One of the more intriguing moments of Strikeforce: Tate vs. Rousey came during the undercard welterweight bout between Paul “Semtex” Daley and PRIDE legend Kazuo Misaki.Misaki has gone through legendary wars during his fighting career in Japan. He was …
One of the more intriguing moments of Strikeforce: Tate vs. Rousey came during the undercard welterweight bout between Paul “Semtex” Daley and PRIDE legend Kazuo Misaki.
Misaki has gone through legendary wars during his fighting career in Japan. He was always a crowd favorite for his heart and ability to put on exciting fights. But few in the media, myself included, gave him much of a chance against Daley on Saturday night.
He’s old. He’s been through too many battles. His striking just wouldn’t be effective enough against Daley, and his takedown ability wouldn’t be enough to keep the fight on the ground, where he would be more effective.
We were wrong. Misaki used highly effective striking to keep Daley at bay throughout the fight. By the end of the final round, commentator Pat Miletich rightly pointed out that Misaki was “in Daley’s head,” and the Japanese star was awarded a decision win.
I can’t be Semtex all the time people, different fights call for a different approach. Sorry for those that felt cheated out of not seeing Semtex, but I feel being Semtex had an effect on the judges scores, because i didn’t come out swinging. He got the 1st round, I got the 2nd, and the 3rd, I feel through takedowns, ground control, effect defense, and scored the most damage while taking very little. The reason I back pedalled and kept it on the jab/counters in the 3rd is because I honestly thought I had won the fight. it was close, but I feel I won.
Losing a fairly close fight must be a terrible feeling, and this absolutely was a close fight. But Daley saying that he backpedaled in the third round because he thought he had the fight won? That’s not a smart decision because—as we’ve seen countless times throughout the last three years—you never know exactly what the judges are thinking.
It’s better to put an emphatic stamp on a performance than to ride it out under the impression that you’ve already won the thing.
Miesha Tate is a tough fighter. That can’t be disputed.But she’s also dumb. And I’m not picking specifically on Tate, though I know it may sound that way. She’s just the latest in a long line of fighters who decided that it was better to look toug…
Miesha Tate is a tough fighter. That can’t be disputed.
But she’s also dumb.
And I’m not picking specifically on Tate, though I know it may sound that way. She’s just the latest in a long line of fighters who decided that it was better to look tough during the course of a fight rather than accept fate and tap out when caught in what was obviously a fight-ending submission.
This kind of thing drives me into a rage. It was one thing when the Gracies did it in the early days of the sport because, well, they’re the Gracies and not tapping out was their thing. And besides, they were fighting in Japan, where showing your toughness endeared you to the PRIDE fighting crowds even more than winning a fight.
But there’s no reason for it in 2012. If Ronda Rousey gets you in an armbar, and you know without a shadow of a doubt that you’re not getting out—much like Tate did when Rousey got the armbar on her for a second time during Saturday’s Strikeforce main event—please just tap out. Save us the trouble of seeing your arm bend in directions it’s not supposed to.
Luckily for Tate (and the viewers at home), her arms are made of rubber. But that’s not the point.
The point here is that there’s no shame in submitting to a superior opponent. The fans won’t think any less of you because they’ve been watching this sport long enough to understand that submissions are part of the game.
When you’re caught, the fight is over. It’s better to give up and live to fight another day rather than risk an injury that will put you on the shelf for months on end. It’s disrespectful to your opponent and it’s disrespectful to your employer who should be able to rely on booking you for a new fight every three or four months.
Don’t try to prove your resilience. We already know you’re tough. After all, you step in the cage to trade punches with another human for a living. You don’t need to prove anything else.
The MMA Daily Video Fix is back to bring you the latest and greatest videos from the world of mixed martial arts.We’ve got a treat for you today. If you missed the new “Jon Jones: Believe Your Eyes” commercial during the UFC on FX 2 broadcast on Friday…
The MMA Daily Video Fix is back to bring you the latest and greatest videos from the world of mixed martial arts.
We’ve got a treat for you today. If you missed the new “Jon Jones: Believe Your Eyes” commercial during the UFC on FX 2 broadcast on Friday night, you missed one of the best things Zuffa has ever produced.
We’ve also got Ronda Rousey’s amateur mixed martial arts debut.
It was quite the weekend in mixed martial arts action, wasn’t it?Friday night brought plenty of flyweight action and judging ineptitude/controversy from the UFC on FX show in Australia. Saturday night saw the crowning of a new Strikeforce women’s banta…
It was quite the weekend in mixed martial arts action, wasn’t it?
Friday night brought plenty of flyweight action and judging ineptitude/controversy from the UFC on FX show in Australia. Saturday night saw the crowning of a new Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion and the potential ascension of MMA‘s next big superstar, male or female included.
Let’s get to the first morning update of the week, shall we?
