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Chad Mendes Being Charged with Battery for Involvement in July Bar Fight

When Chad Mendes was first accused of sucker punching a patron at a California bar during a brawl and fleeing from the cops, he dismissed the accuracy of the charges against him and stated he would cooperate fully with the investigation. In retrospect, that turned out to be a bad idea. Mendes was charged with battery yesterday, facing up to a $2,000 fine and 6 months in jail.

For those of you who missed this the first time, or have the memory span of a goldfish, here’s the official recap of what happened:

“Kings County Sheriff’s deputies say Mendes, a 27-year-old local native, sucker punched a man in the face at the Lacey Inn Bar on July 29. Leaving out the back door, he ran from law enforcement and managed to escape capture. But witnesses at the scene recognized the famous athlete. [Author’s note: people recognized “famous athlete” Chad Mendes!? MMA is finally mainstream!]

Deputies initially stopped at the bar around 1:18 a.m. in response to a call about two people fighting in the parking lot. After they pulled the men apart, about 40 more people decided to join in, turning it into a large brawl.

Props: Twitter.com/chadmendes

By George Shunick

For those of you who missed this the first time, or have the memory span of a goldfish, here’s the official recap of what happened:

Hanford police and the county Gang Task Force were called in to help break it up. When the dust settled, officers heard Mendes cursing and yelling at them. He showed signs of being intoxicated, Putnam said, and law enforcement asked him to leave.

Instead, he turned and went back into the bar. That’s when he allegedly punched another patron.”

Obviously, the allegations are a blow to Mendes’ career. Not as big a blow as, say, a well-timed knee to the face. But a blow nonetheless. Even though these are solely allegations right now, it could adversely impact some of his sponsorship deals. His role as the rugged, masculine face of Edge Shave Gel could very well be in jeopardy. (Then again, maybe Mendes might want to consider keeping his face out of advertisement campaigns in the future. Fame doesn’t become him, it seems.)

However, it’s unlikely Mendes will spend any time in a jail cell as a result of this. The charges don’t seem to be too serious, and besides, Mendes has the resources to hire a legal team that’s more than capable of dealing with this. It’s likely the two sides will reach some type of settlement and the whole thing will blow over in a few months. That may sound a little optimistic to some of you, but if Mendes was able to avoid getting criminal charges filed for his brutalization of Cody McKenzie, he should be more than capable of beating these as well.

[VIDEO] Alan Belcher Rallies for Chris Weidman, Accidently Proves Jorge Guimaraes’ Point

With Vitor Belfort now set to fight Jon Jones at UFC 152, Alan Belcher was left without an opponent for UFC 153 in Rio. Many of us began to speculate as to who the UFC would call in to replace Vitor Belfort in a fight that had possible title implications. Nah, I’m just kidding, we were all way too busy talking about bitchassness, trolling your way into title shots and over-saturation to worry about Alan Belcher. Let’s get back to the real issues of today.

Not so fast. Alan Belcher released a video blog yesterday to discuss the whole Jon Jones saga. Interestingly enough, Belcher first discloses that he won’t be fighting at UFC 153 because he wants to let a back injury he suffered while training heal. In his words:

Rewind a little bit: Three or four weeks back, I had a real bad back problem. I went to the doctor, found out that I had a spinal fracture, so that put me out for three weeks. I didn’t bend my back, I just kept it straight. I’m like “I’m just going to get the rest I need to make this fight happen and push through it.” I was getting back in there training, and it took me a whole week to get my mind wrapped back around it, but I was like “This is a huge fight, I’m going to do it,” and there is no way I was going to back out of that fight. Once I started back and I got going, I put a lot of thought into it and I was going full force ahead.

While that speaks volumes about the respect that Belcher has for both his fans and the UFC, that’s not what we’re focusing on now. Rather, let’s focus on who Alan Belcher wants when he’s ready to return to action. Aside from the standard training montages and shots of Belcher’s John Belushi tattoo (that’s who that thing is supposed to be, right?), Alan Belcher slips a call out of the middleweight division’s heir apparent, Chris Weidman, into the video. As he puts it:

Chris Weidman, I think that fight makes sense. Do I think he’s the number one contender? I don’t know about that, but I think that he’s definitely up there.

What’s strange about this call out is how out of place it is in the video. Belcher goes from talking about his back to randomly calling out Chris Weidman to immediately switching to his grappling training with pretty much no logical transitions between topics. He then goes on to say that if he was Anderson Silva’s manager, he wouldn’t let Anderson fight guys like him or Chris Weidman because they aren’t big enough names.

The Anderson Silva comments are around the 5:50 mark.

Basically, Belcher says he wants to fight Chris Weidman, but wouldn’t blame Anderson Silva for turning down a fight with the winner, because Silva deserves to be fighting big name guys like Jon Jones. Unrelated, Alan, but have you ever heard of Stockholm syndrome?

