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In the Cage with Ronda Rousey: Opponents Dish on Fighting the Champ

On Saturday at UFC 193, Holly Holm, a former boxing champion who is chasing the bright lights and bigger paydays available to women in mixed martial arts, will step into the cage with the most dominant fighter in the sport’s history.
Ronda Rousey is no…

Ronda Rousey is not only the UFC’s first and only women’s bantamweight champion—she’s a wrecking ball without precedent, a fighter of such ferocity that lasting more than one minute in a confined space with her is considered a badge of honor.

Rousey has finished opponents in all 12 of her professional fights. Eleven fell in the first round—eight in the very first minute.

At first glance, nothing stands out about Rousey. She displays no identifiable physical tool that would lead an observer to suspect she was a fighter without peer. And yet her success leaves no doubt—Rousey is special.

What creates that seemingly insurmountable gulf between Rousey and her peers? Bleacher Report tracked down five of her former opponents—women who pitted their own fierce will and carefully honed skills against hers and came up short.

Rousey‘s success starts before the first bell sounds, when ring announcer Bruce Buffer begins his endless pre-fight routine. In this calm before the storm, some fighters disappear within themselves, seeking peace and clearing their minds for the battle to come.

Rousey, instead, paces. She snorts, as the promise of violence to come is unmistakable in her every move. But her eyes tell a different story, darting around the arena and never quite settling on anything. The eyes reveal all—and Rousey‘s, contrary to every myth about the cool and calm professional fighter, show the fear roiling around in her gut.

“When you look into her eyes you can see she’s different,” Ediane Gomes, Rousey‘s first professional opponent, said. “She has a different heart. When you are a warrior you have to admire someone like her.”

“She’s scared and excited and feels like she literally has her life on the line with every fight,” former Strikeforce bantamweight champion Sarah Kaufman said. “She thinks of it as a fight more than a sport. She sees it as a fight for her life. That’s why she comes out as quickly as she does. I don’t think she necessarily spends that much time thinking about what her opponent is going to do. She has this mindset of ‘this is what I’m going to do.’ There’s not a defensive thought in her head. That’s pretty huge.

“My brain doesn’t quite work like hers does. I don’t think I’m as much of a psychopath. Or at least not in the same way. I’m super happy to get in there, and that makes me a little bit crazy. Whereas she is scared but also 100 percent determined and confident. I think she literally would let her arm dislocate and spin around backward. And she’d still try to hit you with it.”

While physical violence must wait for the confines of the cage, the psychological war begins long before the two women ever strap on gloves and make the long walk to the Octagon. In the last several years the opportunity to fight the world’s best has also come with unprecedented promotional responsibilities and media attention.

A Rousey fight is more than an athletic contest. It’s an event that is as likely to be discussed on Good Morning America as it is on the ubiquitous MMA blogs dotting the Internet. For some such as Liz Carmouche, that’s a good thing. The UFC’s first openly gay fighter, her appearance opposite Rousey in the UFC’s inaugural women’s fight brought plenty of positive attention from gay-friendly media outlets that aren’t necessarily MMA’s bread and butter.

“I spent so much time in the closet in the Marine Corps and I wasn’t going to hide who I was,” Carmouche said. “If it meant I was going to lose out on opportunities, they weren’t meant to be. But it took off with a whole different energy than I ever expected.

“There was a point when people didn’t see the UFC as supporting the LGBT community or homosexuality. But by embracing me, the UFC showed that wasn’t true and that it wanted to support the community as much as possible. I thought our fight would be overlooked. But it had such an impact. Young women in college and high school talk to me about it. We’re in textbooks. We made history, for women’s rights and for the LGBT community.”

For other fighters, the attention is an overwhelming hassle. As Rousey‘s stature grew, so did the responsibilities heaped on every opponent.

“Do I want to be champion? Hell yeah. Do most people have what it takes to offer themselves fully and wholly to that responsibility? Honestly, probably not,” Cat Zingano said. “It was huge. There was a lot of buildup to it. Everything that Ronda has to do, media-wise and travel-wise and promotional-wise. I was spread thin in an already thin life.”

Whether she embraced extra promotion willingly, such as Miesha Tate did, or begrudgingly, such as Kaufman did, the other woman in the cage was always the “opponent.” Equal time was never an option. Rousey, promoters have made clear, is the star.

Everyone else is just there to provide a foil for her greatness.

“I remember a Showtime producer telling me, ‘Ronda’s the next big thing. She’s the star. We have to make her look good.’ Over and over again it was clear that Ronda was the one they cared about. You’re just the other person,” Kaufman said. “At the shoot there’s Ronda. She has her hair all blown out and they’ve done her makeup and they have her in front of this big fan doing all this different stuff.

“They put me in this white latex suit that was two-and-a-half sizes too small so I can’t sit down in it without busting the seams open. They didn’t do my hair at all. I asked if they were going to do something with my hair, and they said it really didn’t matter. They just wanted Ronda to look extreme. Flat out to my face they said, ‘We want Ronda to look like a badass star, and you’re here as a counter to that.'”

“It’s always only about Ronda,” Tate said. “Ronda has earned a tremendous amount of respect. She’s an incredible athlete who has done great things for our sport. But sometimes it feels like she’s being shoved down our throats 24/7. Every show has Ronda on it. Every promotion involves Ronda. I don’t think the UFC has a single marketing product that doesn’t have Ronda Rousey on it.

“It’s the Ronda show. I don’t think the other women get enough credit.”

Fighting Rousey takes a mental toll beyond the press appearances, reality-television cameras and endless telephone interviews. There’s also the battle within, as competitors have to convince themselves they can be the exception to Rousey‘s reign of terror. Without a regimen that steels the mind every bit as much as the body, the fight is lost before a foe ever sees Rousey pacing like a wild animal across the cage.

While she’s added a striking element in recent fights, Rousey‘s success is predicated on a refined execution of a few simple moves borrowed from her life on the mats as an Olympic judoka. There’s little subtlety to her game plan.

