Forrest Griffin’s barn-burner of a fight with Stephan Bonnar back in 2005 may have done more than any other bout in history to propel the UFC into the mainstream. The two men went back and forth for 15 minutes in a display of heart and skill that could…
Forrest Griffin‘s barn-burner of a fight with Stephan Bonnar back in 2005 may have done more than any other bout in history to propel the UFC into the mainstream. The two men went back and forth for 15 minutes in a display of heart and skill that couldn’t be denied. The fight made Spike television believers in the power of MMA. The rest is history.
Fast forward seven years—Griffin again left it all in the cage, this time in a rubber match with UFC Hall of Famer Tito Ortiz. He won a close fight, but it turns out he got an assist from more than just the judges. The power of modern medical science also helped propel Griffin to victory.
As originally reported by Larry Pepe at Pro MMA Radio, and confirmed by Bleacher Report with Nevada Athletic Commission Executive Director Keith Kizer, Griffin was approved for a Therapeutic Use Exemption, allowing him to use Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) for his bout with Ortiz.
TRT, a divisive treatment that has split the MMA community into two very opinionated camps, allows older fighters to train and compete with the same amount of testosterone in their system as their younger counterparts. Some of the UFC’s top aging stars have undergone TRT, looking to bring their bodies’ natural levels of testosterone back to the levels they enjoyed in their 20s. Top contenders like Dan Henderson (41) and Chael Sonnen (35) have both undergone the procedure.
Some opponents of the treatment are calling it little more than a masking agent for steroid abuse. And it’s true that past steroid use can cause the body to stop producing testosterone naturally. But so can problems with the pituitary gland and extended periods of cutting weight for sports like wrestling and mixed martial arts.
The biggest culprit, of course, is the natural aging process.
Personally, I’m not opposed to the use of TRT. Unfortunately, more than 100,000 high school graduates every year have experimented with steroids. I don’t think it’s fair to eliminate these young men from the sport because of a youthful mistake.
If monitored properly, and Kizer says Griffin’s testosterone levels were tested both before and after the match with Ortiz, TRT can be used fairly. The procedure doesn’t, and shouldn’t, necessarily provide a fighter with more testosterone than the average man. It simply boosts their levels to the upward levels of human potential.
We want our athletes to be at their best. It’s too important not to be, especially when modern science can help a fighter train more effectively. That only helps us as fans and a sport.
Exceptional fighters should be doing whatever it takes to extend their careers. As a fighter, I expect nothing less from Forrest Griffin. Good for him.
In a closely contested rubber match between two war-tested veterans, Forrest Griffin defeated Tito Ortiz via unanimous decision in the co-main event of UFC 148 six days ago. All three fights in the trilogy were close and it could be argued that ei…
In a closely contested rubber match between two war-tested veterans, Forrest Griffin defeated Tito Ortiz via unanimous decision in the co-main event of UFC 148 six days ago.
MMA Mania credits Pro MMA Radio host Larry Pope for being the first one to break the news today.
The 34-year-old had already received criticism for leaving the Octagon unannounced after the conclusion of the third round, prior to the results being read, an action he later apologized for.
Griffin’s bizarre antics continued when he grabbed the microphone from Joe Rogan after the fight to promote an impromptu interview with Ortiz.
Many considered the move inappropriate, given that Ortiz announced his retirement weeks before the event took place. Ortiz was also inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame the afternoon of July 7.
While Griffin significantly out-struck Ortiz on the feet, he looked every bit as slow and fatigued as the self-proclaimed “People’s Champion” as the fight wore on. He also gave up several takedowns and ate plenty of heavy shots on the ground.
Was TRT the difference-maker in this match-up or was Forrest simply the better man Saturday evening?
Of course, the argument can also be made that Griffin, the original winner of “The Ultimate Fighter,” was simply gifted a 29-28 decision by the judges.
(On the count of three, I want everyone who is not pulling a fast one to raise their hand.)
If there are two things that we would be willing to bet the house on in light of recent events, it’s that half of the scheduled fights for the next few months will be cancelled due to injury, and the few participants who remain standing after the smoke clears will only be doing so as a result of testosterone replacement therapy. So goes the story for TUF 1 winner and former light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin, the most recent UFC behemoth fighter who both filed for and was successful in receiving a therapeutic use exemption for TRT over the past couple months.
(On the count of three, I want everyone who is not pulling a fast one to raise their hand.)
If there are two things that we would be willing to bet the house on in light of recent events, it’s that half of the scheduled fights for the next few months will be cancelled due to injury, and the few participants who remain standing after the smoke clears will only be doing so as a result of testosterone replacement therapy. So goes the story for TUF 1 winner and former light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin, the most recent UFC behemoth fighter who both filed for and was successful in receiving a therapeutic use exemption for TRT over the past couple months.
The news that Griffin received a TUE from the Nevada State Athletic Commission for his UFC 148 fight with the now-retired Tito Ortiz was reported by Pro MMA Radio Host Larry Pepe via his Twitter earlier today. Kind of makes you imagine how gassed Griffin would have really been in that third round had he not recently hopped on this bandwagon, but we digress.
We could get into the whole moral debate over this issue, but it would truly be retreading old ground at this point. The truth is, there ain’t much that FoGriff could do to justify his sudden need for testosterone, other than the fact that he’s not 22 anymore. Everyone from Randy Couture to Dana White have stated that TRT is basically a crock of shit excuse for aging athletes to feel younger again, but it’s legal, so whaddayagonnado?! Start juicing up filling out that paperwork now, Stephan, because you’re going to need it if you ever get that rematch.
