Strikeforce President, Scott Coker announced today that Alistair Overeem’s Heavyweight Title is not on the line during the eight-man Strikeforce Heavyweight World Grand Prix Tournament. Instead, there will be a separate Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion and Tournament Champion. The winner of the tournament will then go on to fight Overeem for the Strikeforce Heavyweight belt, unless the […]
Strikeforce President, Scott Coker announced today that Alistair Overeem’s Heavyweight Title is not on the line during the eight-man Strikeforce Heavyweight World Grand Prix Tournament. Instead, there will be a separate Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion and Tournament Champion. The winner of the tournament will then go on to fight Overeem for the Strikeforce Heavyweight belt, unless the winner of the tournament is Overeem. In such case, Coker says:
“If Overeem wins, he’s not just the best MMA or K-1 fighter, he can say he’s the greatest martial arts fighter in the world,”
That is, in a world without Georges St. Pierre, Cain Velasquez, Anderson Silva…
("Pucker Up." PicProps: Strikeforce)
Cung Le won. Cyborg won. Josh Thomson won. Also, Frank Shamrock retired, which we were led to believe mattered in some way.
CagePotato’s inaugural “Holy Crap, We Take Back Everything We Said Ab…
CagePotato’s inaugural “Holy Crap, We Take Back Everything We Said About You Yesterday” award has absolutely, unequivocally got to go to Jan Finney for taking a hellacious beating from 145-pound female champion Cris “Cyborg” Santos. Finney came up in weight and into the fight with a less-than-stellar professional record, but she took everything Cyborg had (and maybe then some) before finally succumbing to a belated second-round TKO. Let us say for the record that if Strikeforce fires Finney without giving her at least one more fight, there is no justice in this world. What’s the company planning to do with the winner of that upcoming Sarah Kaufman vs. Roxanne Modafferi bout, anyway?
On a personal note: Jan, it may not be politically correct or anatomically accurate for us to say this, but you are one tough son of a bitch.
(“Mr. Fedor thinks you are a very amusing little man. He would enjoy it very much to see you dance for him … Dance! Dance, I say!” PicProps: Fedor’s Website)
Even by his own lofty standards for peculiarity, Fedor Emelianenko …
(“Mr. Fedor thinks you are a very amusing little man. He would enjoy it very much to see you dance for him … Dance! Dance, I say!” PicProps: Fedor’s Website)
Even by his own lofty standards for peculiarity, Fedor Emelianenko had a pretty enigmatic week in America leading up to his second appearance inside the Strikeforce cage. When he wasn’t no-showing scheduled appointments or turning interviews into literal games of telephone by funneling his quotes through a comically long series of interpreters and middlemen, Fedor plodded through his obligations to hype tonight’s fight against Fabricio Werdum with the same kind of indecipherable stoicism he usually shows his doomed opponents.
Amid rumors that his retirement was imminent and that he was planning a life in politics at home in mother Russia (both of which he’s denied), the whole circus served only to remind us how little we really know about Fedor. Aside from a few half-hour Showtime specials, a handful of feature stories — the best known of which was actually written by M-1 executive Evgeni Kogan, so it has to be considered no more substantive than an M-1 press release – and his own stilted and translated post-fight interviews, there is shockingly little primary source material on Emelianenko.
What we’re told, over and over again, is this: Because of his old-school Soviet sensibilities and deeply religious nature, Fedor has no need for fame or for money and apparently has no desire to be known or understood by the fans who’ve elevated him to near God-like status in hardcore MMA circles. He’s a simple, conservative-minded man who chooses to live in relative seclusion, train with a select group of close friends and views nearly everything else as bothersome, needless distraction. Yeah, that last part made him sound a little bit more like Brock Lesnar than any of you are comfortable with admitting, huh?
But as much as he remains a mystery outside the cage, he’s given us ample evidence of what’s capable of inside it. In preparation for tonight’s bout with Werdum, we give you our choices for the 10 fights that have, in different ways, defined his career thus far …