She dares her opponent’s best shots and gets in tight and low for a harai goshi—a judo hip throw, one of the sport’s most basic techniques. She usually succeeds at getting her hips so deep under her opponent that her leg sweep meets nothing at all—her victim is already in the air and on her way to a rude awakening.

It’s classic judo: Her koshi guruma head-lock grip is the only concession to MMA’s lack of judogi. In every other way Rousey may as well be on the judo mats where she’s lived her entire life. It’s a throw that, despite appearances, requires little in the way of upper-body power. Her body acts as a fulcrum, representing the definition of science over strength.

Once on the mat, Rousey truly shines. While she had some success there as a judoka, she wasn’t the armbar machine she’d become in MMA. The chaos of an MMA scramble suits her, as her brain operates in the moments between being on her feet and being on the ground at lightning speed. While others are still processing their next move, Rousey is already in action and already in dominant position.

“She’s very technical,” Gomes said. “She is several steps ahead. She’s like a razor. So fast. You don’t even notice what she is doing until it has happened. That’s how fast she thinks.”

“It comes down to her athletic awareness and her ability to adapt on the spot,” Kaufman said. “I think she had that already from her judo. She’s done so much fighting that it comes out without her having to think about it.”

There’s no denying that Rousey is an excellent athlete. No one steps onto the podium to accept an Olympic medal without possessing a certain exceptional physicality. But 27 other judoka won a bronze medal in Beijing in 2008 just like Rousey did. She finished fourth, and that felt about right.

In judo, she was one of a dozen fighters in her weight class who were competing for the same top spot. But she was no Ilias Iliadis, a 17-year-old male prodigy who dominated the world en route to winning Olympic gold. If you weren’t following Rousey because of her nationality or burgeoning Internet presence, you may not have taken much note of her at all.

Her speed, quickness and strength were not at the heart of Rousey‘s success on the mats. And that remains true in the cage.

“Physically, no disrespect to Ronda, but I don’t think she has an advantage over anybody else,” Carmouche said. “She’s not physically stronger than any other opponent I’ve gone against. I’ve fought other women where I’ve gone to move them and thought, ‘Oh, she’s not budging.’ I didn’t experience that with Ronda.”

In a recent UFC commercial for her fight Saturday, announcer Joe Rogan called Rousey an athlete unequaled in human history. That’s not quite right, at least according to opponents who felt every bit as strong and quick. What separated Rousey, instead, was an unbreakable will and unflinching belief that victory is predestined.

“There have been psychological studies on champions. They have clear advantages over contenders. Champions believe in their heart of hearts that they deserve to have that title,” Carmouche said. “She truly believes she’s the champion and that nobody can take that from her. She doesn’t have a doubt in her mind, while her opponents are questioning themselves. And you cannot have doubt when going against Ronda.”

As you might expect, her opponents don’t have any definitive advice about how to topple the queen from her throne. Tate, who has pushed Rousey the furthest in their two fights, doesn’t feel that beating her is an impossible task.

“People tend to only remember who won and who lost,” Tate said. “But I think it was a very competitive fight. It was a very compelling fight. There were a lot of things I did really well. But all people remember is me getting my arm dislocated. That was my choice. I didn’t have to let her take my arm to that point. It’s one of those things. Because I was tough enough not to tap out and let her mutilate my arm. It made her look bigger and badder.”

Rousey has displayed enough moments of vulnerability, from Carmouche taking her back to Tate’s ability to survive, to give opponents hope. But putting her at a disadvantage has proved difficult.

She makes mincemeat of fighters who approach her defensively, forcing them back into the cage where they are susceptible to her judo throws or haymaker punches. The ultimate fear, of course, is of the armbar.

“I’ve changed my mentality thanks to that fight,” Carmouche said. “I don’t train based on what their strengths are and what they do. It’s implemented into my training, but it’s not my focus. I’m not going to give in to my opponent.

“You think, ‘Don’t get caught in that armbar.’ You’ve already mentally psyched yourself out going into the fight,” Carmouche said. “It’s like telling somebody not to look at a car crash. You know you’re going to look. That’s what everybody does against Ronda. And they’ve already set themselves up for failure. If you’re so focused on that, you aren’t doing anything offensive. You need a balance.”

But abandoning all caution and charging forward, as Zingano did, has its own consequences. Even if you hit Rousey, and almost everyone does, she’s shown an ability to take it on the chin and move forward into close quarters. That’s where things tend to get ugly for her opponents.

“I made history. Unfortunately it was for the fastest submission in UFC history,” Zingano said. “I wanted to be aggressive. I wanted to do something exciting. I saw the approach other people had taken with her, and I wanted to do something different. If what I did worked, hell yeah! That’s what everyone should have been doing to fight Ronda the whole time.

“But because what I did didn’t work, I was a flop. And how stupid of me. Whatever, whatever. It was a risk that I took that didn’t work. Next time I’m going to do something else. I’ll figure it out.”

If it sounds like doom if you do and doom if you don’t, Gomes agrees. No matter what you do, combat sports tend to guide athletes to the clinch. Every time you square up and throw a right hand, you’re inviting an opponent into the dance. And that’s where Rousey tends to dominate.

“Most girls train to attack Ronda,” Gomes said. “That’s not the way to go. Because of her judo background she will throw you if you charge into her arms. You have to think defense and movement. Even then, she will get you anyway.”

On Saturday at UFC 193, Holm will attempt a strategy Rousey has never seen. Instead of squaring up and trying desperately for a fight-changing blow, Holm will turn the bout into a track meet.

Rather than moving back and forth on a straight line, she will circle and force Rousey to chase. In those moments she’ll attempt to keep the champion at bay with her jab and the reach of her wide array of body kicks. It’s a strategy that could work, but it’s one that will demand near perfection for 25 minutes.

The result will be either surprising success, and a true challenge to Rousey, or another in a long list of spectacular failures. Oddsmakers are leaning toward the latter. At press time, Rousey is a 20-1 favorite at Odds Shark.

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

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Age in the Cage: Are Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie Too Old to Fight?

