Author: Jeremy Botter

Shogun Rua: Is the Legendary Light Heavyweight Scared of Glover Teixeira?

Mauricio “Shogun” Rua is an absolute legend of mixed martial arts, but he hasn’t the easiest run of things over the past two years. Rua is 2-3 since October 2009, which sounds bad until you consider that his three losses came against Lyoto Machida, Jon…

Mauricio “Shogun” Rua is an absolute legend of mixed martial arts, but he hasn’t the easiest run of things over the past two years. Rua is 2-3 since October 2009, which sounds bad until you consider that his three losses came against Lyoto Machida, Jon Jones and Dan Henderson.

But records are records, and Shogun’s recent record isn’t the best. That’s why it’s a little more than surprising that Rua, when offered a fight with super-prospect Glover Teixeira, allegedly told Dana White he’d rather be cut than face Teixeira:

“Yeah, he said he’d actually rather be cut, than to have to fight him. Dude, nobody wants to fight this guy. Nobody wants to fight this guy. We’re trying to match this guy up with somebody, but he didn’t mind fighting Brandon Vera. So, he’s fighting Brandon Vera.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m disrespecting Shogun, because I’m not. I’m just telling the truth, you know? It’s verbatim what his people said when we talked to them. And you know me, I tell it like it is. If you don’t want that out in public, then don’t say it to me. Then don’t say it on the phone, because I’m gonna say what was said.”

Interestingly enough, Teixeira’s manager told Brazilian news outlet Tatame that the story of Shogun turning down a fight with his client wasn’t true.

So what to make of all of this? 

For starters, it says a lot about Teixeira’s vaunted talents that even a fighter like Rua will decline to face him. In Shogun’s defense, much of that is due to the fact that the casual UFC fan has no idea who Teixeira is, which makes the fight a lose-lose situation. If you beat Glover, you beat a complete unknown, and therefore it’s not a big accomplishment to the majority of your fans.

But if you lose to Teixeira—and that would have been a distinct possibility, given how tough and skillful the Brazilian is—you lost to a nobody. Teixeira’s 16-fight winning streak means nothing to fans who only watch the UFC and don’t really pay attention to the rest of the talent-rich mixed martial arts world.

In the end, I can’t blame Rua for his decision to turn down a fight with Teixeira. If I were his manager or agent, I would have advised him to do the same thing.

Teixeira may ultimately be the guy who can give Jon Jones a run for his money and his belt, but he’s currently just a guy with very little name value. Beating him wouldn’t help Shogun’s career or help him earn any more money, and at this stage of a legendary career, that’s an important thing.

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B.J. Penn Explains His Decision to Fight Rory MacDonald

Several fighters have tried to get B.J. Penn out of retirement, but all have failed. Josh Koscheck couldn’t do it, and he seems to have the perfect combination of fighting respectability and personal combustibility that Penn likes to go head-on with.&n…

Several fighters have tried to get B.J. Penn out of retirement, but all have failed. Josh Koscheck couldn’t do it, and he seems to have the perfect combination of fighting respectability and personal combustibility that Penn likes to go head-on with. 

In the end, it was Rory MacDonald who did the trick in getting Penn interested enough in a fight to come out of retirement. MacDonald didn’t have to be disrespectful or resort to name-calling. He simply asked for a fight, and he got it.

Penn further explained his decision to come out of retirement during an episode of Just Scrap Radio on his website, BJPenn.com:

So with that said, I like everything. I am definitely motivated for this fight. I like everything that’s going on with this fight. Rory is one of the best guys—Firaz and everyone says he is going to be the champion in two years.

I’m not thinking about any kind of title runs. I’m just coming back and doing this fight, and I am pretty sure this is the last fight on my contract. I will have to go back and check again, but I think this is the last fight on my contract, and I would like to finish out my contract, so.

Penn is being brutally honest here. He has no desire to come back and become a title contender again, because he seems to realize that those days are long behind him. Good for him.

