Author: Luke Thomas

In the days after Quinton “Rampage” Jackson became the latest fighter to acknowledge using testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), Nevada state athletic commission executive director Keith Kizer’s phone began to light up. On the other end were fighters and managers interested in finding out how to obtain a TRT exemption.

Kizer, who had heard about Jackson’s interview with Fighters Only acknowledging his usage, was not surprised. In his comments, Jackson claimed that “a lot of fighters are probably doing it but not telling anyone.” That quote has since been removed from the interview, but its echo has created a stir in the mixed martial arts world, suggesting that legitimizing TRT treatment was easy.

Jackson is not only the latest of the divulged names using TRT, but also its loudest proponent. But contrary to popular belief, the number of fighters legally using TRT with the permission of state athletic commissions is quite low.

How low?

In its entire history, the Nevada state athletic commission has granted only three therapeutic use exemptions (TUE’s) for TRT, Kizer told MMA Fighting. The only individuals to receive exemptions have been Dan Henderson, Todd Duffee, and most recently, Shane Roller in 2011. New Jersey Athletic Control board legal counsel Nick Lembo could not offer a specific number but said that state had given “less than five” TUE’s for TRT in its history. In Ohio, only Henderson and Strikeforce fighter Bristol Marunde have ever been approved for TRT use, its state athletic commission executive director Bernie Profato told MMA Fighting.

Contrast that with the reaction of say, Dr. Don Catlin, who sits on the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission responsible for reviewing TUE applications for Olympic athletes. In a recent interview with MMA Fighting regarding the possibility of active fighters needing TUE’s for TRT in MMA, Catlin remarked that the whole thing was “a joke.”

Those types of broad criticisms are troubling to some combat sports regulators who feel that their goals of toeing the line between sport safety and being responsive to individual health situations are being undermined.

“I hear things like, ‘Oh everyone can do it,'” Kizer said. “Well, how many exemptions have [the IOC] given out? Two. Well, we’ve given out three in 12 years.”

According to Catlin along with many other critics, the possibility of professional athletes in their 30s needing TRT is so low, it’s almost completely zero.

But new research might show those long-held beliefs to be incorrect.

The science of brain injury is still relatively new, and developing rapidly. In 2007, a paper published in the Journal of Athletic Training reported the first known connection between mild concussions and hypopituitarism, a deficiency that can lead to low testosterone.

That research, along with how traumatic brain injuries impact the pituitary gland, is being continued by Dr. Daniel F. Kelly, the director of the Brain Center and Pituitary Disorders Program at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California.

Kelly is currently in the midst of a study of 75 former NFL players that is expected to be published around the end of 2012. In an interview with MMA Fighting, Kelly said that preliminary data from the study suggests that pituitary damage is occurring in a subset of the retirees.

That study seems to corroborate a 2006 finding in Turkey that found that head injuries incurred by pro kickboxers have resulted in damage to the pituitary gland.

Extrapolated to MMA, it’s not much of a leap to suggest that similar injuries can be occurring to this sport’s fighters, for whom getting hit in the head is a daily occurrence. In fact, Dr. Fahrettin Kelestimur, a professor of endocrinology at Erciyes University in Turkey who authored the 2006 study, told MMA Fighting that the most common damage has caused growth hormone deficiency and hypogonadism, respectively. The latter problem was the one cited by Chael Sonnen as the necessity of his TRT treatments during his appeal of a California state athletic commission suspension.

“These fighters are getting repeated insults to the head, sometimes more than concussive events,” Kelly said. “And if you did a careful analysis of those people, I’m sure you’d see a significant rate of pituitary gland dysfunction. That’s my prediction.”

The issue is complicated by the fact that it is not always possible to determine the cause of pituitary damage, according to Kelly. It’s well known that steroid abuse can also damage the pituitary gland, but head trauma can cause the same affect.

That makes things cloudier for regulators like Kizer and Lembo, who work for two of the sport’s leading commissions.

At the same time, they along with other regulators believe it’s important not to punish the athletes that come forward with a legitimate need by banning TRT outright. While the long-held belief that steroid use as the main cause of low testosterone among athletes might be true, it’s by no means a catch-all.

That knowledge simply just isn’t widespread. Most of the people interviewed for this story were unaware that pituitary damage could be caused by repeated blows to the head, as Kelly, the brain and pituitary expert agreed.

