(Today’s required viewing: “Fight Factory” goes deep inside the world of American Kickboxing Academy. Props to nuvoTV via BloodyElbow. Skip to the 12:43 mark to see Phil Baroni’s infamous bodybuilding video get a different reaction than he was looking for.)
Some selected highlights from our friends around the MMA blogosphere…
(Today’s required viewing: “Fight Factory” goes deep inside the world of American Kickboxing Academy. Props to nuvoTV via BloodyElbow. Skip to the 12:43 mark to see Phil Baroni’s infamous bodybuilding video get a different reaction than he was looking for.)
Some selected highlights from our friends around the MMA blogosphere…
Regardless of whether Chael Sonnen or Michael Bisping comes out victorious in their co-main event matchup at UFC on Fox 2, neither fighter will pose a real threat to the reign of the 185-lb kingpin Anderson “The Spider” Silva. At present, S…
Regardless of whether Chael Sonnen or Michael Bisping comes out victorious in their co-main event matchup at UFC on Fox 2, neither fighter will pose a real threat to the reign of the 185-lb kingpin Anderson “The Spider” Silva.
At present, Silva (31-4 MMA, 14-0 UFC) is currently recuperating following a shoulder injury incurred prior to his title bout with Yushin Okami at UFC 134.
Once he’s fighting fit and the aforementioned Sonnen and Bisping have taken care of the No. 1 contender’s position, one of them is guaranteed a shot at his coveted belt.
That said, a tilt a Silva’s crown is the best that either will ever get close to—they’ll leave the Octagon and trudge home licking their wounds akin to the nine other opponents (Sonnen being one of them) who have tried and failed in an attempt to unseat the division’s perennial champion.
Michael “The Count” Bisping is raring to get things underway in his co-main event matchup with Chael Sonnen and is also ready for any trash-talking the Oregon native might throw his way.In an interview with theTelegraph Bisping said,
If he…
Michael “The Count” Bisping is raring to get things underway in his co-main event matchup with Chael Sonnen and is also ready for any trash-talking the Oregon native might throw his way.
If he tries to get under my skin, I will take the bait. If he starts talking and saying things, as he often does, I will retaliate.
Obviously, it’s more mature to take the moral high ground and say nothing, but I enjoy a bit of verbal sparring. Obviously, it’s entertaining for the fans, but it gets me fired up. I like that. I fight a lot better when I’m irritated by my opponent.
I fight a lot better when I’m emotional. When I feel the fight has become personal, I feel I do perform better. People say that you get thrown off your game plan, but I don’t react that way.
I’m a fighter, through and through, and if my opponent gets under my skin he’ll bring the best out in me. We did a conference call together, Chael and I, a few days ago, and he was very complimentary.
Not a bad word to say, but that could change very quickly. We have only had 11 days to think about this with the late announcement of the fight.
I have said one or two things in the press over the weekend and he may change his opinion.
In several days time at UFC on Fox 2, Bisping, the pride of British mixed martial arts, is set to take on the enigmatic Sonnen in what could turn out to be the biggest challenge of his career thus far.
What awaits the winner is an eventual tilt at the Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight title currently held by the division’s kingpin Anderson “The Spider” Silva.
Less than a fortnight ago, Bisping was slated to lock horns with submissions expert Demian Maia, but as fate would have it, he was suddenly granted the opportunity to vie for the 185-pound crown following an elbow injury sustained to Sonnen’s original opponent Mark Munoz.
With that said, though not overlooking Sonnen, Bisping does have his sights set on the bigger picture which is a shot at the title, the big payday that lies ahead as a result of challenging Silva and also the possibility of dethroning the indomitable Brazilian.
Bisping also thinks the British MMA scene will gain exposure additional exposure if a fight with Silva ever comes to fruition.
There is a world title on the line, a shot at Anderson Silva, and at big payday at stake. Never mind the trash talk, the thing people really want to see is the fight.
I’ll put it all on the line, because the real prize awaits.
Silva is pound-for-pound best in the world, he has almost become iconic. He is revered for the way he wins, the way he defeats people.
For me, to get a shot at him has always been my aim. If I was going to win the title off anyone, I’d want it to be against Anderson Silva.
He is the very, very best we have in the sport. No one else has been able to do it. He has been a champion for six years. If by fighting for the UFC middleweight title I can draw some attention to MMA in the UK, and help give it the boost it needs, then that will be the icing on the cake.
UFC on Fox 2 is scheduled for Jan. 28, 2012, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.
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The UFC on Fox 2 media call went down last week and the UFC had the six main-card fighters on conference call with the media. It marked the first time that pound-for-pound trash talk champions, and recently announced opponents…
The UFC on Fox 2 media call went down last week and the UFC had the six main-card fighters on conference call with the media. It marked the first time that pound-for-pound trash talk champions, and recently announced opponents, Chael Sonnen and Michael Bisping were both available to throw barbs at each other leading up to the fight this weekend.