“I had X-Rays last night,” Tate told MMAFighting.com via text message. “No bones are broken, which I already knew. Other than that, I have to get an MRI to find out anything further.”
That Tate suffered zero broken bones in that arm is a bit of a shocker to those of us who actually saw what Ronda Rousey did on Saturday night. It was one of the nastier armbars in the history of the sport. The crazy thing? Tate brought it entirely on herself because of her refusal to tap once the armbar was obviously locked in.
Later today, I’ll have more on Tate’s decision to allow her arm to be injured rather than tap out. I’m far from done discussing this subject.
Dana White Fumes Over Johnson/McCall Controversy
One of the positive things coming from Friday’s controversial split-decision-turned-into-a-draw result in the Demetrious Johnson/Ian McCall bout was the fact that we’ll get to see Johnson and McCall step in the cage and go at it one more time. It was an awesome, action-packed fight and every MMA fan in the world will be glad to see it again.
“There is nothing positive about that result,” White told MMAjunkie.com. “I would rather have ended it tonight. We had two badass fights that everybody loved that would have led into the title fight. That would have been best-case scenario.”
I see where White is coming from. The perfect result would’ve seen the two winners meet a few months down the line for the flyweight title.
But seeing Johnson and McCall roll it back one more time next month in Atlanta — White said that the rematch would likely take place at UFC 145 — isn’t such a bad thing. The winner of the rematch will have even more momentum going into the finals and a great performance might actually make some fans believe they have a real chance at beating Joseph Benavidez.
Ohio Athletic Commission To Launch Brandon Saling Investigation
The one black mark from an otherwise excellent weekend of fighting action was the inclusion of neo-Nazi sex offender Brandon Saling on Saturday’s Strikeforce preliminary card. As I relayed in a piece over the weekend, Zuffa was unaware of Saling’s past when they booked him on short notice to take on Roger Bowling. They simply needed a guy at Bowling’s weight who lived in Ohio and who would fight on extremely short notice, and Saling fit the bill.
“We had no knowledge about that until someone brought it up to us this evening,” Coker said of Saling’s background. “It came to our attention during the course of the fights.”
Roy Nelson Says He’ll Go To 205…If You Like Him
Roy “Big Country” Nelson has slimmed down quite a bit over the past eight months, but he says he’ll go even smaller if he’s able to get 100,000 fans to “Like” his Facebook page over the next two weeks.
Ronda Rousey Might Be the Scariest Female On the PlanetI will never forget the first time I ever attended a Ronda Rousey fight.Las Vegas has its share of fine local promotions, but the most enduring is Tuff-N-Uff, long considered a great home for amate…
Ronda Rousey Might Be the Scariest Female On the Planet
I will never forget the first time I ever attended a Ronda Rousey fight.
Las Vegas has its share of fine local promotions, but the most enduring is Tuff-N-Uff, long considered a great home for amateur fighters to hone their skills. I’m being honest when I say that I wasn’t familiar with Rousey or her Olympic background when she stepped into the cage to face Autumn Richardson in the first quarterfinal bout of a women’s featherweight tournament.
Rousey dispatched Richardson with an armbar in just under a minute that night. I was intrigued.
But there were still plenty of questions surrounding Rousey. Could she use that very specific skill against higher-caliber fighters?
That question has been emphatically answered, and in brutal fashion. Last night, Rousey went in the cage against now-former Strikeforce bantamweight champion Meisha Tate and did exactly what everyone suspected she’d do—she scored another first-round submission by armbar.
The terrifying thing about Rousey isn’t her supreme athletic ability, her balance or her insane knack for maintaining grappling control in a fight. The one thing that sets Rousey apart from all other women in the sport (save perhaps Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos) is her killer instinct and utter lack of remorse for her opponents.
If you fight Rousey, she’s going to get you in an armbar at some point in the fight. It’s a certainty.
And if you do not tap once she has that armbar applied, she will gladly break your arm. We saw it against Julia Budd, and we saw it last night against Miesha Tate. If you don’t have the intelligence to tap out, or if you think it’s a better idea to be tough than to submit when she gives you the chance, she will mangle your limb.
Rousey may ultimately do what Gina Carano couldn’t and become the first true enduring female mixed martial arts star. She’s got the looks and the verbal ability, but she also has the killer instinct that Carano was missing. She’s a superstar in the making.
Hiring a Neo-Nazi Sex Offender Probably Isn’t the Best Idea
In fairness to Strikeforce matchmaker Sean Shelby, he had no idea that Brandon Saling was a neo-Nazi sympathizer and registered sex offender when he booked Saling for a bout against Roger Bowling on the Strikeforce preliminary card last night.
Background checks for fighters haven’t been a part of the matchmaking process. But after finding out that Saling was charged with gross sexual imposition after the rape of a girl under the age of 13, you can bet your bottom dollar that every single fighter Zuffa looks to book for one of their events, UFC and Strikeforce included, will be vetted via some form of personal history search.