I’m intrigued by the fact that Penn was more interested in fighting MacDonald than he was Koscheck. With Koscheck, you’d have two guys who are on the down side of their careers. They both have the kind of magnetic personalities that would create a ton of interest in a pay-per-view fight, despite the fact that neither guy will likely ever be contending for a title shot again.

Instead, Penn chose MacDonald, a rising welterweight prospect who many hail as the future of the division. He’s a significantly tougher test for Penn than Koscheck would be. MacDonald’s strengths in wrestling and ground control play right into Penn’s weaknesses.

There’s no upside for Penn here, but given his comments above, that doesn’t seem to matter. He’s looking to fulfill his contract and finish out his career, no matter what happens against MacDonald. But a win for Penn, even if it’s the final pro fight of his life, would be quite the way to close out a stellar Hall of Fame fighting career.

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Ian McCall Will Have a Distinct Weight Advantage Against Demetrious Johnson

Plenty of people, myself included, believe that Ian McCall will beat Demetrious Johnson tonight. It’s a sound prediction, at least in my head. I think McCall did enough to beat Johnson the first time around. He did more damage, and if not for a fe…

Plenty of people, myself included, believe that Ian McCall will beat Demetrious Johnson tonight. 

It’s a sound prediction, at least in my head. I think McCall did enough to beat Johnson the first time around. He did more damage, and if not for a few moments when he decided to showboat instead of going for the finish, he may have scored an outright judges decision instead of the marred non-draw he was forced to settle for.

And then there is this: just hours after weighing in at 126 pounds during yesterday’s weigh-ins, McCall posted on the Underground that he weighed in at 150.5 pounds. 

I just stepped on the scale at 150.5 with sweats and a shirt on.. i’d say i gained a few lbs since the weigh ins hahaha!

Yes, McCall gained 25 pounds in just a few hours. That’s a lot of weight.

If McCall’s story is true—and we have no reason not to believe him—McCall will have a significant size advantage over Johnson going into the fight. I don’t believe Johnson ever gets larger than 150 pounds or so, and that’s when he’s out of training camp. There’s no way he’ll put that much weight back on before he steps in the cage with McCall tonight.

All of this just solidifies my prediction for the main event tonight: I believe McCall will use his wrestling effectively to put Johnson on his back and control the fight from there.

McCall saw, in the first fight with Johnson, that “Mighty Mouse” doesn’t have the best takedown defense. Johnson has defended just 48 percent of takedown attempts since joining the UFC, and that provides a clear path to victory for McCall.

Look for McCall to learn from his mistakes and the areas he succeeded in the first fight and work his way to a decision.

Jeremy Botter is the national UFC blogger for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for breaking news and hilarious stuff.

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Rory MacDonald Wants to Fight B.J. Penn, but so Does Everybody Else

You can add Rory MacDonald to the ever-growing list of fighters taking the time to call out the still-retired B.J. Penn. MacDonald did so while appearing on yesterday’s edition of The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani.”Right now I feel there’s a g…

You can add Rory MacDonald to the ever-growing list of fighters taking the time to call out the still-retired B.J. Penn. 

MacDonald did so while appearing on yesterday’s edition of The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani.

“Right now I feel there’s a guy that I want to fight before he leaves the sport and that’s B.J. Penn,” he said. “That’s a guy I really want to fight. I respect him a lot. He’s a legend and I think it’d be a really good matchup for me to have that fight in Toronto.”

Join the club, Rory. 

The UFC really wants to get Penn back in the Octagon, and for good reason. He’s one of the few guys below 205 pounds that can be considered a legitimate and popular draw. And, at the end of the day, he’s an aging superstar who can be used to help garner younger stars more popularity. He’s lost more than he’s won as of late, but a win over Penn still means something.

I don’t know if the UFC put MacDonald up to this challenge like it did with the recently manufactured beef between Penn and Josh Koscheck. MacDonald is one of the quietest, most respectful fighters in the sport, and so it’s tough for me to imagine that he came up with this idea all on his own.

At the same time, however, this is the kind of thing more fighters need to be doing. I’m not sitting here telling you every fighter in the sport needs to call out someone else, because that would quickly become overwrought and boring and fake. 