The best two fighters at the very first UFC event in 1993 were Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie. After a spirited 57 seconds in the cage, Gracie choked Shamrock out en route to winning the inaugural tournament and launching a new sport into the American c…

Two years later they ran it back at UFC V, one of the most highly anticipated events in the sport’s young history. After 36 minutes, no winner could be declared, and the fight was called a draw.

Friday night, Bellator MMA announced that, more than 22 years after their first epic encounter, the two Hall of Famers will attempt to finally settle the score Feb. 19 at the Toyota Center in Houston.

But what was a great fight in 1995 may not stand the test of time and remain relevant in the modern era. The two fighters will be a combined 101 years old by the time they step in the cage.

We asked Bleacher Report’s MMA staff to chime in on what will surely be one of the most controversial fights of 2016. Is it OK for Shamrock and Gracie to remain MMA headliners into their dotage? Or is MMA a sport that shouldn’t feature the equivalent of a masters division?

Michael Chiappetta

It is not difficult to understand Scott Coker’s reasoning for booking Gracie vs. Shamrock and Kimbo Slice vs. Dada 5000, Bellator 149’s co-main event. Both fights bring with them back stories and eyeballs, which are things that every promoter realizes to be necessary in building a successful event. In a competitive field with a dominant market leader, it is often imperative to stand out with whatever attractions are available to you, and that is precisely what Coker is doing here.

But let us remove ourselves from this MMA bubble for a moment and see this for what it is: lowest-common-denominator programming.

Neither of these fights deserves to be booked in major MMA in 2016. When Shamrock and Gracie fight in February, neither will be within a decade of his prime. Despite their past contributions to the sport, it is ridiculous to suggest they deserve this forum. We must agree that your rights to the cage expire at some point, and we’re well past it for both. Shamrock is 2-8 in his last 10 fights; Gracie hasn’t fought in almost eight years.

With all due respect, these two should be playing shuffleboard and enjoying retirement, not fighting. The sport has moved on, even if the promotions can’t.

As for Kimbo vs. Dada, can’t we leave the mystique of those backyard fights to history? Kimbo’s knees are shot, and Dada, whom the greater sporting public has probably never heard of, never proved he was worthy of the spotlight of a major promotion.

Maybe Bellator should consider booking Benji Radach and Danny Lafever, too. After all, we’re only one ring away from a three-ring circus. You may see it all as harmless fun, but when bookings like this become the norm, where are we eventually going? Where are we headed, except for a race to the bottom? I don’t mean to suggest that the rivalry that made MMA could somehow undo it, but we must accept the obvious: With these bookings, the sport is by definition going backward.

Nathan McCarter

I understand taking a Kimbo, Shamrock or Gracie and running with the name to help promote a card as long as the next fight down is elevating one of the actual legitimate fighters on the roster. But that is not the impression Bellator gave when it made the announcement.

The announcement of Shamrock vs. Gracie can hit an MMA fan right in the feels and get his nostalgia going, but once you think of this fight in any realistic fashion, depression should set in. This is supposed to be a sport, and putting two men with a combined age of 101 against each other with what they’ve shown in the cage in their most recent outings is disgusting.

Then you have Kimbo against someone I have never heard of with a ridiculous nickname. This kind of booking is not going to advance Bellator in any substantive way. Bellator should be trying to create its own fresh stars. It even had Kurt Angle announce the Shamrock vs. Gracie main event while teasing his possible foray into Bellator. It’s nonsense.

Bellator doesn’t have the deep and talented roster of the UFC. Everyone understands Bellator can’t put together a stunning stacked event, but it can at least give us one or two quality fights with its younger talent underneath this circus. Even if Bellator does end up putting a decent fight under these two mockeries parading around as actual bouts, it won’t get the promotion it deserves or showcase the quality talent.

Booking it in this way is what I don’t get. It does nothing for me except extend the belief that Bellator is a sideshow. And that’s unfortunate.

Steven Rondina

I remember back in the day when I looked at MMA as a pure sport. It was a time when the UFC could be expected to sign top-10-ranked free agents. It was a time where the UFC could be expected to let an untested pro wrestler’s MMA debut occur on the regional scene. It was a simpler time. It was a more innocent time…

It may sound melodramatic, but I’m at the point where I’m just sitting back and enjoying the ride with all of this. I’m totally on board with Slice vs. 5000 (is that how we’re abbreviating this fight?). My only concern with Gracie vs. Shamrock is it ending on the stool due to a heart attack.

Am I nervous about the bleak future we are most certainly heading toward? Sure, but let’s not pin that on Bellator. The UFC sets the bar in MMA, and it has never actually set it very high, both in terms of reaching into the history books for main eventers and in terms of promoting clear-cut freak-show fights. The only difference is that Bellator isn’t going to look you in the eye and tell you that Slice vs. 5000 is a legitimate athletic contest the way the UFC will whenever CM Punk vs. 0-0 Jobber gets booked.

Jonathan Snowden

I’m not nearly as down on these fights as my colleagues here. Fight promotion is about putting together contests that fans want to watch. That’s a promoter’s job, and for all the righteous indignation above, the fact remains that Shamrock and Slice crushed the Bellator record for television viewers earlier this year.

This is, like it or not, what we want.

Bellator has booked these fights for the same reason UFC trotted Shamrock out for two curtain calls in its own formative years. For the same reason it brought Kimbo Slice into the fold to record numbers.

Because it works.

Both fights, at the very least, are competitively matched. Slice and Dada have equally sparse official resumes. Shamrock and Gracie are both really, really old. No one is being put into a situation beyond his capabilities. As the promotion teeters between sport and spectacle, that’s important.

The UFC has left competitors little room to maneuver in the MMA space. It has hundreds of fighters under contract, more than it can use to its full capabilities. You have to believe that is, in part, to keep competitors such as Bellator from finding the kinds of diamonds in the rough that made Coker’s previous foray into MMA promotion with Strikeforce so successful.

Truly great fighters, such as Patricio Freire and Will Brooks, are few and far between outside the Octagon. These kinds of fights are what remain for Bellator while it awaits the opportunity to sign big-name UFC free agents. Until then, the promotion is in a holding pattern, forced to resort to sleight of hand to keep fans interested while waiting for its own investment in the sport’s future to emerge.

