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MMA: 5 Fighters Who Can Still Make a Comeback

As fans of the combative sports, it’s a very hard thing to see a fighter we like and have rooted for many times to begin a downhill slide; we know it will happen eventually, and sometimes it happens sooner than we expected, but that doesn’t…

While MMA fans are dedicated on one hand, they are quick to mock and condemn on the other. Before you know it, this fighter or that champion was never really all that good anyway, and you know it’s true because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t be losing.

It’s the kind of attitude that’s to be expected in the fight game; fans are only human, after all, and it’s far easier to be pessimistic than optimistic.

Still, secretly, many a fan has a special place in their heart for at least one fighter who is struggling, hoping they can find a way to turn the tide and prove all the naysayers wrong. Fans also love to root for the underdog, even if they only do it through gritted teeth.

Perhaps the notion of fighters making comebacks is unconventional from a fan perspective, but it does happen. When a fighter is honest and decides that he still wants to fight more than anything else, it is then that positive change is most likely to occur.

One example of this is Arturo Gatti, who looked like he was simply finished as a boxer—too many wars and too much punishment coupled with a face-first style that simply didn’t have to be so—and thought by many to be too old to change his style.

But change he did, and the comeback was achieved, and we got one of the greatest boxing wars the sport has seen in some years: Arturo Gatti vs. Micky Ward.

When you consider that boxers take far more punishment in their careers than MMA fighters, the tale of Gatti is inspiring.

So taking that inspiration to heart, here is a list of five fighters who could make a comeback, should they find their dedication equal to their desire.

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The UFC’s Nick and Nate Diaz: 13 Men We’d Love to See Them Fight

By now, if you are an MMA fan and have not heard of the Diaz brothers, then you are just missing out on the best things in the life of a fight fan. Some fighters are simply cut from a different cloth, and I am not talking about the fabric that separate…

By now, if you are an MMA fan and have not heard of the Diaz brothers, then you are just missing out on the best things in the life of a fight fan.

Some fighters are simply cut from a different cloth, and I am not talking about the fabric that separates you and me from those incredible men and women who put it all on the line in the cage.

I am talking about the differences between Nick and Nate Diaz, and all the rest of those rare human beings we call MMA fighters.

Nick and Nate Diaz weren’t just born to fight, they were born to war—and there is a difference. One need only look as far as the bout between Clay Guida and Gray Maynard to see that proved true.

While other fighters look to develop different strategies in order to defeat different opponents, the brothers Diaz look only to polish and refine their style of aggression as the means to any and all ends, and for them it is more than a style—it’s a religion.

And to it they are faithful.

So faithful in fact that as more fighters prove themselves, the fans who follow the faithful cannot help but imagine what might occur should Johny Hendricks scrap with Nick, or Anthony Pettis draw hands with Nate.

It’s no longer just a simple pondering; it’s become a compliment of sorts for those fighters to be imagined slugging it out with 209s most fearsome brotherhood.

So here is a list of 13 men we’d love to see exchange compliments with Nick and Nate Diaz, and in the listing it’s safe to say some compliments are best given and received by those who speak the same language.

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UFC Champions: Ranking All 60 Fighters to Wear UFC Gold

If there is one question that seems to stand above all others, particularly in the combat sports (and specifically in the UFC, where all combat sports merge under the brightest spotlight), it is simply this: What makes a great champion? Perhaps a bette…

Perhaps a better question would be to ask what makes a champion great, but once again, it usually depends on whom you ask and when. After all, not long ago you could ask that question, and many would cite Junior dos Santos as an example of a great champion. But now that he has been dethroned, it seems his conqueror, Cain Velasquez, is wearing all that luster.

Of course, one criterion might be found in the rule that says a champion isn’t really a champion until he defends his title, and that seems to be accepted—at least by the fighters themselves—as conventional wisdom.

And who am I to argue with the men and women that make it all possible?

When compiling this list, I was forced to weigh different titles in opposition and decide which ones carried more weight: Is a champion with two tournament victories and a heavyweight title (but no defenses) worth more than a champion with no tournament victories but two title defenses?

These are the kinds of questions that hound any such list, and the UFC has seen several kinds of titles as they have evolved, not to mention the renaming and restructuring of weight divisions, etc.

Still, there must be a way to quantify who is the greatest champion in the history of the UFC and who comes in second and so on.

In keeping with that ambition, I present this list that humbly attempts to rank every fighter to ever wear UFC gold, based upon his as champion. The more titles a champion has had, the higher his ranking, and the same goes with title defenses, and, of course, the manner in which he dispatched of his opposition is also considered.

In the case of UFC gold (or any gold, for that matter), less is not always more, and more fights in one night is not always a greater accomplishment than single fights over the course of a champion’s career.

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The 10 Greatest Trilogies in MMA History

When I think of great trilogies in any combative sport, for me there has to be several ingredients that come together to create an epic story where the fighters, acting as co-authors, give us all they can and it’s simply not enough for a single s…

Thus, because it was so good the first time, we need more.

