Author: Michael David Smith

At the UFC 144 press conference, UFC President Dana White will join fighters Frankie Edgar, Ben Henderson, Rampage Jackson, Ryan Bader, Yoshihiro Akiyama and Jake Shields in Japan on Wednesday night.

The UFC 144 pre-fight press conference will be an opportunity for the Japanese media to meet the fighters and the last opportunity to hear the fighters’ thoughts prior to Saturday night’s fights.

The press conference begins at 11 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday (which is Thursday afternoon in Japan). The presser will not be streamed live after all, but a full archived version will be available afterwards.

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell will join MMAFighting.com readers on Friday afternoon to chat about UFC 144 and anything else you’d like to discuss.

The UFC 144 preview chat is your opportunity to ask Liddell for his pick in the lightweight title fight between Frankie Edgar and Ben Henderson, his thoughts on the MMA scene in Japan (where he fought once for the UFC and three times for Pride) or anything else you’d like to know about.

Our live chat begins Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern below.

Derek Brunson revealed on Tuesday that he has been pulled from his planned March 3 fight in Ohio with Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, saying that the Ohio Athletic Commission wouldn’t let him fight with contact lenses, as he has for his entire MMA career. But the Ohio commission says that’s simply false.

“That’s an absolute lie, an absolute falsification or misinterpretation from Mr. Brunson,” Bernie Profato, Executive Director of the Ohio Athletic Commission, told MMAFighting.com.

The commission shall deny, suspend, revoke or place restrictions on the license of any applicant applying for a professional license to participate in boxing, tough person, kick boxing, karate, mixed martial arts or any striking sports regulated by the Ohio Athletic Commission, because of any medical or visual condition, including but limited to the following:

(1) Uncorrected visual acuity of less than 20/200 in either eye or 20/60 with both eyes.

According to Profato, Brunson’s vision is 20/400, which means that he lacks the “uncorrected visual acuity” that Ohio requires.

Profato said Ohio’s standards for vision are similar to those of other states, including Nevada, where Brunson fought in November. Profato said he’s not sure why this is the first time this issue has arisen in Brunson’s career, but as long as that rule is on the books in Ohio, Profato intends to enforce the rule.

“There’s nothing in our rules that says you can’t wear soft contacts,” Profato said. “But if they come out you can’t go look for them — it’s not like a basketball game where you go out there and look and put the contact back in — you have to keep fighting without them.”

Profato says he’s not sure where Brunson got the idea that he couldn’t fight wearing contacts. Profato said that when Strikeforce forwarded the results of an ophthalmological exam for Brunson, Ohio informed Strikeforce that Brunson’s vision was an issue. But Profato hasn’t had any contact with Brunson personally.

“The state of Ohio can’t let this guy fight when it says 20/400,” Profato said. “I’ve never talked to him. I just got the form. Apparently Strikeforce told him he didn’t meet our medical requirements but I’ve never talked to the guy.”

Profato said this is the first time he’s aware of that this has come up with an MMA fighter, although he said Ohio did previously reject an applicant for a boxing license for the same reason. Ultimately, Profato said, he doesn’t see any reason Brunson should criticize Ohio, as he did in a series of messages on Twitter.

“Believe me, we don’t want to cancel any fights,” Profato said. “But the fighters’ safety is our No. 1 priority.”

Just 10 days before its next event, Strikeforce is scrambling to find a new opponent for former middleweight champion Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza.

Derek Brunson, who was slated to fight Jacare on March 3 in Columbus, Ohio, has dropped out of the card because he did not pass his pre-fight medicals, Strikeforce has announced. So what was the medical issue? According to Brunson, it’s that the Ohio athletic commission won’t let him fight wearing contact lenses.

“Ok here’s the deal,” Brunson wrote on Twitter. “I’ve been fighting with contacts for 11 fights … never was an issue. Ohio won’t pass my eye exam. … Stevie Wonder can play a piano blind & blind people can drive cars, but i can’t fight with contacts.”

I’m not sure who those blind people driving cars are, but Brunson says he’s getting Lasik soon. Unfortunately, it won’t be soon enough to fight Jacare in a week and a half.

Losing Brunson vs. Jacare makes an already thin Strikeforce fight card even thinner. The card had already lost a planned fight between Gegard Mousasi and Mike Kyle when Kyle dropped out with an injury. One option for Strikeforce could be to put Jacare and Mousasi in the cage together in a rematch of the 2008 Dream middleweight tournament final, which Mousasi won with an upkick knockout. But that’s probably not realistic, as Mousasi has since moved up to light heavyweight.

Strikeforce’s shallow middleweight division doesn’t have many other potential opponents for Jacare, but as of Tuesday afternoon the promotion is working on finding someone who can step in and take on one of the best Brazilian jiu jitsu practitioners in the world on 10 days’ notice.

The March 3 Strikeforce card is headlined by a women’s 135-pound title fight between Miesha Tate and Ronda Rousey.

When Spike TV first got into the mixed martial arts game, Nate Quarry was a part of it, as a contestant on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter. Seven years and a 10-fight UFC career later, Quarry is back on Spike this week as one of the hosts of MMA Uncensored Live, Spike’s new studio show, which premieres on Thursday at 11 p.m.