“Is that incrementally damaging the connection between the brain and pituitary? I think it probably is,” he said. “But can we prove that there’s an exposure component that’s incrementally adding up even if it’s not even considered a concussion. I think that’s probably the case.”

While MMA often points to its safety record, there are variables to the sport that cannot be controlled. Chief among them is what goes on in the gyms during training camp. While fighters who suffer knockout losses in competition are medically suspended in order to give them time to recover, those periods are rarely enforced. Some of them can’t be due to simple logistics.

If a fighter competes in Texas, for example, but calls Brazil home, there is no real way to check up on him and ensure he’s letting his brain recover from the trauma it received. Most good coaches will try to keep their athletes on the sidelines and away from head strikes in this critical recovery phase, but it’s not like that everywhere.

Take, for instance, Pat Barry’s recent explanation of why he hoped to visit Croatia soon to get in some training.

“Out there, you can punch and kick guys completely unconscious and they show up the next day,” he said. ” Whereas here, you can punch and kick some guys, and sometimes they don’t come back for the rest of the week.”

“Which is probably a good idea,” UFC president Dana White interjected.

Barry’s seeming insensitivity to head injuries might be ingrained in his mentality as a fighter who is trained to be fearless even in the heat of battle, but it also might be from an attitude that is generationally rooted, though changing. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report noted that emergency room visits for children and adolescents due to sports and recreation-related traumatic brain injuries were up 60 percent in the last decade. The organization’s director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control attributed to the rise not to increased incidences, but to growing awareness of the dangers caused by brain injuries.

Attention to the problem of brain injury has also been slow to come to pro sports. In 2008, the collaborative Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy was founded to study brain injury, and their work has changed the NFL’s outlook on concussions and head trauma, causing rule changes in 2009 that focused on player safety. This even though as a league, the NFL has had a multi-decade head start on MMA when it comes to head injuries. MMA commissions in some instances have only been sanctioning the sport for a year or two and are still drafting regulations.
As it stands now, most commissions have no tests in place that would determine this type of problem.

Only a handful of state commissions require an MRI in order to grant a fighter’s license, but MRI’s don’t always show the problem, anyway. A blood draw is more likely to determine if an issue exists, according to Kelly. Tests for luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), testosterone, growth hormone (GH) and IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) could serve as an effective screening tool to determine any pituitary damage.

Most of the blood work done through commissions prior to licensing though, is solely to test for contagious diseases.

A big problem when it comes to changing medical technology is cost. Ohio Athletic Commission executive director Bernie Profato likened it to medical issues in the world at large, recounting the story of how the son of a close friend died from a rare blood disease that doctors didn’t have the means to handle because of a lack of money to fund research.

“The more this stuff comes up, the more time medical people put into it, it extends our knowledge of it,” he said. “We’re regulators, not medical people. We do what we can to put these athletes in the safest environment.”

Only a handful of the regulators MMA Fighting spoke with had heard of the studies linking brain trauma with pituitary damage, but most acknowledged that such conditions are exactly why TRT TUE’s shouldn’t always be passed off as an attempt to fleece the system.

“It’s very rare, but there are some legitimate needs,” Lembo said. “My biggest concern is that most commissions don’t even test for these things in the first place so we’re over-penalizing the people that are coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, do whatever you want to me. Test me before and after the fight. Test me randomly. I need this, I’m on it and I’m going to be within normal limits.’ There are a lot of commissions who don’t believe in TUE’s for any reason, but why be hard on the ones coming forward?”

Dr. Kelly, who has been working on issues pertaining to the pituitary gland for nearly 20 years, in 2008 co-authored a study that concluded chronic hypopituitarism occurred in approximately 20 percent of patients who had suffered mild, moderate or traumatic brain injury.

With the repetitive head impacts from training and competing from month to month and year to year, it’s no wonder then that professional fighters could be subject to these same types of injuries. While finishing up his NFL research, Kelly is also interested in studying boxers and, possibly, mixed martial artists to gain a more definitive understanding of a problem that still remains mostly hidden away.

“I’m sure there’s a certain level of it going on,” he said. “I guess what’s really amazing, if you look at it another way, is how infrequently it occurs, and how sturdy the system is, how much damage it can take. The pituitary gland is this tiny little thing that’s less than a centimeter cubed. It’s sitting in a little, bony depression in the skull base and it’s getting banged around, and the connection is getting banged around repeatedly, yet it keeps it on ticking in most people. It’s a pretty resilient system, but only up to a point.”