Even though Bisping has amped up the talk over the weekend saying some interesting things about Sonnen’s luggage, let’s all hope the fight is much more vicious and exciting than the pre-fight lead up. Both fighters admitted that they respect each other in this sport and that the fact that the fight has been set so late is the culprit for the lack of verbal vitriol.
Bisping is well aware of the challenge he faces in Sonnen and what is at stake in this fight.
“I want the biggest fights possible and when the UFC said Chael Sonnen I jumped at it. It’s a bigger fight with bigger ramifications. People say I haven’t fought tough guys well here we are.”
Say what you want about the brash and cocky Brit, but you have to respect his response to those who think he is risking a title shot accepting this fight with a short camp.
“It’s all there for the taking, if I lose I don’t deserve a title shot. Obviously, I would have brought in more wrestlers, but I have been working with jiu-jitsu guys like Dean Lister and Jake Shields trying to take me down and submit me, so if Chael takes me down, a lot of it crosses over. I’m not gonna make excuses, I’m gonna fight my fight and I’m gonna win.”
Bisping also had some advice for those tuning in for the entertaining trash talk.
“Forget the trash talk, tune in for the fight. Who cares about the trash talk.”
For once, I actually like what Bisping is saying heading into one of his fights.
Dwight Wakabayashi is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report MMA and correspondent for MMACanada.net.
Once the artifice is stripped away from a UFC event—the media narratives, the back-and-forth banter, the UFC on FOX theme music—what’s left is something simple and magnificent. It’s athletic competition at its purest. Two men will stand acr…
Once the artifice is stripped away from a UFC event—the media narratives, the back-and-forth banter, the UFC on FOX theme music—what’s left is something simple and magnificent. It’s athletic competition at its purest. Two men will stand across the cage from each other and try to impose their wills on one another.
Chael Sonnen and Michael Bisping won’t be able to talk each other to death Saturday night on FOX. In the end, as is the case in all sporting events from tee ball to the Super Bowl, things will be settled on the field of play.
And that’s why people at Team Quest in Oregon were all smiles last week when Bisping replaced former NCAA champion Mark Munoz as Sonnen’s opponent in a fight to determine the next top contender for Anderson Silva‘s UFC middleweight title.
“We were actually kind of happy. We weren’t really concerned at all. In a way, we thought this wasn’t that much different than the Brian Stann fight,” Sonnen’s head coach Scott McQuary said.
“Except Stann hits a hell of a lot harder…Bisping breaks easily. I think he’s mentally weak. Watch how he fought Dan Henderson. I think he was totally intimidated. And I think he’s going to be intimidated by Chael too…Chael is such a hard worker and he has such a fast pace. Bisping is much more lackadaisical. He likes to throw a jab, throw a kick, keep his distance. He’s not going to be able to keep up the pace Chael forces. Whether on the ground or standing.”
There were some legitimate questions about who would win the wrestling battle between Sonnen and Munoz. Mark had bested Sonnen in college, but that was 10 years ago. A lot can change in a decade, and Sonnen’s teammates and coaches felt he could put Munoz on his back.
But all agreed it wouldn’t be easy. The fight, they feared, might even devolve into a kickboxing affair between two wrestling greats—never the prettiest sight.
Bisping is another beast altogether. He’s a fighter seemingly tailor-made for Sonnen to beat—a jack of all trades who’s not exceptional at any one aspect of the fight game. He’s the type of fighter Sonnen has traditionally made mincemeat of.
“I like this quite a bit better. I think it’s a much higher-profile fight,” Chael’s mentor and longtime trainer Matt Lindland said. “I wasn’t super excited about the Munoz matchup. Mark and Chael was much scarier, because we didn’t know what was going to happen. Would Mark be able to shut down Chael’s wrestling? Sometimes with two high-level wrestlers, it just comes down to who gets the first good shot in. Look at Hendricks and Fitch. I think Munoz was a much tougher fight stylistically…this isn’t a knock on Michael’s abilities or his skills. His skills just don’t match up with Chael Sonnen’s. Where Michael is weak, that’s where Chael’s real strengths are.”
A win over Bisping in Chicago will land Sonnen a second title shot at Anderson Silva. The Brazilian is probably the greatest fighter ever to step into the UFC Octagon, but that didn’t stop Sonnen from giving him a drubbing in their first meeting. Only a last-ditch, final-round submission saved Silva’s title.
It’s perhaps the most valuable loss on any fighter’s resume. Sonnen didn’t take the title, but he earned everyone’s respect. Another strong showing against Silva would immediately propel Sonnen up another notch in the fans’ esteem. It’s a rare second shot at greatness.