For many, it seems, that’s going to be an excruciatingly long wait.

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Bandits, Bullets and Blood Feuds: The Making of Bellator Champ Patricio Pitbull

The day after the bandits came, Bellator featherweight champion Patricio “Pitbull” Freire (24-2) became a man. He was five years old.
“Someone spread a rumor my father had a collection of guns,” his brother Patricky Freire said. “It wasn’t true. …

The day after the bandits came, Bellator featherweight champion Patricio “Pitbull” Freire (24-2) became a man. He was five years old.

“Someone spread a rumor my father had a collection of guns,” his brother Patricky Freire said. “It wasn’t true. But that’s why they targeted him even though he was a police officer. They wanted to steal the guns they thought he had. It was a night of terror. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

The Freire family lived on the outskirts of Natal, Brazil, in a small two-bedroom house, isolated and alone. The city itself, one of the country’s leading tourist destinations, was nearly a million strong. But the city was very far away.

Eight children packed a single bedroom—Patricio, Patricky and six cousins. His parents shared the other bedroom, one eye open after a jailbreak earlier that day. Bad men, including a serial rapist, were on the loose. Far from civilization, the Freires felt like targets. But they intended to be moving ones.

“When the bandits got into our property, my husband woke me up with a hand on my mouth and made a signal for me to be silent,” family matriarch Marlusa Freire said. “Then he made another signal for me to bring the gun I had under my pillow.”

While her husband Lucilio went to the kitchen, where men were attempting to break down a sturdy door, Marlusa went to check on the children. Gun in hand and a crack shot, she was ready for anything.

“When I was in the living room and saw the window in the boy’s room was open, I didn’t second-guess. We always kept it closed at night, so I knew they had opened it from the outside. I stood by the door, and as soon as one of them tried to make his way in, I shot him. I felt it was a do-or-die situation. I was protecting my family, and it was the right thing to do. I’d do it all over again.”

Seven kids heard the shot from under the bed where they had been told to hide. But one wasn’t so good at following directions.

“She shot him right between the eyes. I saw the whole thing,” Patricio said. “My mother told my father about what happened, and he said she was mistaken, she was just imagining she had hit him. But in the morning, he went around the house and saw the bandit’s body laying there.

“I remember like it was today. I told my father I wanted to go see it. He asked me ‘You really want to see it?’ and I said ‘I do,’ and he took me there. At that moment, I became a man. I saw the bandit with part of his head crumbled by the shot.”

To this day, Patricio needs company to see the nights through. He can’t do it alone—not after knowing the things that go bump in the night aren’t always products of the imagination. But the childhood trauma had one positive impact on his life, particularly for a professional fighter: He fears no man, at least while his eyes remain open.

“I can’t sleep alone after this episode,” he said. “But I have no fear of living beings.”

Forging a Fighter

If you were attempting to forge a fighter who resembled the pioneers of this sport, the whirling dervishes who crafted an art through personal courage and a devotion to the joy of fighting, he’d look a lot like Patricio Freire, who fights Daniel Straus for the Bellator championship Friday on Spike TV.

Some of that is the product of a decade of coaching and the tutelage of the late kickboxer Bruno Gouvea, who passed away after a car accident in 2012. But like Michelangelo saw a statue, perfectly formed, in every block of marble, it didn’t take much for a coach to realize what he had with the Pitbull brothers. Just a little work with the chisel and hammer revealed the fighter within, waiting for the life he was born to.

It was fighting, after all, that led them to the gym in the first place. Every disagreement between the two brothers, separated by just 17 months, ended in fisticuffs, blood and a vow of revenge.

“We’d fight over everything,” Patricky said. “If our father bought a something for one of us and didn’t buy it the other one, it’d end up in a fight.”

“During one of our fights, my mother got in between us, and I stopped,” Patricio remembered. “But Patricky landed an uppercut in my body, and I fell on my knees. I felt the punch because I was not expecting it. He started celebrating saying ‘I’m Popo! I’m Popo.’ I thought that was cowardice, and it pissed me off that he was celebrating it.”

For more than a year after that, the two brothers didn’t speak a single word to each other. While the pain and anger faded, pride wouldn’t allow either to bend.

“I remember we’d use our parents to say something indirectly to each other,” Patricky said. “It was funny. Our parents never imposed on us to talk to each other; they let us take our time to figure it out…it just made our relationship stronger. We realized it was not worth it to sever our relationship because of fights we had at home.“

Considering the impact fighting had already had on the family’s domestic lives, you can imagine how reticent Lucilio Freire was to encourage it with formal classes. But, after seeing a jiu-jitsu demonstration in town, Patricio was insistent.

His father, after visiting a training session to see this jiu-jitsu firsthand, agreed—with a caveat. The boys would need to stop fighting at home and confine their physicality to the gym. For the most part, they lived up to their word—but not completely. The fighting continued almost into adulthood, where it took on another identity: sparring.

Chute Boxe and the Blood Feud

Both, of course, were prodigies of sorts. Already used to pounding on each other, it didn’t take long before they were the region’s standouts. When Pride fighter Murilo “Ninja” Rua came to Natal for a seminar, he left with a 17-year-old Patricio in tow, the legendary Chute Boxe their destination.

“My father compromised his finances, bought me the plane ticket and gave me money to go. I went there with my friend Sergio Junior,” Patricio said. “Mine was a dream coming true.”

Chute Boxe looms large in Brazilian MMA legend. Rudimar Fedrigo, the head trainer, gave no quarter. Neither did any of the fighters under his charge. Jose Landi-Jons called the gym home, as did Wanderlei Silva and Ninja’s brother Mauricio “Shogun” Rua.

Fighters from Chute Boxe didn’t necessarily share a style, but they shared an ethos. Aggression was a way of life, both in the ring and in the training room. Sparring sessions there are often more brutal than the fights themselves, with position in the gym earned only by merit and never by reputation alone.

When you see Patricio fight, you see the Chute Boxe style but a version updated for the modern sport—a mix of pure fury and strategic brilliance. But none of the credit for his success is due to the gym’s influence. His dream died there in less than a month, after a knee from fellow featherweight Jadyson Costa sent Freire’s world reeling.

