The biggest UFC fight of 2012 is just three and a half weeks away. It takes place July 7, when Anderson Silva defends his UFC middleweight title against nemesis Chael Sonnen.Sonnen is the biggest and most unabashed trash-talker in the UFC (or any…
The biggest UFC fight of 2012 is just three and a half weeks away. It takes place July 7, when Anderson Silva defends his UFC middleweight title against nemesis Chael Sonnen.
Sonnen is the biggest and most unabashed trash-talker in the UFC (or any sport, for that matter), and he’s beginning to ratchet up his verbal assault on Silva as the fight draws closer. In a two-minute preview video released by the UFC, Sonnen says he’ll beat Silva no matter where the fight goes:
Make it a boxing match. I’ll find a way to win. Make it a kickboxing match. I’ll find a way to win. I’m not gonna play a dance-off with him. But if he wants to make it a combative mansport, I’ll do it. Make it a jiu-jitsu match, make it a wrestling match, make it an MMA fight. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have anything that I, as an athlete, won’t conquer. I’m a competitor. I will find a way to win, like I always do.
First of all, I’d like to congratulate Sonnen for creating the new word “mansport.” I’ll be using that one in plenty of stories I write in the future, so I offer a hearty thanks to West Linn’s best for giving me new material.
As for the rest of the quote? I have no doubt that if Sonnen would do very well in a grappling match with Silva. He’s one of the best wrestlers in mixed martial arts, after all, and we all saw what Sonnen was capable of during the first fight with Silva. Sonnen is a destructive, grinding force when he puts your back against the ground.
But we also saw one of Sonnen’s biggest weaknesses during the first Silva bout: His sketchy submission defense. And it wasn’t just the Silva bout that exposed that weak point. Of Sonnen’s 11 career losses, 8 have come by submission. Defending submissions has never been his strong suit.
Sonnen, of course, has been known to say outlandish things in the interest of hyping a fight, and this is likely more of the same. But the idea of Silva vs. Sonnen in a grappling/jiu-jitsu match is certainly an intriguing one, isn’t it?
Brock Lesnar is one of the biggest pay-per-view draws in the world, but he’s also a very good businessman. He has a real sense of what he’s worth, and he plays hardball when it comes to his dealings with folks who are looking to get involved in the Bro…
Brock Lesnar is one of the biggest pay-per-view draws in the world, but he’s also a very good businessman. He has a real sense of what he’s worth, and he plays hardball when it comes to his dealings with folks who are looking to get involved in the Brock Lesnar business and brand.
We’ve seen it time and time again. When he came out of college and began talking to World Wrestling Entertainment, he negotiated one of the highest-paying deals ever handed out for a developmental wrestler. Rather than make the typical $500-$700 a week typically given to wrestling trainees, Lesnar made somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The same thing happened when Lesnar made the move to the UFC. As a known commodity from his time in the WWE, Lesnar was able to join the UFC roster and instantly become one of the highest-paying fighters in the sport. He backed up that huge contract by delivering record pay-per-view numbers for the company and was rewarded accordingly.
Rather than sign tons of small endorsement deals with fight companies, Lesnar created his own clothing company—DeathClutch clothing, for those not in the know—and pushed them as his primary sponsor. Sure, Lesnar wasn’t paid to wear DeathClutch clothing, but he also made a killing on the sale of his walkout t-shirts, shorts and other items.
You can see that Lesnar is smart in his business dealings. He’s calculated and never does anything unless it benefits the Brock Lesnar brand. It’s been said that he never leaves his house in Minnesota unless it helps him out somehow, and I think that’s true.
You can see Lesnar’s business acumen all over his latest dealings with WWE and the UFC. Lesnar, who returned to the world of professional wrestling in April after retiring from the UFC in December, famously attended UFC 146 last month and then met with Dana White after the show. As I noted above, Lesnar never leaves his house unless it will somehow benefit him, and so, his appearance right before the Junior dos Santos vs. Frank Mir main event got people talking, and rightly so.
