Author: Chuck Mindenhall

It won’t be a trilogy fight with Miesha Tate after all.

During a Friday appearance on Good Morning America, women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey broke the news that she will be facing Holly Holm in her next title defense.

“January 2 I’ll be fighting Holly Holm, who’s the most decorated striker we have in all of mixed martial arts,” Rousey said on the show. “Not the women’s division, not the bantamweight division. [Holm]’s a 19-time boxing champion Holly Holm was The Ring magazine pound-for-pound Fighter of the Year, and definitely my biggest challenge to date.”

The 28-year old Rousey (12-0) is coming off a 34-second knockout victory over Bethe Correia at UFC 190 in Rio de Janeiro, Before then she finished Alexis Davis and Cat Zingano in 14 and 16 seconds respectively.

After Tate had won her last fight against Jessica Eye in July, UFC president Dana White had said that she would be next in line to fight for the bantamweight title.

Holm, 33, is undefeated since crossing over to mixed martial arts after a successful career as a boxer, where she posted a 33-2-3 record and held the IBA and WBF world titles. She is 9-0 in MMA, and 2-0 in the UFC. She defeated Marlon Reneau via unanimous decision at UFC Fight Night 71 in San Diego.

Asked why people should buy her fights, with her vanquishing her opponents so quickly, Rousey said she preps for tough battles.

“I prepare for a five-round war every time I get in there,” she said. “Nobody’s easy until after you beat them. With Holly Holm, she’s the type that’s ready to go 12 boxing rounds. She’s not the average chick that I’d fight. I mean, she’s the best striker I’ve ever fought and the striking is something I learned much later in my career. So, I don’t ever expect fights to be easy and fast.

“No one knows exactly how fast the fights are going to go, and that’s why everybody buys them.”

UFC 195 takes place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Holm vs. Rousey will be the main event.

One of the unique things about fighting on a Conor McGregor card is that the promotional angle is already taken care of. Same thing will be the case at UFC 194 on Dec. 12, when McGregor faces Jose Aldo to unify the featherweight title. The Irish firebrand McGregor will act as a pay-per-view magnet all on his own. Only thing middleweight champion Chris Weidman and challenger Luke Rockhold need to do is show up for the co-main event.

Yet, that doesn’t mean the two are going to kick back and respect the hell out of each other like Rory MacDonald and Robbie Lawler did before UFC 189 while in the shadow of McGregor.

On Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour, Weidman — who has a degree in psychology from Hofstra — took a few early shots at Rockhold, saying he believed the challenger was “faking” his confidence in the fight, a little bit, and that he was “insecure.”

Weidman’s exact words were, “I think he’s just insecure and I think he knows what’s coming. I think he’d much rather be fighting anyone else but me.”

That interview made its way to Santa Cruz by Tuesday, and Rockhold said it was all he could do to suppress a yawn.

“It sounds like [Weidman]’s asleep in bed,” Rockhold told MMA Fighting. “I just don’t know what the hell’s going on in his head. I don’t know if he’s psychologically convinced himself that we’re scared of him or something, but he’s not on the right page. I feel like he’s in for a rude awakening.

“I know one thing…I’m going to start bringing Monster Energy drinks to our press conference and all our media engagements, just to give him something extra to promote this fight. His interviews are like watching paint dry.”

Rockhold, who trains with current light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier and former heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez at the American Kickboxing Academy, said that he and Weidman have been friendly with each other over the years, but with a dose of caution.

“I think we always knew there’d be a fight one day, so it’s been a weird situation to be in.”

On Dec. 12, when they do finally come together, it will be at the height of their careers. Each man in his prime. Weidman, who trains with Ray Longo in Long Island, is undefeated in his mixed martial arts career. Rockhold, the former Strikeforce middleweight champion, has peeled off four victories in a row since losing to Vitor Belfort in May 2013. All of them have been finishes.

And Rockhold said it amuses him that Weidman, who defeated Belfort in July at UFC 187, uses those past performances as a comparative analysis. He said he sees the psychological game in play, and that he understands how Weidman might gain some measure of confidence holding up the two Belfort fights — but that perhaps Belfort is the wrong gauge.

“I feel the same way that he feels,” Weidman said. “The only difference is I train with elite level fighters and he doesn’t. I know what I’m capable of. He’s been in there and he’s fought some tough guys, I’ll give him that. He fought the old lion with his balls cut off. I fought a different fighter. He wants to keep comparing our two fights, it’s a joke. I got caught, and that doesn’t tell the tale of a fight. I got caught by a juiced-out animal. Him? He fought an old lion with his balls cut off.