“We were there doing technique training, and when it was his turn, instead of doing the technique, he came at me with a sequence of attacks, clinched me and kneed me on my mouth,” Patricio said. “I fell back without understanding what was going on. Andre Dida got between us, and the following day, I was already back in Natal.”

Freire stewed for the entire 2100 mile trip back home, dreaming of his chance to set matters straight.

“I came back frustrated, anger and wanting revenge,” Patricio said. “My father made a hell of an effort for me to be able to go and live in another state. It was frustrating, but I knew I’d find a way to face that guy in a fight.”

A few years later, in 2007, he got his wish. A promoter in Natal made the fight happen after Patricio agreed to fight for free in order to pay for Costa’s plane ticket to the event. Patricky, too, was willing to forgo a pay check to fight Costa’s brother Maykon.

“I was cheering him on and warming up at the same time because my fight would be right after,” Patricio said. “Patricky beat the hell out of Jadyson’s brother, and people went crazy. Then it came my time.

“I submitted him in the first round. And while I had him on the rear-naked choke, I said in his ear ‘sleep, motherf–ker, sleep.’ After it was done, I felt vindicated. Like my honor had just been cleaned.”

The Champ Is Here

In 2010, Patricio joined Bellator Fighting Championships, leaving Brazil for the first time for a fight at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. One year later, his brother joined him.

The two decided, because Patricky was two inches taller, that he would fight at 155 pounds, leaving Patricio to rule the roost at featherweight. His success was not just immediate—it was emphatic. Eight of his 12 wins have come by way of knockout or submission. His two losses, by contrast, were both split decisions.

“I hope to be remembered one day as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, fighter in MMA history,” Patricio said. “I want people to say the name Patricio when they talk about MMA and that God allows it to happen. I want to fight the biggest names, I want to face [UFC champion Jose] Aldo and all the other guys people say are better than me at the weight class. To have real proof of who is the best. We’ll only know who’s truly the best after we all fight.

“I wish MMA was like boxing with fighters from different organizations being able to fight each other. It would be more interesting for the sport, the sport would grow more, everyone would be able to fight everyone. I wish I was able to promote my fights and go after those people deem the greatest. They’re not just in the UFC and not just in Bellator. They’re everywhere, and I’d like if there was a way to fight them all.”

While the sport’s current climate doesn’t allow for fighters to mix easily, not even for what Patricio calls the “Mayweather vs. Pacquiao” of MMA, Freire has done his part to make a dream match possible. In five years, he’s established himself as arguably the best fighter outside the UFC Octagon and one of the most aggressive and combative personalities beyond the confines of the cage as well.

Patricky, meanwhile, has struggled some as an undersized lightweight, winning just seven of his 12 fights and falling short of championship glory. He’s content, it seems, to let his little brother command the spotlight.

“Although Patricky is the older one, Patricio is the one who behaves like an older brother,” Matheus Aquino, part of the brothers’ management team and a longtime family friend said. “He’s always worried about Patricky, and he’s basically the one that takes front stage on things. Patricky is more reserved.

“Patricky is calm, way too calm for Patricio’s tastes, and that irritates him and initiates arguments. Patricio has a very short fuse. Add that to the fact they’re brothers, and sometimes conversations between them easily goes from a normal conversation to a swearing contest.”

While a bout with Aldo remains on the back burner and a fight with Straus takes center stage this week, another fight looms large. MMA has had several sets of prominent brothers, including the Ruas, the Nogueiras and the Emelianenkos. It has not, however, had a family feud in the cage.

But Patricky, the clock ticking on his career as his 30th birthday approaches, thinks everyday about making the cut down to featherweight. There, he believes, his height, strength and explosiveness would pay dividends. He might, if he devoted himself fully, emerge as champion—even if that means going through the current belt holder, who just happens to be his brother.

“To face Patricio in the cage would be normal,” Patricky said. “We’ve fought a lot of times, and we used to spar a lot at the gym. We already fought so many times for free. I’d fight him without any problem if we were well-paid for it.”

Something still lingers between the two brothers, an energy that never fully dissipated in their youth. They no longer spar together. The sessions, they say, were too likely to careen out of control—a friendly contest quickly spiraling into a full fledged fight. Perhaps, it was meant to be this way?

“I think about fighting my brother being as natural as giving him a hug. We basically born facing each other, so it would be something interesting,” Patricio said. “We’d put on the best fight we ever had. We know each other too well.”

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Departing UFC Exec Don Gold on Dana White and Zuffa’s Infamous Christmas Parties

Don Gold did a lot of great things for the UFC in his years with the company, spearheading the development of five top-selling video games, a home video program that helped keep the sport alive when things were at their darkest and the UFC’s successful launch into the home fitness market. But to employees at Zuffa, the UFC’s parent company, Gold will always be the man behind the party.

For more than a decade, Zuffa has closed every year with a blockbuster private Christmas party, described by former UFC public relations chief Jen Wenk as “infamous.” The first year Kid Rock played a bowling alley for a small group of employees. Other years it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Joan Jett on stage.

“The beauty of it was, we never told the employees who was going to be performing. It was always a surprise,” Gold, who is retiring after 10 years with the company, told Bleacher Report. “Except once. Snoop Dogg being who Snoop Dogg is, it was pretty evident who it was. When you got into that club, it was pretty evident it was somebody who really liked marijuana.”

Gold’s UFC journey goes all the way back to the very first event and, of course, involved much more than party planning. Already looking ahead to the home video market, then-UFC President David Isaacs invited Gold, an executive at Trimark, to see the event he would soon be pitching him. Gold agreed to make the trip to Denver in November 1993 and, like many, fell in love with the beauty and brutality of mixed martial arts.

“I saw the future that day,” Gold said. “My life changed dramatically. I took over all the worldwide rights to home video and all the merchandising.”

The UFC was more than a product. It was an idea and one that took a bit of explaining, especially to skeptical executives in an era that saw politicians attacking entertainment products at every turn. Gold became a UFC evangelist, taking stars such as Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie on the road to engage in another fight—this one for shelf space.