[Editor’s Note: PEDs in MMA is a two-part series. Next week, an installment on the drug-testing landscape in MMA, and how regulators, athletes and promoters are adapting.]

UFC 146’s all-heavyweight main card isn’t a declared tournament, but it is the closest relative to the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix the UFC has ever produced.

In fact, one can barely consider the novelty of the UFC card without acknowledging the obvious Strikeforce influence. While there are obvious differences between the two events, the two rosters between the organizations can be meaningfully compared. And given that comparisons have to be limited but not out of bounds, the most pressing question is which event had the stronger roster of heavyweights?

It’s true the UFC’s absolute and comparative advantages here are hard to overstate. However, it’s also true the deck is stacked slightly in Strikeforce’s favor. We are not measuring or comparing what kind of tournament or what the best possible all-heavyweight main card is the UFC can put together. We are merely comparing Strikeforce’s best historical heavyweight event against an excellent but not resource-draining creation by UFC.

There are a few methods to compare rosters, but the most obvious is rankings. Despite debate among the community as to the accuracy or value of fighter rankings, they are the best if very imperfect method of evaluating status and accomplishment.

The first leg of the Grand Prix kicked off in February of 2011. Therefore, let’s take at the rankings of the Strikeforce heavyweights on the cusp of the tournament’s beginning. According to the USA TODAY/SB Nation Consensus MMA Rankings (a measure of the MMA rankings community aggregate view), they were as follows:

Fedor Emelianenko – #3
Fabricio Werdum – #4
Alistair Overeem – #7
Antonio Silva – #10
Josh Barnett – #11
Brett Rogers – #12
Andrei Arlovski – #17
Sergei Kharitontov – unranked

By comparison, here’s where the top eight of UFC 146’s ten main card fighters rank as of the time of this writing:

Junior dos Santos – #1
Alistair Overeem – #2
Cain Velasquez – #2 (tied with Overeem, there is no #3)
Frank Mir – #4
Antonio Silva – #10
Roy Nelson – #14
Stefan Struve – #20
Mark Hunt – #22

What’s the major takeaway? The Strikeforce roster is very competitive, but not as top heavy or deep as the upcoming UFC 146 main card. There are more, higher-ranked fighters on UFC 146 than there were at any point in the Grand Prix. That’s also true in terms of top ten talent.

One could argue several of the Strikeforce fighters were underrated. But several of them bottomed out in the course of the tourney. Those that succeeded have climbed the ranks. The case for a major recalibration of the February 2011 rankings is a tough sell.

The Strikeforce top eight are competitive, though. Like the top eight of the UFC’s main card, Strikeforce’s tournament featured four fighters who at some point held a major heavyweight title in MMA (Emelianenko for PRIDE, Overeem for Strikeforce, Barnett and Arlovski for UFC). And two of the UFC main card fighters – Alistair Overeem and Antonio Silva (del Rosario was an alternate) – were a part of the Strikeforce tournament. Due to Overeem’s victory over Werdum in the tournament and dominating performance of former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar, today they’re in an accumulatively improved rankings position than they were before the tournament started.

It’s true and regrettable the Strikeforce tournament is limping to an end. And as aforementioned, it’s also true several participants have fallen on hard times. Emelianenko would lose first round to Silva and subsequently to Dan Henderson, ultimately resulting in his dismissal from Strikeforce. Arlovski would lose first round to Kharitonov – his fourth in a row – and would also leave the organization. Brett Rogers, too, would be cut due to his run-in with the law on charges of domestic abuse after being easily bested by Barnett. Given Golden Glory’s poor relationship with Zuffa, Kharitonov’s MMA future remains uncertain.

Hindsight is always 20/20, though. It’s easy today to dismiss Arlovski’s or even Emelianenko’s inclusion in the tournament as evidence of strong competition. We’ve witnessed their decline. Trying to appreciate the original February 2011 context is psychically impossible. There were reasons to be skeptical of their merit then, yes, but decline in fight sport is precipitous. And given Strikeforce’s limited resources, what they were able to cobble together at the time was rather remarkable. That, too, is a benefit of retrospection.