A great trilogy needs action (and back-and-forth action is the best), some doubt as to who is going to win each bout (and the more doubt, the better), drama as a result of serious conflict, and above all, there needs to be a reason why two fighters would need to meet a second time, let alone a third.

Some notable trilogies that didn’t make this list based on this criteria are Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock, Wanderlei Silva vs. Kazushi Sakuraba, Randy Couture vs. Vitor Belfort, and so on.

It’s not that those trilogies weren’t good; it’s that I didn’t think they were great.

Ortiz ran all over Shamrock in their first bout and from there it just got worse, and we got a trilogy lacking any real drama, doubt as to who would win, and no clear reasons why they should fight two times, let alone three.

Well, there was money, of course; can’t forget about that.

The same could be said about Silva vs. Sakuraba (to some extent), and as far as Couture vs. Belfort, the only reason why we got a third fight is because Couture didn’t slip that punch as well as he thought in the second bout.

Of course, not all great trilogies meet every standard, but they meet most of them, and for the purpose of this list, the majority rules.

Enjoy.

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MMA: Would It Make Any Sense to Bring Back Pride in 2013?

As Strikeforce prepares to close their doors forever and the UFC continues to march forward in their quest for global domination, I can’t help but wonder what impact an organization like Pride FC could have on the sport if they could come back no…

At their peak, Pride was the premier organization for MMA, second to none.

Much talk has been made about how the UFC will never co-promote, but during the Pride Middleweight Tournament in 2003, the UFC sent Chuck Liddell into the Pride ring, and make no mistake about that, they were co-promoting with Pride.

To be plain, I have always believed that competition is good in the combative sports.

I think when one show rules the road, fighters begin to slip through the cracks, suffering due to not enough chances to fight and worse, their performances and hard work are taken for granted.

After all, where else are they going to go?

Granted, there is Bellator, and I love that show. There is something about it that is serious enough to speak to a passion for the sport, professional enough to make you forget that nearly all of those fighters would bolt for the UFC if Joe Silva called, and there is a kind of integrity the organization possesses, simply because they are doing it their own way, Dana White be damned.

But in all honesty, if there is a problem with the sport right now, it is not the near stranglehold the UFC has, and it sure isn’t Dana White.

It’s a flaw intrinsic to the system itself, nothing more and nothing less.

Even if the UFC were to nearly double in size overnight, they could only increase their output of shows by about 20 percent, and that would probably be too much, given how they have basically saturated the PPV market.

There are still so many untapped countries that the other combative sports have shown have a deep well of talent, and no matter how big the UFC grows, they can’t employ them all and they can’t give them all the exposure they need.

Mexico, Russia and Japan are just a few examples of this. Yes, the UFC is attempting to get back into the Far East markets, but it is going to be a long time before they really get a solid enough footing to draw deep from that well.

And they haven’t even attempted to start making inroads to Mexico and Russia, at least not to any extent that is noteworthy.

When pondering the question further, I then remember that Pride FC started with fighters who came from the UFC.

Yes, Pride had a lot of money and managed to get a small number of bigger name fighters to defect, but the first Pride shows were built upon the names of UFC fighters who had been all but forgotten.

Dan Severn, Kimo Leopoldo, Gary Goodridge and Oleg Taktarov were really the biggest names on the first Pride card, save for Rickson Gracie and Nobuhiko Takada, and they pulled around 47,000 fans out of their homes and into the arena to watch.

From there, they began to mix their cards with bigger name UFC castoffs and defectors and newer talent, and they turned into the biggest promotion of their time.

As impressive as the UFC stable is now, there are still quite a few big names not pledging allegiance to their banner, and those men and women love to fight.

Josh Barnett could probably be lured into the fold, along with Gegard Mousasi, Ben Askren, Michael Chandler, Bibiano Fernandes, Marlon Sandro, Andrei Arlovski, Tim Sylvia, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson (once his contract is up), Pedro Rizzo, Matt Lindland, Sergei Kharitonov, Jeff Monson, and so on.

None of these men are the best in their divisions, but a few of them are in the top 10, and if such a new company really wanted to get attention, they would need only call upon some of their national heroes, such as Kazushi Sakuraba and Shinya Aoki, along with new fighters itching to make a splash, and suddenly you have all the makings for an entertaining night of fights.

Notice I said “entertaining,” not meaningful. Really none of the fights on a new promotion’s first few fight cards are going to have any real divisional ramifications, but they could entertain the crowd and viewers, and that is how such things begin.

Once such a promotion got their feet under them and began walking (not running), they could attract a lot of attention, both from fans and other fighters either tired of dealing with the UFC (or waiting on them) or just eager to get noticed on a bigger stage.

In the end, as long as said promotion paid well and kept to their books with an eye toward serious fiscal responsibility, they could start talking in a language all fighters understand: money.

When the first incarnation of Pride fell, the sport was not nearly as big as it is now. Thanks to the growth of the UFC and the exposure the sport has enjoyed as a byproduct, a new Japanese promotion might be able to get partners to invest in them, and god knows how big a promotion could get if a company like Sony took an interest and was willing to put their money in the pot.