“Back in those days retail was a huge part of the business. Pay-per-view had so many issues because of the nature of the UFC. But home video was really a home run. My job was to make sure they understood what UFC was,” Gold said. “I would take these folks with me and they would explain what they did for a living. If we got the buyer at Blockbuster Video excited about the sport, it was a big deal. That was a major order and we were growing one retailer at a time.”

As the UFC struggled in the late 1990s, facing political pressure that crippled its PPV business and made it almost impossible to operate in much of the United States, Gold moved on to other pursuits. But when Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the UFC in 2001, they brought Gold back into the fold.

In the early years of Zuffa’s reign, Gold and UFC President Dana White talked about the DVD business daily. At the time, after all, it was the only positive news the struggling company had every month. While live events failed to get off the ground, video had always been UFC’s saving grace. And White wasn’t above doing whatever it took to make things work.

“Dana and I used to go to local retail stores, him to the Tower Records in Las Vegas and me to the one on Sunset in Los Angeles,” Gold said. “When it wasn’t that busy we’d remove the movies from display cases the studios had paid for and put the UFC product in. We got away with it for a little bit, and then The Ultimate Fighter came out and he started to get recognized and got busted doing it and had to stop.”

That kind of multitasking was typical at the time for a small company that was looking to build upon a big idea.

“It was this small little company of less than 10 people,” Gold said. “And these 10 people had never promoted the sport, never done a live event, Had never done anything. Really what they were was fans. If you look at where we were and where the UFC is now, it’s a remarkable story.”

Like everyone else at Zuffa, Gold was able to grow professionally with the company. Home video may have been his calling card, but soon he was delving into the music business with Interscope and developing an award-winning video game with THQ. Through it all, he worked closely with White and had the chance to see behind the gruff face the UFC president wears in public.

“After my wife served me with divorce papers, he was calling me two or three times per day to check up on me and invited me to come to Vegas to spend time with him,” Gold said. “He just has a heart of gold. That’s the Dana I know. He’s always been loyal to me and to anybody who works hard. I’ve never honestly been in a room with him where he’s yelled at an employee. He yells at issues, but he doesn’t really yell at people. I’ve never seen him go after anybody or embarrass anybody in a room. At least not an employee.”

Gold’s swan song with the company was the creation of UFC Fit in 2014. The project, a UFC-inspired fitness program, won a 2015 Greensheet award for infomercial excellence and launched yet another new revenue stream for the UFC.

“I spent a year doing research about how to do an infomercial before I felt comfortable enough to do a presentation for Lorenzo and Dana and Frank,” Gold recalled. “I had a huge dog-and-pony show and dressed up the boardroom. It turned out I didn’t need it. Everybody came in and three minutes into the proposal Lorenzo said ‘I want to do this.’

“He said ‘do you know how to do this?’ And I said, ‘I don’t, but I’m learning. And I know the right people to hire.’ We put the team together, hired Mike Dolce and it’s become a really great program.”

After years of selling the UFC around the world, Gold is returning home to Los Angeles to pursue other projects. More than 20 years into this century’s greatest sports marketing story, he’s confident the company and the sport sell themselves.

“The goal was never to hammer it into people’s heads how great UFC is. You just had to let them see it. I was always bringing executives to fights, because once you got somebody there to a fight, they were converted,” Gold said. “Lorenzo is a really smart guy and a visionary. And Dana has such passion and an ability to see both sides, both the fighters’ and the company’s. It’s a company that was built on passion and a sport that was built by the fans.”

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

The White House Petition and Why UFC Star Nick Diaz Matters

Nick Diaz, unjustly railroaded by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for the crime of “maybe smoking marijuana” too close to his January cage fight against Anderson Silva, needed 100,000 signatures in order to prompt a White House response to his desperate cry for justice. He had a month to get them. With two days to spare, and after a push from a collection of allies that inexplicably included the pop star Cher alongside MMA royalty like Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, Diaz met the mark.

More than 107,000 fans (at press time) leaped through the necessary hoops to make their voices heard by the most powerful executive in the nation. And while the White House is unlikely to respond to a petition regarding an ongoing legal dispute, that’s hardly the point.

No one truly expected the President of these United States to come down from rarefied air in order to shoot the athletic commission the double bird or end his second term with an executive order making “don’t be scared homie” the law of the land.

The petition served a different purpose. It allowed us all a voice—and together we sent a message both loud and clear.

“It’s so not right for him to be suspended five years for marijuana,” Rousey told MMA Fighting. “I’m against them testing for weed at all. It’s not a performance-enhancing drug. It has nothing to do with athletic competition. It’s only tested for political reasons. They say, ‘Oh, it’s only for your safety to keep you from hurting yourself because you’re out there.’ Why don’t they test for all of the other things that could possibly hurt us?”

The tale of Diaz’s failed drug screening, his third for his use of legal medical marijuana, is byzantine. As ESPN’s Bret Okomoto reported, Diaz’s five-year suspension came in the face of evidence he likely wasn’t guilty at all:

The circumstances of the failed test were unique in that Diaz passed two drug tests on fight night but failed a third.

The failed test was collected and analyzed under different methods than the other two. The two clean tests, administered prefight and postfight, were analyzed by the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory (SMRTL) — which is accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency — in Salt Lake City.

The failed test, which was administered between the two clean ones, was analyzed by Quest Diagnostics.

Diaz’s attorneys argued that the Quest results were “scientifically unreliable,” unlike the SMRTL results, which were obtained using WADA’s higher standard of protocols.

Diaz’s real crime, it seemed in the wake of a contentious Commission hearing, was his failure to pay his interlocutors proper respect. By refusing to answer questions, Diaz put himself squarely in the cross hairs. And they weren’t firing blanks.

Diaz is a man with rapid eyes, darting terrified beads that never seem to grasp hold. He doesn’t make much of a witness. Like in all things, he’s too honest for comfort. Pleading the fifth, a right granted by the Supreme Court to both angels and demons, only made sense. Otherwise, he might have confessed to offenses committed only in a dream.