The tournament’s legacy will not be that the best heavyweight in MMA was crowned. Nor will it be a positive referendum on Strikeforce’s ability execute on a vision. Instead, it’s that permutations on the sort of fights and format Strikeforce lined up are very promotable at the highest level. That’s not the success Strikeforce sought in February of 2011, but a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

All of this also suggests UFC 146’s main card deserves some extra acknowledgement for what it says about those staging the event.

Strikeforce’s collection of tournament fight cards relied on the best their division had to offer. It’s not as nimble or elegant a feat as constructing a single fight card that can more than rival the tournament’s talent. Also consider several ranked UFC heavyweights – Fabricio Werdum, Shane Carwin, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira – are not even part of this upcoming card. There is a disconnect between what the UFC is capable of and what they’re doing. Given how well they’re doing, it’s staggering to consider how much better it could be.

The UFC is significantly more powerful than Strikeforce both then and especially now. Appreciating or acknowledging as isn’t a particularly difficult task. One can naturally infer even with a more limited platform they’d be able to create a product to surpass any of their competitors.

As we look back on the Strikeforce experiment, though, we can recognize the UFC 146 card succeeds by poaching several Strikeforce stars and aping what’s alluring about the heavyweight tournament: a night(s) of top talent in bouts of both significance and slugging and the promise of more to come. UFC 146 feels as if Zuffa capitalized on what was right about the Strikeforce tournament while shrinking or eliminating that which held the tournament back.

The May 26 fight card is the single best showcase of ranked, heavyweight talent in a single night in MMA history. For that, UFC deserves credit both for having the resources and executing on them. But credit, too, goes to Strikeforce. Although they stumbled along they way, they birthed a clever idea. In more capable hands, that idea turns out to be fun for fans, record-setting for the sport and excellent for the UFC’s financial bottom line.

As we all digest the news of what happened to Muhammed Lawal and keep waiting for UFC 145 to get here already, MMA Fighting felt it appropriate to have my colleague Mike Chiappetta and I debate the weighty topics of today in another installment of the MMA Roundtable.

This week: Mike and I discuss whether Zuffa made the right call in cutting Lawal for his comments about the NSAC on Twitter, if there’s a case to be made to change Bellator’s tournament format, what chances Chael Sonnen has in his rematch with Anderson Silva and how the UFC heavyweights of today compare with PRIDE’s best heavyweight era.

1. King Mo’s cut: is that the right call by Zuffa?

Chiappetta: No. I would have preferred he was simply fined. It would have been one thing if they released Lawal due to his nine-month suspension ruling by the Nevada state athletic commission stemming from a positive steroids test. At least then they could say they were punishing him for an illegal act related to the sport. Instead, it seems he has been let go due to his reaction to the suspension. More specifically, a tweet he sent out aimed at NSAC commission member Pat Lundvall, which referred to her as a “racist b—-” for asking him if he could read and write English.

Now, two wrongs don’t make a right here, so Lawal wasn’t exactly justified in his words. You can’t have your athletes going around firing off venom, because that sets a terrible precedent. Policing the fighters has to be done. But stripping him of his livelihood for it seems a little bit harsh. I can understand his anger for being asked such a degrading question. He’s not exactly a nobody, and any cursory knowledge of his background — something by the way, that should exist in a ruling body judging him — would clearly indicate his level of schooling. By the way, commissioner Lundvall had been speaking to him for a while by the time she asked the question that offended him, and clearly she knew he spoke English. Again, this doesn’t excuse Lawal’s tweet, but at least it gives some context into the emotion that led up to it.

Sadly, the whole situation turned out like a fiasco on every side.

Thomas: Mike’s absolutely right here. Certainly Lawal’s words were incendiary. They were also unprofessional. But in the absence of a defined social media policy all fighters sign and agree to (like a terms of service agreement), any kind of punishment is capricious and unfair.

The UFC is trying to encourage use and novel application of social media among it’s fighters (who, by the way, are not really employees but ‘independent contractors’; would you fire your plumber for insulting others on Twitter?). That’s a truly excellent idea and the vast majority of the times yields positive results. But fighters need to have a clear sense about what is and isn’t expected of him. Relying on some notion of ‘common sense’ is plainly negligent on the part of the UFC.