“We fought Machida in the relative same time. You saw how I dealt with Machida and how he struggled with him in five-round fight, and almost got beat multiple times. I don’t believe there was one moment where I struggled with Machida. If there’s a difference on the ground, if he thinks his grappling’s superior, look at that fight. He couldn’t hold Machida down and I completely dominated him on the ground. Stand-up realm, he’s tough on the feet — but he’s slow. He’s slow, he’s clumsy…he kicks like Michael Bisping, really the most awkward, funky kicks.”

Rockhold, a southpaw with power and range, is known as one of MMA’s most obsessive game-planners. He has said in the past that he prides himself on being able to pick out an opponent’s tendencies before they meet. When evaluating his fight with Weidman, who also has power and length to go along with an aggressive brand of MMA wrestling, he says it’s no different.

“You build these instincts,” he said. “A training camp is, I do my homework and I build my instincts in training camp, so things will come off naturally. I know how to adjust, and I know what he’s going to bring to the table. Usually things play out the way I see them, or the way I set them up in my training camp. Things almost always work out the way I envision.

“I think there’s a relaxation that I have over Weidman that he hasn’t realized yet. He’s so tough, he gets by on a lot of toughness, but I don’t think he uses his head too well. It seems like he’s a little cloudy in his vision in a fight. He doesn’t fight with the highest IQ. You can see when he comes in, he comes in kind of carelessly, kind of going through the motions. He doesn’t adjust well. It seems like he’s almost seeing red at times. I was there at one point in my career. I learned how to adjust and see my opponent and what he brings, and counter.”

Rockhold said he envisions “teeing off” on Weidman at some point in the fight.

“I understand that Chris is a good offensive wrestler, but this is not wrestling,” he said. “He’s not going to be able to dictate the pace of the fight. He’s going to run into a wall. He’s going to come forward and expect to control the cage like he usually does with these guys who are scared of his wrestling and I’m going to meet him right in the middle and stop him dead in his tracks. I’m about to wake this fool up.”

The social media feud between Irishman Cathal Pendred and CM Punk has escalated to the point where some people are now hoping to see them fight. The problem is that the former professional wrestler CM Punk — real name Phil Brooks — has never been in an MMA bout, while Pendred has been in 21, including five in the UFC.

So how does an odd couple like this come together? Through backhanded self-deprecation, it turns out.

Last week Pendred posted a tweet with a short interview between FOX and CM Punk, in which B-roll was played of his hitting pads at Roufusport in Milwaukee. “CM Punk on the pads making me look like Muhammad Ali,” the message said.

CM Punk saw it and responded, which kicked off a back-and-forth between the two. Because CM Punk has over two million Twitter followers and something like 100 fighters calling him out, all of it took Pendred — who was a guest on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour — by surprise.

“I didn’t even call him out last week,” the 27-year old Pendred told Ariel Helwani. “I put out a tweet with a short clip of him hitting pads, and I didn’t use his Twitter handle or tag him in it or anything. I just put the video up. And you know me, as the Irish say, I’m always having a little bit of ‘craic.’ I was actually more wrecking the piss out of myself than I was CM Punk. Everyone knows my stand-up hasn’t looked too beautiful since my UFC career started. And I just said, look at this guy, he makes me look like Muhammad Ali hitting the pads. So, I was actually just insulting myself in a half-hearted way.”

In December, the UFC announced that CM Punk had signed with the promotion. Eight months later he is still training with Duke Roufus in Wisconsin to prepare himself for his debut, which could occur in early-2016. Though there has been wild speculation as to whom he might face in his first UFC fight, one constant seems to be that it will do big numbers on a pay-per-view. That also means big exposure, big pay day, big build-up.

Those thoughts alone have warmed Pendred to the idea of welcoming the former pro wrestling star, whom he refers to as “Chick Magnet,” to the Octagon. 

“The day that he got signed by the UFC I said the Chick Magnet fight was a lottery ticket,” he said. “He is the lottery ticket. I think every fighter should want that fight that’s in the UFC. There’s a lot of money to be made, and I’m one of the guys that’s on his division, so I definitely wouldn’t turn it down.

“I actually think that I’m in the pole position for it now because, nearly every guy in middleweight and welterweight has called the guy out, and he hasn’t responded to any of them.

“I was having a great time with it to be honest, I thought it was brilliant. That just makes me think that maybe this guy is delusional, as some of the fans that he has, and actually thinks that he could beat me in a fight.