Fighting is lying. It’s subterfuge, bad intention hiding behind the benign. But in a world tinged with irony, Diaz is the last honest man. He approaches his life the same way he approaches opponents in the cage. Straight ahead. Muttering curses. Facing his fears and attempting to draw yours to the surface.

Once, at a post-fight press conference, Diaz railed at his plight, his inability to navigate the unfamiliar world of the middle class. It was a topography he didn’t know, and he was adrift without a map. Bank loans and money market accounts were troubles meant to plague a different kind of man he said, a man who had the upbringing to handle it.

The media, thinking it was watching a bit, laughed uproariously. But Diaz was not joking. Success, for some, can be its own kind of cage.

Only predators and prey populate the combat sports. Sometimes a man is both in the same breath, too caught up in the magic and allure to realize the thing he loves most is killing him slowly. More often than not, the MMA alpha males never understand they might be anything but the hunter until they are in the snare, snarling and helpless.

Diaz seemed more attuned than most to the fact that fighters might not have the last laugh. His appealing brand of bravado and bombast has a brittle veneer, like he’s desperately trying to convince himself of his own primacy. It’s a vulnerability to makes us love him. You can feel the fear emanating off of him, its waves humanizing, powerful.

Measuring Diaz’s grief, an ancient pain that seems to know no limits, doesn’t require an exploitative interview, emotions dumped raw on the world with no context or care. You need only look at his face to see an aching longing, thousands of hurts piled up over the years weighing on him, despair and grief and desperation an anchor he can’t quite pull from the ground.

“It’s upsetting,” Diaz told TMZ after the hearing. “I held off on having kids and getting married so I could fight. I gave my life to this. I am a fighter. It’s what I am. A lot of guys have to worry about what their wives and kids think, I don’t. All my attention goes towards fighting, and now I don’t know if I can fight. They’ve taken it away from me.”

Nick Diaz needs fighting. And fighting needs Nick Diaz. We all need justice, whether it comes from Mr. Obama in the White House or through the kind of grassroots activism that made this petition a success.

What happened to Diaz is not justice. And while that justice may not come in the form of an executive order, it will come in time as we highlight abuses in the system. If nothing else, at least we managed to do that much. Fighters deserve better. Nick Diaz deserved better.

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

After Action Review: Who Really Won the UFC 192 Title Fight?

Daniel Cormier’s first title defense was very nearly a disaster. After a strong start, the former Olympian faltered, abandoning his wrestling game in favor of slugging it out with the Swedish striker Alexander Gustafsson for four of the five rounds.&nb…

Daniel Cormier‘s first title defense was very nearly a disaster. After a strong start, the former Olympian faltered, abandoning his wrestling game in favor of slugging it out with the Swedish striker Alexander Gustafsson for four of the five rounds.

That strategy proved to be a mistake.

Gustafsson left his mark, both on Cormier‘s face and on at least one of the judges, falling just short of taking the championship across the Atlantic. It was clearly a close fight—but most of the media and two of three judges scored in favor of the champion.

As fans, we tend to view a fight in its totality. When the final bell rings you tend to have a feeling about who won and who lost. But cageside, fights are scored in five-minute increments. Dominating a round and eking it out, while leaving very different impressions with fans, are scored equally.

We’ll score the fight the same way judges do, looking at each round with the power of hindsight to see what really happened. When a fight is this close, it’s important to go back over it minute-by-minute, in painstaking detail, to answer the question everyone ponders after a mega-fight. Did the right man leave the cage with the UFC championship belt?

Round 1

While announcer Joe Rogan hyped Gustafsson‘s length and serious reach advantage, Cormier goes about the business of mitigating that advantage with inside leg kicks. He might be short and have short arms too, but using his feet gave him the ability to reach out and touch Gustafsson.

At the 4:21 mark, Cormier walked through a right hand to take his first wrestling shot of the night. He pushed Gustafsson into the cage with a single leg and used a high crotch to lift his opponent high into the air and slam him hard on the mat as the crowd roared.

“That is why wrestling is the most important aspect of MMA,” Rogan said. “If you can do that to a game, it changes the whole ballgame.”

Cormier floated over and secured solid control. Gustafsson eventually managed full guard and at the 3:06 mark even appeared to be about to get back to his feet—had his opponent been anyone but Daniel Cormier he very well might have.

Gustafsson did a brilliant job of defending himself on the ground, controlling Cormier‘s head and wrists. The champion was able to land a number of short shots but couldn’t ever wind up and land anything of real significance.

His best work, instead, showcased his status as a mean son of a gun. He ground his forearm into Gustafsson‘s face and covered his mouth with his hand, making breathing hard. He might not have been able to hurt Gustafsson—but he did his best to make him suffer.

At 1:50, Gustafsson threw up a lazy triangle attempt and Cormier rolled him over and ended up in side control.

“This is not good for Gustafsson,” Rogan roared, but things worked out fine for the Swede. Cormier lost control of his opponent and the challenger made it to his feet and proceeded to stick a left-right combo in Cormier‘s face.

The round ended with Cormier lunging with a right hand. He landed, but it showed clearly the lengths he would need to go to in order to score on his bigger foe. After a weak Gustafsson shot, Cormier slipped and the bell rang as the two traded punches after Cormier scrambled to his feet.

The Verdict

Round 2

Cormier‘s corner encouraged him to feint and throw punches in combination. Thus far in the fight he’d thrown only single shots to little effect.

Although unlikely, it seemed to be Gustafsson who’d heard that sage advice. The challenger opened the round more aggressively, throwing a left-right combination and mixing in a shot to the body and a leg kick.

At 4:26, Gustafsson attempted to time a shot by Cormier that never comes. The huge uppercut he tried to counter with hit nothing but air. But it also, almost certainly, stuck in Cormier‘s head. After dominating the first round with his wrestling attack, he almost never returned to it for the rest of the fight.

A scrum and a short left hand left Cormier bloodied. “There’s blood under the right eye of the champion,” Mike Goldberg said. The disadvantage didn’t slow Cormier down and at the 3:57 mark Gustafsson literally turned and ran from Cormier, eventually resetting in the center of the cage.