Let’s also make note of how utterly rude and patronizing commissioner Lundvall was in asking Lawal if he understood English. The notion that line of questioning is somehow common is total myth. Alistair Overeem failed to properly take a drug test in the specified amount of time and English is his second language. Was there any questioning about whether his proficiency in reading or writing English inhibited him from following through on his responsibilities? Please. The commissioner may or may not be racist, but they are most certainly condescending.

Chiappetta: Of course it can be tweaked, but should it be? I think the answer is no. The way the heavyweight tournament ended was unfortunate, but it’s no different than when a title challenger or No. 1 contender drops out of a UFC bout and has to be replaced. In a way, Bellator has to face the same problem the UFC does: an unrelenting schedule. The shows must continue even when the fighters can’t, and so there is only so much wiggle room when an injury takes place.

In the past, Bellator has delayed title fights with one injured participant, but the tournament bouts must continue on and generate a winner, otherwise they become pointless. The heavyweight tourney had gone on so long, I can understand why CEO Bjorn Rebney basically threw his hands up and surrendered. Of course we want to see things decided in the cage, but you can only try to set up a fight so many times before it becomes obvious it’s not going to happen.

The tournament format is one of the few things that differentiates Bellator from other promotions, and they shouldn’t give up that uniqueness to be just another fight promotion. Unforeseen issues are going to be pop up from time to time, but you just have to do your best to plug in the hole and move forward.

Thomas: There are obviously tweeks that can be made to Bellator’s format. You know who knows that? Bellator. The question is how much? Therein lies the more challenge part of this problem.

This past week on The MMA Hour, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney said as much. They’ll be having more tournaments per season, moving to three hour shows and more. I can even see a case for abandoning heavyweights and focusing more on women.

But all of those alterations still keep the tournament model in tact. That, above all else, should not be abandoned. It’s the key differentiator and a boon to the company. Moreover, there is time to get things right before moving to a bigger and much more important platform. While on MTV2, Bellator has the opportunity to make the adjustments necessary to properly leverage and execute on their business model. Those who argue about lackluster ratings fail to realize Viacom doesn’t really care about them. In this window of opportunity, Bellator has the chance to get things right. As long as they don’t abandon the tournament format, they’ll likely move in the right direction.

3. Sonnen-Silva II was recently announced. What is Sonnen’s realistic chance of winning?

Thomas: I’d say his chances are slightly diminished from the last time, but still very real. It’s well-known (though not exactly proven) Silva suffered from a rib injury during their first bout. He managed to win late, but took a beating along the way and looked dreadful at defending the takedown. He looked better at UFC 134 when he easily bested another strong wrestler in Yushin Okami, but Okami’s a significantly different type of fighter. Among other notable differences, he isn’t nearly as aggressive and doesn’t run through his takedowns.

The question on my mind is Silva. If he’s healthy, is he still up to to peak performance? His game is so heavily predicated on speed and reflexes. At 37, are they still there? Liddell was cruising up through the second Tito Ortiz bout before his career fell off a cliff. I have no idea if he’s there or not, but it wouldn’t totally surprise me to see him not move, bounce and counter with the same nimbleness we are accustomed to seeing.

I don’t know if Sonnen will get rattled when a soccer stadium full of prideful Brazilians are wishing him to lose the fight or his life. There’s arguments to be made Sonnen is both properly game for challenges and a bit of a choke artist. Either way, I expect a tough fight that will close inside the distance.

Chiappetta: Sonnen has a very real chance to win. Luke makes some valid points, particularly the question we must ask every time Silva walks out to the octagon: Have we already seen his last great performance? This rematch will only intensify that question, only because the 10-month layoff will be his longest inactive stretch since a multi-year rest from 1997-2000 when he was still a young buck.

He’s been extremely active since then, and that’s allowed him to be consistently sharp over the years. Will that time away from the cage adversely impact him against Sonnen? It’s certainly possible. On the other hand, Sonnen didn’t look particularly terrifying against Michael Bisping last time, though he got the job done.

The one thing Sonnen has going for him is he knows he can repeatedly take down Silva, and that’s a huge boost for his confidence as he walks into hostile territory. As long as he can stay out of traps, he has a very legitimate chance to win. The odds have Silva as a 3-to-1 favorite. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think it’s closer to a coin flip, with Silva a slight favorite. It’s not like Sonnen didn’t come within two minutes of beating him last time around.

4. Are today’s UFC heavyweights better or worse than PRIDE’s best era of heavyweights?

Thomas: I’d say they are at least as good if not better.