Quarry said it never even crossed his mind when he started fighting in a cage that he could actually become a professional broadcaster, and he said making any kind of a living at all “is beyond a dream come true.” What Quarry says viewers will see from him is as simple as one former fighter discussing his passion for MMA.

“It’s something I enjoy doing,” Quarry said. “I had a small show on the West Coast, American Cage Fighter, on Comcast Sports Net, and I enjoyed doing that, sitting around with other fighters and talking about the game.”

As a new and still relatively small sport, MMA hasn’t had many opportunities for former athletes to make a living in broadcasting the way former players in the NFL or NBA or Major League Baseball can. But Quarry thinks he can be a trailblazer on that front, and he also thinks his background is going to make him a strong interviewer who isn’t afraid to ask tough questions.

“Most journalists are coming from a position of being fans and having watched the sport, but I’m coming from a position of being a fighter and I know what it’s like,” Quarry said. “I can ask Anthony Johnson why he can’t make weight and it’s not disrespectful because I’ve made weight every time I’ve fought.”

“My formal training has been that I was raised as a Jehova’s Witness as a child, from birth until about 20 years of age or so,” Quarry said. “They have kids who do Bible readings or little talks at the church. From the age of 7 I was doing a Bible reading, taking a chapter of the Bible and reading a few verses of it and then talking about it, and then when you’re done you’re critiqued on it and told how well you spoke. So from a very young age I worked on this.”

Spike TV had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with the UFC, but that relationship has come to an end, and the network and the UFC have butted heads more recently. Quarry said he isn’t sure whether the UFC will allow MMA Uncensored Live to show highlights, or whether the UFC will encourage its fighters to appear on the show, but Quarry himself makes clear that he remains a UFC fan.

“I hope the UFC will see what a great show MMA Uncensored Live is and they’re going to want to work with us, give us their footage, send their fighters to talk to us because it’s good exposure and we’re doing a phenomenal job of getting the word out there and getting people interested in the fighters, so it benefits everyone,” Quarry said. “I don’t know the relationship with Spike, but I know we at MMA Uncensored aren’t battling anybody, we’re not counter-programming any of the shows. The UFC is the biggest game in town and we’ll be talking about the UFC.”

Quarry describes the show as an unscripted conversation, “as if you’re hanging out with three of your buddies talking about the upcoming card and who you think is going to win.” Spike is joining a crowded space, alongside HDNet’s Inside MMA, ESPN2’s MMA Live and FUEL’s UFC Tonight and UFC Ultimate Insider, but Quarry said he thinks there’s room for everyone.

“I think HDNet with Bas Rutten has always been the gold standard because Bas has been around fighting forever and he’s a great personality, and I like other fighters I’ve seen doing jobs like this like Kenny Florian,” Quarry said. “If we get good ratings that doesn’t mean Bas Rutten is going to be homeless because nobody is tuning into his show. I think there’s room for all these shows to be successful.”

Greg Jackson, the MMA coach who has long sought to foster a team-first environment at his gym and claimed he would never participate if two of his students planned to fight against each other, has made a difficult decision: He has decided to corner Jon Jones at UFC 145, when Jones will defend the light heavyweight title against Rashad Evans, a longtime member of Team Jackson.

Evans left the Jackson team only after it became clear that he and Jones were on a collision course at the top of the light heavyweight division, and there’s some lingering bitterness between Evans and Jones. Jackson’s decision will do nothing to lessen that bitterness, and it will undoubtedly lead to some hard feelings for Evans toward Jackson as well.

But it’s the right decision: Jackson is Jones’s coach, and Jackson needs to do his job as Jones’s coach and be there for Jones at UFC 145.

It’s easy to see why Evans is unhappy. He came up under Jackson’s wing and always subscribed to Jackson’s teachings about teammates not fighting each other. For a long time, the question Evans faced wasn’t whether he would fight Jones, but whether he would fight his friend and training partner Keith Jardine. Evans and Jardine always insisted they would never fight each other, and Jackson always insisted that was the right course of action.

Things started to change a year ago, when Evans suffered an injury while training at Jackson’s gym for his planned fight with Shogun Rua, and Jones stepped in to take Evans’ place. Jones became the champion, Evans remained the No. 1 contender, and although it’s taken a year to get the timing right, the Jones-Evans title fight is now going to happen. In the mean time, Evans left Jackson’s gym in large part because he wasn’t happy about the way things transpired between himself and Jones.

Jackson never wanted Jones and Evans to be in a position where they were fighting each other, but the reality of the business is that the UFC needs its best fighters to be willing to fight. They may be friends or teammates or training partners, but if one is the champion and the other is the No. 1 contender, they need to fight. Jackson has long supported an ideal in which teammates never fight teammates, but that ideal just isn’t realistic at the highest levels of the UFC. Sometimes the two best fighters in a weight class just have to suck it up and fight each other.

And when those times come up, a coach who has a relationship with both fighters will face a difficult decision. Jackson was faced with a difficult decision as soon as Jones and Evans were identified as likely future opponents, and now Jackson can’t delay that decision any longer. He’s made his decision about where he’ll be at UFC 145, and he made the right decision. He’ll be in Jones’s corner, doing everything he can to help Jones beat Evans.