ve either got to say to us, ‘I’m in,” and give us a date in October or November. But if you’re still ambiguous and can’t give us a date we’ve got to schedule something and then you’ll get to fight the winner of the interim fight. And he said, ‘I understand it’s a business, schedule something because I can’t give you a date right now.’ So we did.

“Vegh called us and said, ‘I was quoted out of context,’ and that he said ‘I understand it’s a business, people want to see that fight, so they’ll do it now.’ And people construed it to mean he was saying he was bypassed to step aside. I’ve got a seven-page addendum to his contract that says, I’m injured, here’s the medical report, and I understand I’m injured.”

Rebney says the issue is cleared up, and that him and Vegh are as friendly as they’ve ever been. Vegh is now being pegged to fight the winner of Newton vs. Lawal in January.

“Look, everybody likes intrigue and to say, ‘oh my god, what did he do,'” Rebney said. “Honestly, he couldn’t say yes. And it was okay, there was no problem with it. He actually asked us for some money and said, ‘hey, can you cover me during this period because I’m not going to be able to fight,’ and I said, ‘sure.’ It was a lot less odd and contrived than it sounded. Things are great between us.”