Make no mistake: PRIDE’s heavyweights were an elite group. And the major triumverate of rivals – Fedor Emelianenko, Mirko CroCop, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira – mirrored the close contests among the sport’s top light heavyweights at that time (Tito Ortiz. Vitor Belfort, Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell) that helped push MMA forward. A lot of credit goes to them for helping to create a spectacle while competing in sport. Beyond the big three, there were MMA and heavyweight pioneers who grew the game with their outsized personalities as well as the technical evolutions they introduced (Mark Coleman, Kevin Randleman and Gary Goodridge). And there were x-factors like Aleksander Emelianenko, who before catching a blood-borne disease, showcased the type of excellent boxing-for-mma skills rarely seen at that time in the sport’s growth.

But let’s be serious: outside of the big three in their prime, none of the other heavyweights would stand a chance not only with the UFC’s top three today, but possibly even their top 10 or top 15. Do I really believe a prime Kevin Randleman or Mark Coleman have anything for Frank Mir or Antonio Silva?

In defense of the PRIDE heavyweights, some are still floating around among the UFC’s top ranks. Nogueira may have had his arm broken against Frank Mir at UFC 140, but he was winning that bout and is still a top ten talent. Mark Hunt, for all his faults, is in the top 15 as well. At the top, it’s arguably competitive. Across the division, though, the UFC ranks are significantly deeper.

Chiappetta: It’s always difficult to compare eras due to improvements in training and technique, but it’s a fun debate.

Let’s imagine an eight-man tournament of the UFC’s best four current heavyweights against PRIDE’s four best all-time. If I’m doing the picking, I have Dos Santos, Cain Velasquez, Alistair Overeem and Frank Mir for the UFC, and Fedor Emelianeko, Mirko Cro Cop, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Josh Barnett for PRIDE.

I think a prime Fedor beats Dos Santos, Velasquez mauls Cro Cop, Nogueira submits Overeem and Mir tops Barnett. So we have Fedor vs. Velasquez and Nogueira vs. Mir in the semis. Well, we already know that Mir beats Nog, and Fedor squeaks past Cain to set up Fedor vs. Mir. I’ve got Fedor in that final, but of course, if you re-seed them and set up the matchups differently, you might get a different result. Still, I think that’s a very competitive scenario, and if that’s the point, we can’t say they’re any worse than the old PRIDE set.

That said, it’s just another reason why rolling the Strikeforce heavies into the UFC is a great move. We won’t have to have this debate again five years from now.

Quite an interesting day yesterday. Former Strikeforce heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem gets sentenced to community service for (allegedly) shoving a woman in the face in a Las Vegas nightclub. Then the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspends (former) Strikeforce light heavyweight Muhammed Lawal for nine months as well as fines him roughly $40,000. Of course, all of this is before Zuffa cut Lawal from his Strikeforce contract for controversial remarks he made about a member of the NSAC.

Naturally, there’s a lot to talk about. So, join me at 1 p.m. ET today as we discuss it all: should Lawal have been cut? Does Bellator’s tournament model deserve to be changed?

Remember, you can login to the awesome Scribblelive service using Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. Or you can just register with Scribblelive. Either way, all I ask is you show up at 1 p.m. ET for the banter.

Talk to you then.

Former Strikeforce heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem, 31, was sentenced in Las Vegas, Nev. court Tuesday to 50 hours of community service and anger management counseling for battery charges related to an incident in a Las Vegas nightclub. The top UFC heavyweight also received a suspended 90-day jail sentence. If the terms of today’s sentencing are met, any follow-up punitive action will be dismissed.

The striker faced a maximum of six months in the Clark County Detention Center and not more than a $1,000 fine. Overeem must appear in court again on Las Vegas on Sept. 26th.

The charges Overeem faced resulted from an incident that took place at the Wynn Las Vegas on Jan. 2nd of this year. A woman alleges Overeem pushed her in the face, which caused her to “stagger back”.

The former Golden Glory fighter was not in attendance at today’s hearing. He was instead represented by his attorney, David Shesnoff.

Overeem was in attendance at today’s press conference in Las Vegas promoting UFC 146. He faces Junior dos Santos on that May 26th fight card at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for the organization’s heavyweight title.

When Rory MacDonald received word he’d be facing British striker Che Mills at UFC 145, what did he do?

