Filed under: Fighting, FanHouse Exclusive, NewsAs Hermes Franca waited for the decision of his fight against Ferrid Kheder to be read inside the cage in a Cartago, Costa Rica high school gym, the UFC veteran thought his losing streak was history. Inste…
As Hermes Franca waited for the decision of his fight against Ferrid Kheder to be read inside the cage in a Cartago, Costa Rica high school gym, the UFC veteran thought his losing streak was history. Instead, to him, it was the beginning of something even worse than defeat.
If it was a simple loss, Franca could have handled it, but what happened next could not be so easily settled in his mind. According to some, Franca was simply the victim of a bad decision. But according to others, he was robbed, the victim of a fix.
“This is like a bad joke,” Franca told MMA Fighting. “It’s unbelievable. I won the fight. The judges gave it to me. I got my hand raised. And then they said I didn’t win.”
“What happened was confusion,” said Jean-Francois Billon, who helped organize the show. “It’s a big story for a little thing. Nobody had bad intentions. Nobody was cheating.”
What started out as a fight in the cage became a fight for the truth.
(Video courtesy Sherdog)
I don’t know what the hell it is lately with shady MMA promoters screwing fighters, but it looks like these leeches are bound and bet to add some black marks on an overall otherwise decent year for the sport before the cl…
(Video courtesy Sherdog)
I don’t know what the hell it is lately with shady MMA promoters screwing fighters, but it looks like these leeches are bound and bet to add some black marks on an overall otherwise decent year for the sport before the clock ticks out for 2010.
By now we’ve all heard about some of of the crazy shit that went down at the Nemesis Fighting show in Dominican Republic earlier this month where fighters didn’t get paid and the promoter tried to high tail it out of Dodge before they realized the checks he wrote them were rubber. The latest on that story is that former bounty hunter Keith Jardine, who was one of the fighters who got stiffed has hooked up with the U.S. Secret Service to remedy the situation. We’ll have one of the fighters who nearly didn’t make it out of Dominican alive, Chris McNally on tomorrow’s The Bum Rush Radio Show to tell another crazy story from the event.
Well, it looks like another promoter has tried to pull a fast one on another UFC veteran, only this time it isn’t money that was stolen, it was a championship belt.
(They call him "The Hurricane" because he makes opponents want to hide in the basement when he touches down on them.)
If you don’t know who Ferrid Kheder is, by this time next year you will.
Here’s the story of The Hurricane:
The …
(They call him "The Hurricane" because he makes opponents want to hide in the basement when he touches down on them.)
If you don’t know who Ferrid Kheder is, by this time next year you will.
Here’s the story of The Hurricane:
The French-born Tunisian judoka who placed seventh as a lightweight at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia has completely dedicated himself to becoming a mixed martial artist since discovering the sport in 2005 and has done so impressively, compiling an 18-5 record in the process.
Hooking up with Hector Lombard, a fellow judo competitor and friend who was living and training in Australia at Sydney satellite of The Lion’s Den, the pair soon became the best fighters in the gym and were looking for a change.
Out of the blue, Kheder received a MySpace message from Ryan Parsons, the manager of Dan Henderson’s Temecula, California branch of Team Quest, inviting him and Lombard to move to the states to train with the stacked fight team that at the time included guys like Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou, Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal, Krzystof Soszynski, Jason “Mayhem” Miller and Joey Warren.
He jumped at the offer.
“To make a living at MMA, I knew it would be hard because every day I had to work. I couldn’t even speak English, so I had to work doing jobs that I didn’t need to talk to do. I worked as a mover and security at a nightclub and I trained in the morning and at night between working. You can’t expect to be one of the best in the world living and training like that, so after I had a few wins, I was contacted by Ryan Parsons," he recalls. "He contacted me through MySpace and he wanted me and Hector to come over to train at Team Quest. That was why we decided to move to America. Hector didn’t get his visa at the same time as me, so I started in 2007 to train at Team Quest.”
As Hermes Franca waited for the decision of his fight against Ferrid Kheder to be read inside the cage in a Cartago, Costa Rica high school gym, the UFC veteran thought his losing streak was history. Instead, to him, it was the beginning of something even worse than defeat.