Pendred is coming off a split-decision loss against John Howard at UFC 189, just one month after winning a unanimous decision over Augusto Montano at UFC 188 in Mexico City. As a native of Ireland, Pendred is now booked for a fight against Tom Breese at UFC Fight Night 76 on Oct. 24 in Dublin. His current record in the UFC stands at 4-1, though his style of fighting has rubbed some people the wrong way. His last four fights have gone to a decision, with only his UFC debut against Mike King resulting in a finish.

Pendred stopped King with a second-round rear-naked choke the last time the UFC visited Dublin.

Asked why he though CM Punk responded to him out of everybody else, Pendred said he thought he might be a desired target.

“I genuinely feel like he’s responding to me just because he feels that he might have a shot, or else he feels like he could maybe at least not die in there with me,” he said. “I’ve seen in a lot of his interviews since he joined [the UFC], he looks more scared now than he did — I think he looks more unsure of himself now than he did when he first decided to do this. I think he’s in the gym now and he’s having a hard time and he’s realized, I bit off more than I can chew now.

“I reckon he thinks Pendred is the way to go, and if that’s the way he wants to go, there’s a couple of hundred thousand reasons I think it will be the way to go, too.”

Pendred said he didn’t necessarily have anything against CM Punk. He said he just wanted to point out worse stand-up than his own.

“My striking has looked atrocious in the UFC so far, and that’s the type of guy I am,” he said. “I have no problem ripping it out of myself. But [CM Punk’s footage] made me look good. I’ve seen boxercise classes where people were hitting the pads better than that.”

Manny Gamburyan had his first fight in the UFC at The Ultimate Fighter 5 finale in 2007. He lost to Nate Diaz in the finals as a lightweight. Eight years later he’s now 34 years old and competing as a bantamweight. He’s had 13 UFC fights, with four WEC bouts in-between. He’s faced everyone from Leonard Garcia to Jose Aldo. Gamburyan has been around a long time.

Perhaps that why it feels like a slap in the face that Bryan Caraway, the guy he’s been actively lobbying to fight next, is giving him the cold shoulder. Gamburyan said during an appearance on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour that Caraway

“I just felt real disrespected,” Gamburyan said. “I really want to punch him in the face dude. Even if I see him on the street or anywhere outside of a fight, he better walk with a bodyguard or something like that, because I want to punch him.”

The contentiousness between Gamburyan and Caraway — himself an alum of TUF 14 — goes back to the taping of The Ultimate Fighter 18, when Gamburyan’s training partner Ronda Rousey was coaching opposite Caraway’s girlfriend, Miesha Tate. With the Tate and Rousey rivalry at a pitch for reality television cameras, the peripheral coaches began to spat as well. Things between Rousey’s head coach Edmond Tarverdyan and Caraway also got heated.

At one point, Gamburyan says, a grappling match was purposed by Dana White between him and Caraway, to help quash the tension. Gamburyan says that Caraway balked at the idea, declining to participate.

The history between the two goes into why Gamburyan, who has won back-to-back fights against Cody Gibson and Scott Jorgensen since dropping to bantamweight, wants a piece of Caraway, who is coming off a decision victory over Eddie Wineland at UFC on FOX 16 in Chicago.

“It’s one of those fights I’ve wanted to have for a long time,” Gamburyan told Ariel Helwani. “When we were on the show with Ronda things weren’t going well between me and Bryan Caraway. Why not get in there in fight since Miesha and Ronda are going to fight. I’m looking for that third fight actually.”

Ideally, with Tate now locked into a title shot against Rousey (should she defend her title at UFC 190 against Bethe Correia), Gamburyan would like to make himself part of a package deal. He wants a fight

“Most likely, if everything goes well, me and Bryan should be on the same card also,” he said.

It’s not just the rivalry that is peeving Gamburyan, though. It’s Caraway’s disregard for him as an opponent. After beating Wineland, when asked if he’d be interested in a fight with either Gamburyan or Aljamain Sterling, Caraway said he wanted to get somebody higher ranked that help him make headway towards a title shot.

This didn’t sit well with Gamburyan.

“He says I need to work on some stuff before I can fight him,” he said. “Let me tell you something, man. When I was fighting with the UFC, this guy was still in diapers. I’ve been in the UFC for nine years. I’ve been fighting since I was 15 years old.

“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, me, I need to work on some stuff. Just say it out loud, ‘I don’t want to fight you.’ I’ll move on and I’ll never call you out anymore. But to sit there and tell all the people, all the media and everyone else that I need to work on something, that’s not the proper way. He can man up and tweet or go on [The MMA Hour] and say you know what Manny, I don’t want to fight you. I promise you I’ll never call him out again.”