Leading this charge towards MMA immortality is Scott McQuarry. The head trainer at Team Quest Tualatin, McQuary is a 50-year-old Judo black belt who’s taken control of Sonnen’s ground game. In the past, Sonnen’s impeccable wrestling has been a blessing and a bane.
When he’s won, it’s been with his wrestling—attacking non-stop, implacably, unstoppably. But his inability to make the most of this strength, and his inclination to score the takedown and then bide his time, has cost him.
Too often—eight times, in fact—he’s tossed an opponent down, only to be submitted from the bottom.
But what others count as a weakness, McQuary saw as a potential strength. Sonnen, he thought, was able to put himself in great positions with ease—positions most grapplers would kill to be in. What if, McQuary pondered, Sonnen used his wrestling skill, not just to plant people on the mat, but to finish them there as well?
“We just needed to tweak a few things,” McQuarry said. “I told him, ‘We need to work on your defense and I want to work on just a couple of submissions.’ It’s worked really well. We have a number of things in the bag that we haven’t even let out yet. The Brian Stann fight, we were so glad he got that submission we’d been working on. But trust me—he’s got a bunch of stuff he hasn’t even showcased yet.
“I looked at the positions he was most frequently in. A lot of times he was trying to ground-and-pound people with fairly good success. But I told him, ‘We can make this a lot easier. Let’s work for a submission.’ He’s so damn good at keeping his position or transitioning to a new position if things go awry, it was kind of a no-brainer.”
Of course, with Sonnen, the public is less interested in the nuances of his game and more curious about what he said, about whom, and whether or not he meant it. Sonnen has a gift for gab, one he’s used in the latter years of his career to become a superstar.
“Coming from a wrestling background, he tried to take a more humble approach. Over the last couple of years he’s taken a little different approach… Whether they hate him or they love him, they know who he is,” Lindland said. “They want to see him fight either way. I think it’s important that he learned how to do that. This is what it takes in this industry. It’s an entertainment industry. The promoters decide which fights are going to sell more tickets and those are the fights they put together. It’s about building hype and putting on a show. There’s no athletic architecture that says ‘If you beat this guy, your next fight is for a world title.'”
Without trash talk, Sonnen is a middleweight Jon Fitch, a ground specialist who lingers on the undercard despite his perennial contender status. With it, Sonnen is the UFC’s fastest-rising star.
“If you look at Muhammad Ali, he started to get the same type of notoriety when he started believing and selling the same kind of fairy tale. Everyone else says ‘What?’ But he just goes with it,” McQuarry said. “Do I sit back and ask, ‘What are you doing calling yourself the (real) world middleweight champion?’ I don’t question that. I see it, believe it, achieve it. If he has to go that route to it and it sells the fight in the meantime, more power to him.”
No one is beyond Sonnen’s reach. He’s taken heavyweights like Brock Lesnar down a peg, lambasted the entire nation of Brazil and taken special care to eviscerate Silva whenever possible. He isn’t afraid to center the media in his sites either, as witnessed by an ugly exchange with broadcaster Michael Landsberg late last year.
The Landsberg incident is consummate Sonnen. No one can be entirely sure just how serious he is. Those closest to him believe it’s all an act, but a multifaceted one. Sonnen’s trash talk isn’t just to get fans riled up. Angering opponents and getting in their heads is also a pleasant side effect.
The real target of Sonnen’s trash talk is Sonnen himself.
“For Chael, him talking is not as much for the fans as for himself,” Lindland said. “If he’s saying it enough, loud enough, long enough and often enough, I think he starts believing he’s the best guy. He’s going to believe he can beat Anderson. He’s not just trying to sell the fight to fans. He’s selling it to himself. So he can be the hype he’s created.”
Sonnen refuses to let anyone behind the curtain. His is an act every bit as calculated as Stephen Colbert’s. But while Colbert does out-of-character interviews, the real Chael Sonnen is not for public display.
I asked him about the contention that his trash talk is motivational, that he needs it to thrive and continue to push himself. As usual, he deflected with humor.
“Wow that’s deep. No way you got that from ‘someone close to me.’ I surround myself with ‘yes’ men,” Sonnen said.
What about his wild statements. How calculated are his wrestling-style promos? Are they off the cuff, or carefully crafted?
“I’m not sure what ‘promo’ means. I looked it up, and found no definition. If I’m asked a question, I answer it. That’s all.”
In the end, we aren’t any closer to knowing the real Chael Sonnen. We only know the face he’s shown us: smart, cutting and caustic. Chael Sonnen wears a mask. But that’s the beautiful thing about his sport.