Did Brock attend the show to play up his firing storyline in the WWE? Did he want to return to the cage and fight again? Nobody really knows. But Bryan Alvarez, in this week’s edition of the Figure Four Weekly newsletter, attempted to shed some light on a murky situation (subscription required):
The WWE side almost universally claims that Brock has an iron-clad contract and that there is no way he could fight for UFC until that contract expires following WrestleMania 29 in April of 2013. On the UFC side, there are people who insist that his contract is non-exclusive (more than one source used the term “on loan to WWE”), and that he and White were discussing a potential fight during the meeting.
Not everyone in UFC believes he’ll fight. Some believe that even if his WWE contract allowed it, his heart really isn’t into fighting and all of this is some sort of ploy by Lesnar to increase his bargaining power or leverage with WWE. There is a great deal of heat on Lesnar from the WWE side, in part due to the belief that the stories coming out of UFC about the meeting going poorly are false.
So what’s the deal? Will Lesnar return to fighting, or is this simply a ploy to gain negotiating leverage with the WWE?
I’ll tell you what I think: I don’t believe Lesnar wants to fight again. I think he WOULD fight again if the UFC offered him a significant raise over what he was getting for his last few fights. His heart may not be into it, but his heart isn’t into professional wrestling, either. It’s simply a business move, and if Lesnar can make more money fighting than he can in WWE, well, fighting is what he’ll do.
But even if Lesnar finishes out his time in WWE and never returns to the Octagon, he’s making shrewd moves.
After all, it’s been six months since he retired, and I’m still here—along with plenty of other MMA media folks—writing stories about him.
Frank Shamrock loves himself. This is not up for debate. All you have to do is listen to Shamrock perform commentary services for Strikeforce, and you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.If Shamrock has faced one of the dudes fighting in …
Frank Shamrock loves himself. This is not up for debate.
All you have to do is listen to Shamrock perform commentary services for Strikeforce, and you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.
If Shamrock has faced one of the dudes fighting in the cage, he’ll tell us all about what he did that was better than what the opponent is currently doing. If Shamrock hasn’t faced one of the guys in the cage, he’ll still tell us what he’d do better than what the opponent is currently doing.
It’s grating, but that’s Shamrock for you. It’s one of the traits that made him a great in the early days of the sport, and it’s probably the thing that led him to wearing braces for 43 years in order to improve his smile.
I don’t think the Hall of Fame has any credibility unless I’m in it. I was the first champion ever, and set two world records. I’ve been pioneering for this sport since before there was weight classes and gloves. It kind of looks to me like the whole Hall of Fame is up to Dana’s own jock as to who decide to go in. And unfortunately that does not apply in a real sport.
I mean, we already know the UFC Hall of Fame isn’t for the greatest fighters in the history of the sport. It’s for those who meant a lot to the company and helped them grow through tough times. That’s why Tito Ortiz is going into the hall next month, and that’s why Brock Lesnar (ridiculously) receives serious consideration from fans for induction.
That being said, I love Shamrock automatically discounting any Hall of Fame that he’s not a part of. He might just be right, but isn’t that for other, non-Shamrock folks to decide?
The live version of The Ultimate Fighter was an interesting experiment. After 14 seasons of the venerable reality show, it was certainly time to shake things up, to do something different. The show had grown stale and fans were tuning out. What better …
The live version of The Ultimate Fighter was an interesting experiment. After 14 seasons of the venerable reality show, it was certainly time to shake things up, to do something different. The show had grown stale and fans were tuning out. What better time to try something new than with the move to the Fox family of television properties?
It was the perfect opportunity, but it didn’t pan out. Producers for the show—and that includes Dana White—were unable to craft the kind of storylines fans of the show were used to. The Ultimate Fighter is about fighting, yes. It always will be. But more than that, it’s about characters. Not fake, blown-up characters created at the diligent pen of a scriptwriter, but real characters that allow fans to connect and invest in the show.