When it was brought up that the No. 6-ranked Caraway regarded him as a step back, Gamburyan said his name value alone is worth the price of booking.

“I’m not a step back,” he said. “I’ve been in this game for so many years. What is it exactly you lose if it’s a step back? Because I’m not ranked? I’m one of the biggest names at 135 pounds. He’s never fought a bigger name than me.”

Gamburyan couldn’t hold back from taking one more jab at Caraway before switching topics.

“Who is this guy?” he said. “He’s not even Bryan Caraway. He’s Mr. Tate.”

In the mixed martial arts, three days can easily feel like an eon. On Monday, Tim Kennedy appeared on The MMA Hour and said he’d like to fight Anderson Silva on Dec. 5 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas. By Thursday, the Dallas event had already morphed into a Las Vegas event, Kennedy found himself in the bad graces of the UFC’s official sponsor, Reebok, and Silva…well, let’s just say Silva won’t be available.

The GOAT showed up to his Nevada Athletic Commission hearing on Thursday with a rather…unformed? unique? impromptu?…defense to explain how steroids ended up in his system back in January for UFC 183 for his fight with Nick Diaz. Turns out those steroids ended up in his system the old-fashioned way: Via a sex-enhancing liquid elixir in a blue vial brought expressly from Thailand from a buddy named Marcos whom he had trained with once or twice but, for reasons all his own, came to trust implicitly.

Pretty common mistake, really.

Yet, sound though that explanation might have seemed, the sober NAC panel thought they spotted some “inconsistencies” in the defense. After something like an hour-and-a-half of clumsy “case making,” Silva was handed down a one-year suspension (retroactive back to Jan. 31) fined $380,000 (for his win bonus and 30 percent of his purse) and stricken of his victory over Diaz. The original decision win will now become a “no contest.” That means Silva’s last victory falls a little further into the rearview mirror, all the way back to UFC 153, when he beat another controversial figure, Stephan Bonnar.

And so this is how they put the GOAT out to pasture.

To dash a little salt on the wound, the NAC called Silva’s testimony “soft,” which had all the punsters who’d tuned in on the UFC’s Fight Pass slapping their britches. And really, though the punishment wasn’t all that severe in the end — Silva can fight as soon as early-2016, it would have been far worse a month from now — it’s that he put himself through such mortification that’s hard to understand.

Rather than admit to cheating, Silva put his libido on public trial.

Had Silva just confessed to taking something, said “my bad” a couple of times, and simply apologized, he’d have likely been given some variation of the same punishment. But he would have spared himself the fiasco. And make no mistake, what happened on Thursday was a fiasco. This time it wasn’t the NAC panel so much as Silva’s backpedaling, the dueling translators, the over-indulgence of personal information, and the gullibility that came into play. What dignities Silva carried in the cage didn’t find their way to the courtroom. Maybe he’d have been better off pleading the fifth, as he tried to do early on (apparently, it was a little lost in translation). But instead, he ran around in circles, which was as painfully awkward to watch as it was entertaining.

To make matters worse, some wisenheimer kept piping in songs by 2 Live Crew and Salt-N-Pepa (“Let’s Talk About Sex”) over the testimony, which cracked Ed Soares and some of the NAC board up. Silva, the greatest fighter MMA has yet known, had put himself into a ridiculous position to become the butt of many jokes.

The thing is, Silva didn’t want to be known as a cheat. Nobody who ends up before an athletic commission wants to be regarded that way. The NAC has heard every plea of innocence there is. The simplest thing to do for a person in that position is to play dumb and avow no knowledge as to how something illegal got their system. The record will show that almost nobody has voluntarily taken a performance-enhancing drug. You can look it up. The quacks who hand out prescriptions and loaded supplements, those are the real evildoers. Any competitor that ends up taking them is a victim. Usually a victim that’s learned a valuable lesson, though, if there can just be some leniency.

That logic is easy to understand. It’s better to go down as an innocently duped bystander than a cheat.

But man. It was hard to watch Silva, who for so long was sacrosanct in this sport, go to such lengths to avoid the tag. And for what? This whole ordeal can’t help but send a shockwave back down his entire resume anyway. How far do things go back? Will this strange episode taint everything Silva’s accomplished? If history has shown us anything, it’s that it’s hard to get out of this sport with a sound mind and a clean reputation.

And it’s even harder watching people lose their minds a little bit to stay in it.

Next month will mark the one-year anniversary of Tim Kennedy’s last fight in the UFC, which came at UFC 178 against Yoel Romero. That bout — which ended in a controversial third-round TKO after a sequence in which Kennedy thought he won to end the second — left a bad taste in his mouth.