Of course, all of this is nothing more the speculation and assumption, and proceeding from those assumptions, but it is possible.

However, the real question becomes: “Is it probable?”

Right now, in 2013, I think not. Japan is still in the process of recovery from many woes, and that takes time, and if a promotion was started now, I think they would falter and fall.

But in five or 10 years from now?

That could be a totally different story.

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MMA: Why There Is No Such Thing as a “Fluke” in the Fight Game

For a very long time now, I have been surprised at just how quickly fans of the combative sports attach certain labels to shocking upsets, and perhaps no label is as grossly misused as the term “Fluke.” Sure, this is nothing new; it’s…

Sure, this is nothing new; it’s been going on since people began to follow the sport of boxing, so many years ago, and in truth it isn’t going to go away, either.

But that doesn’t give it any real credibility, nor does it make it correct, because it is simply wrong.

Recently, fans have attached the term to fights such as GSP vs. Serra I, Andrei Arlovski vs. Roy Nelson, and so on and so forth.

Those fights were upsets, yes, but they were still fights, not flukes.

Neither GSP nor Roy Nelson had any illusions as to what they were walking into; they knew that their opponents were going to try to win any way they could, and that said opponents only had so many avenues to win: by decision, submission, TKO or KO.

Sure, it has been noted by many that GSP had distractions in his life leading into his first bout with Matt Serra, but that doesn’t change the fact that GSP knew that he could lose by any of the means fights are decided in the sport.

When he suffered that TKO loss, it was because Serra, based on his height and reach, was a bit more problematic that GSP anticipated; when Serra caught GSP with that shot, it was then that Serra really stepped up his game and finished the champ with poise and accurate power punching, and that is something that we don’t usually see when one man has the other hurt badly and is going in for the kill.

The same goes for Roy Nelson, who has made a living getting slugged in the face, often. His easy smile, beard and mullet may distract some, but his style of fighting is based on four pillars, and one of them is his chin.

When he got knocked out by Arlovski, it was because he was willing to test his chin against the fists of his opponent, and he lost in a big way.

That is not a fluke, that is just part of the game; anyone can get knocked out, and if you put your chin in the line of fire often enough, against heavy punchers, it is going to happen.

Then, there is the simple fact that both GSP and Nelson are students of the game—and truth be told I don’t know of any fighter who isn’t—and the notion of being defeated by KO is something that both men have faced not only in training but every previous time they had stepped into the cage.

Of course, I have been on board the “fluke” bandwagon before. I used to scream the term into the faces of anyone who saw validation in claiming that one fighter was no good simply because he was upset by another fighter.

But then I was called on it, and called hard.

It happened around the time Mike Tyson was upset and knocked out by Buster Douglas.

It was a fluke, I said. Couldn’t happen again in a million years, I said. Will never happen again, I said.

“Do you think Tyson studies tape?”

I think so, I replied. But maybe he didn’t this time.

“If he did, then he should have trained harder, and being lazy isn’t a fluke, it’s being lazy,” my tormentor said. “If he didn’t study tape, then he damn well should have. That isn’t a fluke, it’s being overconfident.”

You’re oversimplifying things, I tried to counter. No one thought Tyson was going to lose this fight. Douglas was hardly ranked.

“So, because the masses thought one way and were proved to be wrong, that makes it a fluke?”

I didn’t know what to say about that, because it sounded like I was walking into a trap.

“The masses like to be amazed, and if they are amazed enough and in a continuous fashion, it’s what they come to expect, and that lulls them into nothing more than making assumptions beforehand, and then proceeding from those assumptions before learning if they are correct or false. Pavlov’s dog was the same way, you know, but Pavlov not giving the mutt the scraps wasn’t a fluke, it was by design, just like it was by design when Douglas climbed up off the canvas and kept on fighting, and just like he kept on throwing punches. Fights happen by design and are based on a known design. The winner just happens to be the better designer.”

Each and every single fight is really its own story, and that is where the folly of the fluke comes into focus. What GSP or Nelson did before their fights with Serra and Arlovski are of no importance; it’s what they decided to do—how they fought these men—at the time that matters, and that is where they were defeated.

Everyone can fall into error and proceed from false assumptions, especially fighters who are as gifted as GSP or as tough as Nelson, but when those notions and assumptions are confounded, it is not a fluke but a simple byproduct of hubris if the loss comes because of a reliance on the past.

Flukes happen in other aspects of life, to be sure. I am not saying I don’t understand why people rush to use the word to explain why the upset happened (because we all crave explanations) or to label it (because we all love to label things); I understand this all too well.

I am saying that in a contest with weight classes, unified rules, referees in good standing and of high personal and professional accountability, known methods to achieve victory, training camps and trainers chosen by the fighter via free will, desire and dedication and the lessons of the past…well, someone is either going to win by decision, KO, TKO or submission, and there is no mystery to be found in that.

No fluke to be found, either.

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