The old Ultimate Fighter was never about creating drama. Rather, it was about accentuating the drama that actually occurred in the house to create something intriguing for the viewers at home.
I guess I can’t say the live show had no effective storylines. Michael Chiesa’s storybook win at the TUF Finale earlier this month after the death of his father early in the season? That’s a real-life story that they couldn’t have replicated even if they tried. It gave viewers a reason to root for Chiesa outside of the fact that, well, he’s generally just a very nice dude.
But that wasn’t always going to be the case, and White and his UFC production team were well aware of it.
Going back to a taped format may feel like a retreat to some. In reality, it’s an advance, because The Ultimate Fighter was never about the hype and intrigue of a live fight. It was about seeing interesting stories play out over the course of 12 weeks. It was about seeing these guys who are complete strangers at the beginning of each season become more familiar to us than 75 percent of the UFC’s roster.
This is a good move, and I applaud them for making it.
Watching today’s UFC 150 press conference was a bit of a revelation, and not in a good way.You see, whenever the UFC announces their intention to go to a certain city for a big show, they do these on-sale press conferences in the host town. They’ll bri…
Watching today’s UFC 150 press conference was a bit of a revelation, and not in a good way.
You see, whenever the UFC announces their intention to go to a certain city for a big show, they do these on-sale press conferences in the host town. They’ll bring in the main event fighters and answer some questions from the local media, all in the name of hyping up the soon-to-be-on-available ticket sales.
That’s all well and good. The problem, at least on my end, is that it’s absolutely infuriating to hear some of these local media folks ask questions.
A perfect example: During today’s press conference, which I had the pleasure of watching via the magic of Internet streaming, one of the very first questions asked of former UFC lightweight champion Frankie Edgar—the guy getting a rematch for the belt in the main event of UFC 150, mind you—was this:
“Is it a possibility that if you do win the belt back, that we’ll see you face Jose Aldo in the very near future?”
Obviously, Edgar was dumbfounded. He tried his best not to show it, but you could hear the frustration in his voice.
“I’m obviously not thinking about that right now,” he said. “This fight is looming two months away.”
Why in the world is Edgar having to answer questions about going down to featherweight? I understand that it’s almost a certainty that we’ll see Edgar drop to 145 pounds, and it’ll happen this year. But that’s well off into the future, and he has a big lightweight title rematch coming up in just a few months. You know, the entire reason that the press conference was held in the first place?
I’ve tailed fighters as they’ve gone through media rounds in the past, and I can understand their frustration. They’re constantly asked the same questions, one after another, and the mainstream sports reporters—such as the one who asked Edgar this truly dumb question—who know nothing about the sport are the worst offenders by a country mile.
I remember the excitement I felt last week when the news came out that DREAM bantamweight champion Bibiano Fernandes had signed a deal with the UFC and would be debuting at UFC 149 against Roland Delorme.Fernandes, after all, was one of the brightest f…
I remember the excitement I felt last week when the news came out that DREAM bantamweight champion Bibiano Fernandes had signed a deal with the UFC and would be debuting at UFC 149 against Roland Delorme.
Fernandes, after all, was one of the brightest free agents in the world, and signing him was a big coup for the UFC’s bantamweight division.
I was less excited yesterday when it was reported that Fernandes had pulled out of the Delorme bout with an injury.
I would like to make perfectly clear the news concerning my involvement with the UFC. It was announced that I, Bibiano Fernandes have been contracted to fight for the organization at UFC 149 which will take place in the city of Calgary on the 21st of July. I would like to make it clear that I am not a UFC athlete as I did not sign any contract with the UFC organization.
Negotiations between the UFC and myself did take place, however, we could not resolve the issues on the table and as a result we did not come to an agreement. The recent reports that have been circulating in the media are false, contrary to what is being said, I am not a UFC athlete.
What just happened?
So Fernandes isn’t just out of the bout with Delorme—he never signed a contract to fight in the UFC to begin with? That’s weird.