In the cage, there’s no escaping who you really are. When the time for talking is done, when it’s time to start backing it up, that’s when a man shows who he is. Fear, pride, strength, resolve: All those things are magnified in the confines of a cage.
Who is Chael Sonnen? We’ll find out Saturday night.
Filed under: UFCMichael Bisping hadn’t yet gotten his heart rate down and his breathing back to normal following his TKO win over Jason “Mayhem” Miller and already UFC president Dana White was in his face, trying to talk him into another fight.
Michael Bisping hadn’t yet gotten his heart rate down and his breathing back to normal following his TKO win over Jason “Mayhem” Miller and already UFC president Dana White was in his face, trying to talk him into another fight.
“[White] asked me immediately after the fight, ‘Do you want to fight on the FOX card on January 28?'” said Bisping. “I thought, fighting on FOX right now is a bigger deal than anything else. You can’t get any higher than that.”
He also thought, up until last week, that he’d be fighting jiu-jitsu specialist Demian Maia, and that he might have at least one more fight after that before he’d have a realistic chance at a title shot. Now, thanks to an injury to Mark Munoz, all that has changed. The question is, has it changed for the better or the worse?
Judging by the stakes of the fight alone, you’d have to say that Bisping’s lot has improved significantly. Before the switcheroo on the UFC on FOX 2 card, he was fully prepared to wait in line behind the winner of the Chael Sonnen-Munoz fight in order to get a crack at UFC gold. He was also prepared to take another fight in the meantime, he said, since more fights mean more paychecks.
“I want a title, but also I want to keep fighting because I want to earn money,” he explained. “That’s why I do this, first and foremost. I do this for money. [People say], ‘I do this to challenge myself,’ and all this other crap; that’s bulls–t. I do this for money. I do this to give my family a certain lifestyle. And yes, I want to be champion, I want to be the best. That’s the next thing. But ultimately I want to put money in the bank and provide for my children’s future, and that’s how I do it is fighting. I’m not going to do it sitting around waiting for a title shot.”
As it turned out, all he had to do was wait around for a phone call. While eating lunch following a training session last week, he said, he got a call from White, who explained that Munoz was out and he could be in — if he wanted to be.
“He said if I win I’m fighting Anderson Silva in a soccer stadium in Brazil in the summer. It’s too big of an opportunity to turn down. I’ve trained my whole life for this moment, so of course, I didn’t hesitate.”
But if you believe oddsmakers, Bisping now finds himself in a much tougher fight. Most bookmakers favor Sonnen in the fight by a nearly 5-1 margin, making Bisping by far the heaviest underdog on the network TV portion of the card. The fight against Maia seemed difficult, though certainly winnable. The fight against Sonnen, at least according to most experts, is a real longshot for the British middleweight.
Part of that, it seems, is a problem of perception. To many fight fans — and even to Sonnen, if you can ever take what he says at face value — Bisping is a fighter who wins, but who has yet to prove himself against opponents who matter.
“He certainly hasn’t beaten anybody that’s any good, rankings-wise,” Sonnen explained when I spoke to him last week.
In other words, he just doesn’t seem like a legitimate title challenger to many outside observers, and so they have a hard time imagining him in the same cage with someone like Anderson Silva. But according to Bisping, that’s where perception doesn’t line up with reality.
“I’ve been in the UFC since 2006,” he said. “That’s six years, and I’ve been consistently facing the best opponents out there. If you look at my record, it’s a who’s who of mixed martial arts, to be honest, and I’ve done very well.”
Take, for instance, his current four-fight win streak, which includes victories over Dan Miller, Yoshihiro Akiyama, and “Mayhem” Miller. Maybe it’s not a path of fire through number one contenders, but it is a list of solid wins against guys who matter. Perhaps more importantly, look at his losses.
As Bisping is quick to point out: “I’ve only ever been stopped once in my career, and I’ve got two very, very debatable decision [losses].”
Detractors would point out that he also has at least one debatable decision win over Matt Hamill, but it’s still a point worth considering. These days there’s no shame in getting knocked out by the likes of Dan Henderson, and there’s no reason for a middleweight contender to feel bad about a split decision against former UFC light heavyweight champ Rashad Evans, either.
It’s enough to make you wonder, is Bisping better than he gets credit for from American fans? Just because some people can’t imagine him beating a superior wrestler like Sonnen and coming face to face with Silva in a soccer stadium, does that actually mean anything?
“Chael Sonnen had his shot,” said Bisping. “He blew it. Who else is there?”
If he can find away to prove the oddsmakers and the critics wrong and get his hand raised in Chicago on Saturday night, he’ll have his answer. So will fight fans everywhere, whether they like it or not.
Michael “The Count” Bisping is raring to get things underway in his co-main event matchup with Chael Sonnen and is also ready for any trash-talking the Oregon native might throw his way.