He met a Cormier shot with a hard knee and surprised the champion with a takedown of his own. Though the wrestler made it to his feet immediately, he was greeted with a stinging Gustafsson punch for his trouble.

“He hurt him with a right hand,” Rogan exclaimed in classic Rogan style, predicting trouble that never came. Instead, Cormier recovered almost instantly and grabbed Gustafsson in a single collar tie, a move that ultimately decided this fight. Cormier, as we saw in the Anthony Johnson fight, is hard to hurt.

Cormier takes another shot at 3:10, but Gustafsson defended nicely and cracked him with a nice elbow to the dome. The wrestler, however, was able to push Gustafsson into the cage and was working him over when the Swede once again ran away.

The two men stood on the Monster Energy logo and exchanged punches, with Cormier landing several for Gustafsson‘s one. “Those uppercuts by DC were excellent,” Rogan said.

With just over a minute remaining, Cormier landed a left hand at the end of a combination that snapped Gustafsson‘s head back. Gustafsson‘s response, again, was to run. It might be tactically smart to remove yourself from disadvantageous positions, but judges notice that stuff too.

The round closed with a Gustafsson takedown, which surprised both the announcers and Cormier.

“That’s a big statement late in this round,” Goldberg said.

“That’s a big statement period. That’s a shock to Daniel Cormier,” Rogan said.

The Verdict

Round 3

Cormier continued to be the aggressor, pursuing the taller challenger relentlessly. The action slowed noticeably in the early stages. Gustafsson landed a hard uppercut following a feint but Cormier scored a telling blow of his own, a leaping right hand that busted open his opponent’s nose.

Gustafsson met the challenge with a hard right hand of his own, but found himself trapped in Cormier‘s clinch, brutalized by a series of right hands. Gustafsson attempts another takedown and Cormier meets it with a hard sprawl, his pride, perhaps, stung by being put on his back earlier in the fight.

Gustafsson kept the champion at bay for a time, moving and surviving but not doing enough to make it feel like he was winning. At 1:37 Cormier caught a kick and cracked him with a right, ending in the clinch and once again landing a series of uppercuts.

“He’s hanging in there Mike,” Rogan said. “We learned about his heart and will in that Jones fight.”

As the round came to a close, Gustafsson took advantage of a single moment of Cormier lethargy with a leaping right knee, following it with a left hook and tight shot group of punches as the champion fell to the mat.

Cormier had the wherewithal to grab a hold of a single leg for dear life and ended up riding out the round in the clinch. But this wasn’t the offensive clinch he’d used to take control of the fight. His goal here was simply survival.

“What. A. Fight!” Rogan exclaimed as the bell rang.

The Verdict

Round 4

“You’re not tired,” Gustafsson‘s coach Andreas Micheal told him in the corner between rounds. “You’re not tired.”

The challenger attempted to take that to heart, landing body kicks with both legs early and keeping his jab in Cormier‘s face. It is a punch that doesn’t have much snap, but he never stopped throwing it, occasionally following with a right hand.

“DC’s trying to spring into his punches to handle this distance,” Goldberg explained. It was a tactic that worked only on occasion.

Cormier remained the aggressor, but a physically limited one. He had trouble reaching Gustafsson‘s head from distance, often resorting to leaping in the air and throwing an odd backhand with his right hand that wouldn’t have amounted to much even had it landed.

Gustafsson wilted a bit under the pressure at 3:37, trying once again to run away and reset. This time, however, Cormier chased him, landing some solid punches while Gustafsson continued to mistake the fight for a track meet.

Just over halfway through the round there’s a strange paradigm shift. Cormier looked up at the clock and Gustafsson responded by becoming the aggressor. Cormier began circling the cage with Gustafsson chasing and landing a one-two.

Eventually the two return to their normal pattern, Cormier chasing and Gustafsson moving around the outside with a jab and a looping left hook he disguised effectively as a jab throughout. On his feet Cormier looked more desperate than in control, chasing, but mostly ineffectively.

“Daniel Cormier has not looked for a takedown in forever,” Goldberg said, underscoring Cormier‘s shrinking offensive attack.

With just over a minute left in the round, Gustafsson shot a takedown, then landed a knee in the clinch when Cormier defended. After a Gustafsson combination, he retreated with Cormier giving chase. The champion ended the round with a good straight round hand and a combination of blows that mostly missed their mark.

“It’s flurries like that that win rounds,” Rogan said.

The Verdict

Round 5

In the corner, “Crazy” Bob Cook asked Cormier for a takedown. Across the way, Gustafsson‘s team knew what was up.

“He’s going to try to take you down now,” Michael told his charge.

The two men begin the round with a show of respect. Cormier lands a stinging right hand early and followed up with one of the leg kicks that had bugged Gustafsson in the first round.

The challenger continued to move around the cage, but he did little to show anyone he actually wanted to win the fight. Midway through the round he, once again, turned and ran from Cormier. This time he was met by lusty boos from the crowd.

This isn’t how you win title fights.

Cormier once again secured a single tie, but this time Cormier grabbed a hold of his right hand to mostly prevent the uppercut. It only took him 22:53 to come up with a counter for the move that defined the bout.

With just over a minute left in the fight, Cormier landed one more solid right hand. The two have been relatively active throughout, but not especially effective. As for much of the fight, Cormier landed the more telling blows.

“(Gustafsson)’s just so weary Mike,” Rogan explained.

Gustafsson, however, wasn’t done yet. He scored a right hand and a knee with a minute left. The bout closed with both fighters in their respective elements, Cormier throwing punches in the clinch and Gustafsson responding with a final solid knee.

“Outstanding,” Goldberg exclaimed as the final bell rang.

The Verdict

If it felt like a close fight, it’s because it was. Only two rounds were definitive—the first and final were clearly Cormier‘s. The middle rounds could reasonably be scored to either man, even the third where Cormier was knocked down by a knee and a left hook.

I scored the fight a draw—but that’s a best-case scenario for Gustafsson. He fought a bout designed to ensure survival, not victory. In the end, the judges punished him for that.

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com