Did he react with joy that he’d be the co-main event under one of the biggest headlining fights of the year? Maybe he immediately begin gameplanning for Mills’ strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps he was glad to be back in action after being sidelined before UFC 140 with a knee injury.

It turns out he did none of those things.

“I looked him up on the Internet to see what he looked like,” MacDonald confessed. And he probably isn’t alone.

By most accounts, the Rory MacDonald vs. Che Mills bout as a co-main event for UFC 145: Jones vs. Evans is a curious bit of matchmaking. It’s true Mills is coming off a devastating stoppage of Chris Cope at UFC 138 and even earned Knockout of the Night honors for the crushing win.

It’s also true, however, MacDonald enters this bout having won his last two fights in a row against much more marquee names in the welterweight division: a decision win over Nate Diaz (now a lightweight) at UFC 129 and a first-round TKO stoppage of Mike Pyle at UFC 133. It would seem if anyone were ready and deserving of a jump in ranked competition, it’d be MacDonald.

And maybe he is. Maybe MacDonald knows he was supposed to be getting more out of his next fight. But he also knows in the UFC, big wins can get you big opportunities. Mills had a sensational win in his last bout and MacDonald will be the first to tell you as much.

“He had a good performance in his last fight, so I think UFC is very performance based,” MacDonald told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour. “Joe Silva thought it was a good match-up.”

The Montreal-resident believes letting his mind wander to what could or should be instead of what is can also be a recipe for disaster at this level of the game. “If a fighter’s in the UFC, I have all the respect in the world for them,” MacDonald argued. “You can’t take anyone lightly in this sport.”

“I didn’t see his fight in UFC,” he continued. “I told a lot of people this. I don’t really do research and watch video on the guys I fight. I kind of leave that to my coaches and just focus on my own training. But I did see a little bit. He’s obviously a very talented striker and a good mixed martial artist.”

The bout with Mills may be odd to some, but getting an opponent who is appropriate in the UFC is often a function of availability. MacDonald was originally scheduled to face Brian Ebersole at UFC 140, but was forced to withdraw due to a knee injury. More importantly, MacDonald took the time he needed to heal properly and avoid surgery. That meant a layoff longer than he would’ve liked.

“I basically had this issue with my hip and my quad at first during sprinting,” the Tri-Star Gym welterweight said. “It moved down into my knee and the back of my leg and then my meniscus. It was like a whole string of things. The whole chain kind of went.”

“I tried to heal it, but I wouldn’t have had any time to train for the fight. Luckily I avoided surgery because I took care of it. I figured it was the best thing. Just take a little bit of time to myself to heal it properly, avoid surgery. Because I had to have surgery on my other knee the year before and I didn’t really want to go through that again.”

MacDonald admits to feeling like the made the right decision about his health, but is somewhat glum about where the upcoming fight with Mills will take place.

UFC 145 was originally scheduled to be held at the Bell Centre in Montreal on March 24. But the UFC was never able to secure a suitable main event for the premium market, so the card was pushed back to late April and moved to Atlanta, Georgia.

“It was a bit disappointing not being able to fight in Montreal. I wanted to show the fans here who I was,” MacDonald admitted. “I really have no problem traveling to Atlanta or anything like that, but it would’ve been nice to stay in Canada.”

Despite the changes and oddities of it all, MacDonald is taking the UFC 145 process in stride. He’s in the co-main event for the time in his career – “I’ve never been a co-main event, so I’m excited for that” – and ultimately doesn’t view it as his personal responsibility to determine who he fights. He’s got other priorities to worry about.

“I don’t really get disappointed because my job is to look good and to fight good, put on a good show. This sport is so performance based and it’s meant for entertainment,” MacDonald observed. “It’s my management and my coaches’, and the UFC’s job to pick who I fight. I don’t worry about that part of it. All I worry about is training hard, getting better, and fighting at my best.”

MacDonald will have to defeat Mills at UFC 145 to get where he wants to go and be where he feels he rightfully belongs. Even then, he’ll have to see what the UFC has in store for him. Nothing is ever certain in this sport and now more than ever MacDonald knows it. But sooner or later, the 22-year old rising MMA star believes no matter who he fights or where the bout takes place, he’ll be on everyone’s radar. MacDonald is determined to leave an impression.

“I feel like I’m the best in the world,” MacDonald said without hesitation. “You’re going to have no choice but to rank me at the top very soon.”