No one is saying that fighters have to be total assholes to properly promote a fight- the friendly banter between Josh Barnett and Daniel Cormier during Strikeforce: Tate vs. Rousey illustrated this perfectly. But when a guy randomly calls out another fighter and then says that the winner isn’t big enough to deserve a shot at the champion, it makes the call out look meaningless. It kind of makes you see where Anderson Silva manager Jorge Guimaraes was coming from when he called the middleweight division a bunch of amateur kids who can’t promote a fight. After all, if Belcher doesn’t think he deserves a shot at Silva, then why should we?

And that’s too bad, because Belcher vs. Weidman actually sounds like an excellent idea- to me at least. Do you agree? And who ya got?

@SethFalvo

Chael Sonnen Debuts “The Jon Jones Special Pizza” at Mean Street Pizza

“This new driver we hired came THIS close to hitting a pole on his first delivery. Where’d we find this guy, anyways?”

Looks like Chael Sonnen isn’t done with Jon Jones just yet.

Still upset over Jones’ decision to turn down a fight against him in order to save UFC 151, Chael Sonnen decided that he’d at least make some money off of the situation. See, because unlike Jon Jones, Chael Sonnen is a businessman. His pizza parlor, Mean Street Pizza, now offers “The Jon Jones Special Pizza,” presumably for a limited time only. It isn’t exactly subtle, but it may be the best case of death by chicken since Henri M’Bongo.

Behold:

“This new driver we hired came THIS close to hitting a pole on his first delivery. Where’d we find this guy, anyways?”

Looks like Chael Sonnen isn’t done with Jon Jones just yet.

Still upset over Jones’ decision to turn down a fight against him in order to save UFC 151, Chael Sonnen decided that he’d at least make some money off of the situation. See, because unlike Jon Jones, Chael Sonnen is a businessman. His pizza parlor, Mean Street Pizza, now offers ”The Jon Jones Special Pizza,” for a limited time only. It isn’t exactly subtle, but it may be the best case of death by chicken since Henri M’Bongo.

Behold:

It’s no coincidence that chicken is the only topping that Chael Sonnen reserves for The Jon Jones Special Pizza, but the Bones-Bashing doesn’t end there. In case you didn’t notice how it’s just loaded with chicken, Mean Street Pizza offers a six-pack of beer (may we assume it’s Bud Light?) with your pizza. If you somehow don’t get where he’s going with the free six-pack, Chael Sonnen encourages delivery so you can avoid a DUI.

Oh, and if anyone wants to order one and tell us how it tastes, you better hurry up: The chicken may run out (before September 1, we assume) and then Mean Street Pizza will have to cancel the special.

Subtle? No. Effective? Extremely.

Your move, Nike.

@SethFalvo

[VIDEO] Attila Vegh Wrecks Travis Wiuff in Just 25 Seconds at Bellator 73

The UFC may be a bit of a mess right now, but last night’s Bellator 73 wrapped up the promotion’s Summer Series with a bang. Despite an injury to Pat Curran scrapping the initial main event of Curran vs. Patricio Freire, the event soldiered on with Attila Vegh vs. Travis Wiuff for the light-heavyweight tournament championship as the new main event.

If you asked us for a prediction beforehand, we probably would have told you that Vegh is too small and one-dimensional to stop Travis Wiuff from laying on top of him for most of the fight. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it’d earn Wiuff a well-deserved rematch against Bellator light-heavyweight champion Christian M’Pumbu. Well, good thing you never asked us, because we’d feel pretty stupid right about now.

Wiuff can’t implement his trademark pit-and-quit offense before Vegh finds his head with a huge right hand. A few more follow-up punches for good measure, and Attila Vegh is now the Summer Series Light-Heavyweight Tournament Champion. Something tells me that the eventual clash between Vegh and M’Pumbu won’t last too long.

Video available after the jump.

Also of note, Marcos Galvao took home the bantamweight tournament championship with a convincing second round TKO over former training partner Luis Nogueira. After a close first round that saw Galvao use some vicious knees from the clinch against Nogueira to possibly steal the round, Galvao began to pull away with the fight throughout the second using his superior reach. Once Galvao was able to get Nogueira to the ground, the fight ended as Galvao took Nogueira’s back and unloaded some heavy elbows. Eduardo Dantas will be fighting Marcos Galvao in the near future for the Bellator Bantamweight Championship.

UFC Begins to Transplant Canceled UFC 151 Bouts. Spoiler Alert: None End Up On PPV.

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151’s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we’ve been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151’s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151’s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s worth mentioning that absolutely none of these fights – three of which were on the pay-per-view portion of UFC 151, mind you – have made it to the main card of an upcoming pay-per-view. Now I understand that financially, most fighters who were expecting a paycheck on September 1 simply can’t afford to wait until November’s UFC 154 to fight again. But that’s not the issue: The issue is that the UFC could afford to move pay-per-view quality fights *makes this hand gesture* to free television in the first place.