During an appearance on The MMA Hour shortly after the Romero loss last fall, Kennedy expressed his dissatisfaction with not only that fight, but also with the business side of MMA. Despondent at the time, he flirted with the idea of retirement.

A year later Kennedy is now flirting with the idea of returning to the octagon. Fresh off a plane from Brazil after a tour of South and Central America, Kennedy once again appeared on the MMA Hour and updated is status.

“Where am I, I’m ranked like seventh or eighth right now?” he told Ariel Helwani. “So I’ve only slipped a spot, which his crazy because there are five guys above me who I would murder, or smash. I have been calling out every single middleweight that has fought, that is ranked in the top ten, in the last six months. Or every marquee name.

“I guess how matchmaking works now is you just find two dudes that previously used steroids or testosterone and then you just make them fight each other because they’re going to lose to everybody else now that they’re off of it.”

Kennedy has been out of the country filming a new reality show which will air on History Channel in October. He said he is an investigator/special ops guy who hunts old war criminals, using “current technology to solve historical problems.” After filming eight shows, he is now preparing for a role in a movie, which films in October. After that, he says he is open to getting a fight.

Even if some of the things that bothered him about the current state of the UFC are still somewhat bothersome to him.

Kennedy has been vocal about stricter anti-doping policies and more extensive testing. Since he last fought the UFC has brought in the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to work as an independent third-party in conducting out-of-competition tests for the entirety of the UFC’s roster.

Though Kennedy said on the surface the efforts look good, that there’s still some gray areas to address. One of the areas that has perhaps swayed him from returning is the UFC’s sponsorship deal with Reebok. Kennedy talked used this past weekend’s UFC Fight Night 73 in Nashville as an example of how fighters are losing out on endorsement money.

“My disenchantment has come from the business side of it,” he said. “The reffing, the sponsorship. Where the sport is now is horrible and tragic and pathetic. Glover [Teixeira] just fought [Ovince Saint Preux], and the entire Reebok payout was like $100,000 or something. [That’s] everyone, every single athlete from the entire card that night. I made more in sponsorship in Strikeforce than every single athlete on the card that night. In one fight. So me versus Luke Rockhold, or me versus Jacare [Souza], or hell, even my last fight. My last fight in Strikeforce [against Trevor Smith], I made more than every single UFC athlete, to include Glover who just fought for the title against Jon Jones, cumulatively. And if that doesn’t blow your mind and say what is wrong with this sport, then…”

Asked if that would preclude him from returning, Kennedy pointed out that things are going pretty well for him outside of the fight game.

“That’s a major contributing factor,” he said. “It’s not any one thing. I’m loving life right now and I’m having so much fun. Scuba diving, skydiving, hunting, finding poachers, finding war criminals, hanging out with my infant son, making out with my hot wife. My life is awesome. Motorcycles, big ol’ snakes, Everglades of Florida, pig hunting in Louisiana, this is good stuff. So Joe Silva has a task of finding something interesting, especially with the circumstances surrounding the UFC as a promotion.”

Before he was cast on the new reality show, Kennedy had thrown down an ultimatum fight with former light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida. He proposed a loser leaves town fight, meaning whoever lost should retire from fighting forever.

Kennedy has since called out numerous other high-profile fighters, and to this day he says he’d still like to fight Vitor Belfort. He said his management team went to International Fight Week in Las Vegas in July to gauge interest and timing for booking a fight.

As a resident of Austin, Texas, Kennedy even pointed out that the UFC is looking to come to Dallas in December, and he even had an opponent in mind.

“There’s a big fight card in Dallas. That’s two hours away. Anderson Silva, No. 2 middleweight, versus Tim Kennedy, No. 7 middleweight.”

When reminded that Silva had a hearing this Thursday with the Nevada Athletic Commission to address his failed drug tests from back at UFC 183, Kennedy joked that the former middleweight champ could share his DNA.

“He can have my blood,” he said. “[Silva] can just inject himself with my blood from this point forward and he’ll be good. And then we’ll fight in Dallas. That would be awesome. That would be the perfect…Tim would get off the couch for Anderson Silva in Dallas.”

In any case, the 35-year old veteran said his love for the sport has never waned.

“I’m never done fighting. My love for fighting is absolutely 100 percent still there. I think my indifference for the sport has nothing to do with the sport. I still love the sport. I still love mixed martial arts, I still love fighting. I’m always going to be a martial artist. My dad…they put me in martial arts when I was stupid small. This is going to be until back to the age when I can’t walk again. This hasn’t changed anything.”