It’s the right thing to do.
Gilbert Melendez Still Has No Real Opponent
Josh Thomson’s win over K.J. Noons allegedly installed him as the next contender for lightweight champion Gilbert Melendez. I’m not so sure.
UFC President Dana White has repeatedly told the media that Melendez and his very vocal fanbase would be “very happy” with the opponents Zuffa gives him in his next few fights, and another bout with Thomson doesn’t really fit that criteria.
I don’t believe Thomson will get the next shot at Melendez, and I think we’re all going to be surprised when Zuffa finally reveals his next opponent.
Dana White Finally Gives Up On Strikeforce
In the weeks leading up to last night’s event, Dana White told the media that he’d finally been given control of the Strikeforce production. He was excited to unveil changes to the product, changes that would make things better for the viewing audience.
Those changes were nowhere to be seen during last night’s broadcast, and for good reason. White tweeted that Showtime vetoed White’s involvement in the event.
This doesn’t bode well for Strikeforce’s future. If White isn’t interested in the product, Strikeforce is losing the man who could be their biggest ally.
It also means Strikeforce is living on borrowed time.
Mauro Ranallo Sure Loves Big Words, Doesn’t He?
I tend to rag on UFC announcer Mike Goldberg a bit more than I should, but at least he doesn’t come across like he has a thesaurus on the desk in front of him when he’s announcing UFC events.
I generally enjoy Mauro’s work, but it’s time to get rid of the nonsense. One of my pet peeves are writers who use 20 words to complete a sentence when just six will do.
Ranallo needs to apply the same concept to his broadcasting work.
And don’t even get me started on Frank Shamrock, who almost always comes across like he’s not even watching the fights unfolding right in front of his face.
We don’t know the extent of the damage yet, but it looked bad. Real bad. Ronda Rousey, a 2008 Olympic judo bronze medalist, bent Strikeforce bantamweight champion Miesha Tate’s arm in a direction no one ever intended an arm to bend.As Showtime shared t…
We don’t know the extent of the damage yet, but it looked bad. Real bad. Ronda Rousey, a 2008 Olympic judo bronze medalist, bent Strikeforce bantamweight champion Miesha Tate’s arm in a direction no one ever intended an arm to bend.
As Showtime shared the brutal submission with us in the slowest of slow motion—and don’t think we didn’t notice the sick gleam in your eye, Showtime—Tate’s arm appeared to break. She was willing to take things that far before finally giving in and tapping out.
Slow-motion replay confirms Tate did indeed tap. But by the time she did, it was too late. The damage was done.
In some ways, it’s fitting that the fight ended this way. Tate and Rousey had talked trash for months leading into the fight. At the weigh-in, they got physical and went head to head. If the war of words had been intended to hype the fight, things had gotten out of hand. The referee made it clear as he gave his opening instructions that the two women viewed this as a real grudge match.
“I understand,” he said. “We are not touching gloves.”
Many MMA fans question the talent of the female athletes in MMA. Women are not as strong, fast or explosive as men the same size. Some won’t like me pointing that out. It’s just science.
But Ronda Rousey showed that a female fighter can be every bit as skilled as her male counterparts. Even more so. Her grappling is on another level altogether. Between her judo throws and her armbar setups that come out of nowhere, fighters—both male and female—will be replaying this fight all day Sunday to figure out exactly how she did what she did.
Ronda Rousey is a monster clad in silk. She’s a pretty package, but one you open up with caution. Rousey is the best finisher in all of MMA. Her record speaks for itself. In five Strikeforce fights, Rousey has five first-round armbar finishes. She also has three amateur fights on her record. All ended by armbar. None lasted a minute.
Rousey is a fearless and merciless finisher—an assassin on the ground. That’s a big thing. Some fighters flinch before doing their opponent serious harm. Rousey won’t hesitate. She’s learned that lesson. After showing some restraint in an earlier fight, trying to protect an overmatched Sarah D’Alelio, Rousey vowed that she would break an arm if needed to in order to get the win.
She may have lived up to her word Saturday night against Tate.
“I don’t feel that bad about it,” Rousey said after the fight. She shouldn’t. They give you the chance to tap, and Miesha didn’t want to concede. That was a choice. Ronda did what she had to do.
Sarah Kaufman, Rousey’s next opponent, will start training armbar defenses next week. No doubt Tate did as well, but it did not matter. Rousey is competing at a different level. Gina Carano had the looks. “Cyborg” Santos had the ferocity. Rousey combines them both. Women’s MMA may have just found its first long-term star.
One of the more intriguing moments of Strikeforce: Tate vs. Rousey came during the undercard welterweight bout between Paul “Semtex” Daley and PRIDE legend Kazuo Misaki.