When you’re sitting on the precipice of becoming a legitimate top contender in the division, though, it’s time to start calling out other guys who can help you earn a bigger fanbase. Penn could do that for MacDonald, which is why calling out the Hawaiian legend is one of the smartest things the young Canadian has done thus far in his career.

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EA Sports Acquisition of UFC Video Game License Is a Great Thing

Earlier this morning, I started hearing rumors that EA Sports would be announcing a follow-up to its original MMA game, which was creatively titled EA MMA. The rumor seemed like nonsense to me because I’d heard for well over a year that the EA MMA…

Earlier this morning, I started hearing rumors that EA Sports would be announcing a follow-up to its original MMA game, which was creatively titled EA MMA. 

The rumor seemed like nonsense to me because I’d heard for well over a year that the EA MMA franchise was dead and that there would be no sequels. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. 

That is, until UFC president Dana White tweeted the following:

White concurrently took the stage at the E3 video-game conference in Los Angeles to announce the deal. No game footage was shown during the presentation—it was simply a montage of great UFC highlights.

I’m sure plenty of you are gamers, but even those of you who aren’t probably played EA MMA and at least one iteration of the UFC Undisputed series from THQ. There are hardcore fans of both games, but for my money, EA MMA had the best game play and control setup. 

So it’s good news—really good news, actually—that EA has acquired the UFC license and will be making the games going forward. EA is the best in the business when it comes to sports games, and you have to assume that they’ll treat this project correctly and make one of the best MMA games to date.

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Ronda Rousey vs. Cris Cyborg Is the Biggest Fight Strikeforce Can Make

It’s no secret that one of the few remaining big-ticket fights that Strikeforce can put together—at least at the moment—is a women’s title fight between bantamweight champion and rising superstar Ronda Rousey and former featherweight champi…

It’s no secret that one of the few remaining big-ticket fights that Strikeforce can put together—at least at the moment—is a women’s title fight between bantamweight champion and rising superstar Ronda Rousey and former featherweight champion Cris Cyborg.

Cyborg, of course, can’t fight at the moment. She’s currently serving a one-year suspension for testing positive for stanozolol, after thoroughly dismantling poor Hiroko Yamanaka last December. Cyborg was stripped of her title, leaving the Strikeforce female featherweight division on the verge of extinction. 

Rousey’s rise to the top coincided with Cyborg’s fall from grace, but there’s still plenty of interest in seeing the two best female fighters in the world collide. Part of that comes from a technical perspective, but mostly it’s due to Rousey taking every chance she can get to issue derogatory remarks about Cyborg.

Female fighting at the highest level hasn’t really caught on with the public, but Rousey vs. Cyborg is the exception. Rousey’s personality, and the fact that she’s utterly destroyed every opponent she’s faced thus far, has helped turn her into Strikeforce’s biggest star. And Cyborg has a wealth of footage of her destroying one opponent after another. It’s truly a gold mine.

Cyborg took the time to issue a challenge to Rousey for the 135-pound belt after winning gold at the World Jiu-Jitsu Championships over the weekend. 

The main question that remains is this: Can Cyborg actually make 135? She’s a massive woman, all rippling muscles and very little body fat. And according to Cyborg herself, she won’t be able to make the weight. 

Can the fight actually happen? Rousey’s mom, Dr. Ann Maria Rousey, says that Rousey might consider a catchweight bout, but she indicated that Rousey shouldn’t compromise for someone who was caught doing steroids.

 

As a fight fan, I hope we do see Rousey vs. Cyborg down the road, even if it takes place at 140 pounds or another agreed-upon catchweight. They’re two of the most compelling characters in the sport, and they’re also the best female fighters in the world.

It would be a shame if they’re kept apart by weight issues, but I also understand that Rousey has no incentive to move up to featherweight. She’s the champion, she’s the one who has stayed clean thus far throughout her career and there’s no reason for her to risk her marketability by moving to a weight she isn’t completely comfortable in against an opponent who might run through her quite easily.

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