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151′s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we’ve been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151′s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151′s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

Dana White can point his fingers at Jon Jones and Greg Jackson and say “That’s the bad guy!” all he wants, but that certainly doesn’t make him the good guy in all of this. The fact that the UFC can give away bouts that they expected you to pay for without worrying about the revenue they’ll lose is essentially an admission that the bouts were never really worth your money in the first place. Essentially, it’s proof that, as we feared, over-saturation has reached its tipping point in the UFC and as a result, the main event of any given pay-per-view is the only fight worth paying for. Gone are the days when a fighter in the co-main event of a UFC pay-per-view was too big of a name for basic cable (Isn’t that right, Mike Russow?). It’s easy to make Jon Jones and Greg Jackson the scapegoats for the cancellation of UFC 151, but it’s nothing short of willful ignorance to continue to deny that over-saturation is a pandemic in the UFC.

With Jones vs. Belfort now headlining UFC 152 (151?), Dana White will more than likely use the “stacked” UFC 152 as “proof” that the UFC is still putting on stacked cards and that over-saturation is not an issue. On paper, he has a point; it’s hard to say that a card with two title fights isn’t a quality product. But let’s actually look at what we’re getting: A light-heavyweight title fight where the challenger earned the honor of fighting for a belt by simply being the first guy to say “Yeah, sure, I’ll do it,” a flyweight title fight that fans weren’t exactly excited for in the first place, and a middleweight scrap between two top-ten fighters who probably still won’t be getting a shot at Anderson Silva with a victory. Call me crazy, but I’m not seeing a stacked card here. I’m seeing a card that, up until Jon Jones was added on, was weaker than UFC 151.

I guess it would be pretty ironic of me to let the comments section fill up with complaints about how boxing died because champions were fighting unworthy challengers and the “one-fight cards” that ruined the sport. But to do that would be missing my own point, so instead I’ll propose a new rule: From now on, if you aren’t willing to complain with your wallet, you forfeit your right to complain with your keyboard. That should be enough to force the UFC to acknowledge over-saturation, and admission is the first step to recovery.

@SethFalvo

WTF of the Day: Ken Shamrock Hits a Woman He Thought Was a Dude

“I used to kind of have the opposite problem whenever I’d visit Thailand. Long story.”

And now for something completely different.

It’s 2012, yet I’m about to tell you that Ken Shamrock did something of relevance yesterday. Before you start to guess what he did: Yes, it was actually winning a fight – even though his opponent was just some random tubbaguts. No, it wasn’t a sanctioned MMA fight that he won. And obviously, it was pretty damn embarrassing for everyone involved. Give up yet? Brace yourselves…

Ken Shamrock, while breaking up a fight, got arrested for hitting a woman. His justification for hitting the woman wasn’t so much “She attacked me first, and I was simply defending myself” as it was the rock-solid “Wait, THAT’S a chick? For real? GET OUT!” defense.

Not that I think any of you are surprised by this, but let’s read what TMZ.com wrote about the incident after the jump:

“I used to kind of have the opposite problem whenever I’d visit Thailand. Long story.”

And now for something completely different.

Ken Shamrock, while breaking up a fight, hit a woman. His justification for hitting the woman wasn’t so much “She attacked me first, and I was simply defending myself” as it was the rock-solid “Wait, THAT’S a chick? For real? GET OUT!” defense.

Not that I think any of you are surprised by this, but let’s read what TMZ.com wrote about the incident after the jump:

Shamrock — whose nickname is “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” — was hangin’ out at a mall in Modesto, CA last month when he saw two women fighting each other in front of the Coach store … surrounded by a group of lookie loos filming the whole thing.

We’re told Shamrock dove into the scrap and tried to pry the women apart … when one of the bystanders, a HEAVYSET bystander, jumped on his back and tried to rip Ken out of the pile.

Shamrock’s rep tells TMZ … he threw the person off of his back and followed up with a move that knocked the attacker to the ground.

After the person was incapacitated, the crowd shouted at Ken, “You just hit a girl.” Ken took a closer look and realized the attacker was in fact a female .. so he immediately backed off.

An officer arrived to the scene and took a battery report against Shamrock, noting the only injury was a slight abrasion to the woman’s knee. The report was sent to the District Attorney’s Office.

But law enforcement sources tell TMZ … Shamrock probably won’t be prosecuted because officials don’t feel the woman he knocked to the ground is a “victim.” In fact, they believe Ken was acting in self-defense.

Just so we’re all on the same page: Ken Shamrock was breaking up a fight that was being filmed in front of a Coach store – which is ironic, considering these types of promotions are the only ones still willing to book Ken Shamrock – when some tubby jumped on his back. Despite the fact that his chin is held together by shards of glass, chewed bubble gum and tainted supplements, he stayed awake and managed to knock down his opponent (?!). Upon actually looking at his foe, Shamrock realized that “he” was actually just a husky “she.” Regardless, Shamrock more than likely won’t be punished for this because he was defending himself, and stopped attacking once his attacker backed off.

I know that Ken Shamrock’s career has really taken a turn for the absurd as of late, but this story is crazy even for him. So crazy, in fact, that I have nothing sarcastic or terrible to say about it. I just wish that Dana White heard about Ken Shamrock’s triumphant victory a little bit sooner.

@SethFalvo