Express your outrage or support for FoGriff’s plight in the comments section. And happy Friday the 13th, Potato Nation. I leave you with this:
(Fair warning: You DEFINITELY won’t see the compiler’s choice of music coming.)
Tito Ortiz has spent the last couple of days on Twitter venting his frustration over what he considers to be a horrible decision by the judges following his fight with Forrest Griffin at UFC 148.It first started with Ortiz announcing he was going to wa…
Tito Ortiz has spent the last couple of days on Twitter venting his frustration over what he considers to be a horrible decision by the judges following his fight with Forrest Griffin at UFC 148.
It first started with Ortiz announcing he was going to watch the fight for the first time. His first reaction was:
Never knew a fight can be won by strikes thrown. I feel sorry for my fans. (Posted at 9:32 PM, July 11)
The next person Ortiz ripped was Joe Rogan:
Funny hearing the commentating @joerogan’s hand must of been sore from stroking Forrest during fight. Joe may need 2get glasses instead of hair plugs. Crazy how my quads aren’t sore from kicks. But my shins are from checking. (Posted at 9:55 PM, July 11)
Today, news broke that Forrest Griffin was granted a TRT exemption shortly before his fight with Ortiz. The former “Huntington Beach Bad Boy” had this to say about the news:
@ForrestGriffin sorry to hear you had to use #steroids to beat me! Wait or try to beat me. @ForrestGriffin = #cheater lol. Have a good day! (Posted at 2:08 PM, July 13)
Granted, most MMA fans would agree that Ortiz deserved a better send-off than what he received. His last fight will be most remembered for the post-fight antics of Griffin.
Griffin running out of the Octagon, being chased by Dana White, then coming back to accept the win, followed by him grabbing Joe Rogan’s microphone and conducting a pathetic interview with Ortiz. That’s what we’ll remember from the fight.
Well, that and the image of two tired fighters lethargically trading jabs with one-another.
I think it’s safe to say most MMA fans have grown tired of Griffin’s immature banter.
Let’s just hope we aren’t forced to witness another Ortiz vs. Griffin fight at any point in our lifetimes.
Joe Chacon is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report and a Staff Writer for Operation Sports. You can follow him on Twitter @JoeChacon.
(What?! You mean no more of this?! This isn’t happening. THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!!!)
For those of you who didn’t have the patience, the cable package, or the right list of websites to steal last night’s UFC on FUEL event from, we are sorry to inform you that you missed out on one hell of a show. James Te Huna and Joey Beltran set the UFC record for most significant strikes landed within a three round light heavyweight affair at 206, unfortunately giving us cancer in the process. Te Huna also set a record for most significant strikes landed in one round by a light heavyweight with 71 in the first. In the main event, Chris Weidman made Mark Munoz look like Houston Alexander on the mat*, holding him to zero significant strikes en route to a beautiful standing elbow KO in the second round ala Steve Bosse vs, you guessed it, Houston Alexander. Apparently under the belief that Weidman had covered his gloves in smelling salts, referee Josh Rosenthal allowed the New Yorker to land about a dozen or more unnecessary shots to a clearly unconscious and exponentially bleeding Munoz, causing this writer to scream at his television in honest to God horror for the first time in recent memory. As is usually the case with a free card, last night contained its fair share of ups and downs.
But perhaps the most disorienting moment of the night (aside from the few seconds I thought we had seen the last of Mark Munoz) came during the post-fight show, which featured Jay Glazer, Chael Sonnen, and CagePotato contributor/future UFC HOFer Stephan Bonnar. When the three finally calmed down and Sonnen had finished stroking Weidman’s ego with the fervor of a Taiwanese transsexual prostitute, Ariel Helwani was able to snag a short interview with UFC bossman Dana White. After White announced the coaches for The Ultimate Fighter: Billy no-mates vs. Banana Benders, Helwani proceeded to ask about the futures of the fighters that sat just a few feet behind him.
White declared that “He hadn’t even talked to Chael yet” and that “Only [Chael] knows what he wants to do,” but the real bombshell was dropped when White was asked about Bonnar. After skewering, then roasting Bonnar’s dreams of coaching the next season of The Ultimate Fighter opposite Forrest Griffin over an open flame, White claimed that the last time he and “The American Psycho” spoke, Bonnar was considering retirement.
What followed was a heartfelt, if not mildly confusing speech by Bonnar that more or less confirmed this.
(What?! You mean no more of this?! This isn’t happening. THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!!!)
For those of you who didn’t have the patience, the cable package, or the right list of websites to steal last night’s UFC on FUEL event from, we are sorry to inform you that you missed out on one hell of a show. James Te Huna and Joey Beltran set the UFC record for most significant strikes landed within a three round light heavyweight affair at 206, unfortunately giving us cancer in the process. Te Huna also set a record for most significant strikes landed in one round by a light heavyweight with 71 in the first. In the main event, Chris Weidman made Mark Munoz look like Houston Alexander on the mat*, holding him to zero significant strikes en route to a beautiful standing elbow KO in the second round ala Steve Bosse vs, you guessed it, Houston Alexander. Apparently under the belief that Weidman had covered his gloves in smelling salts, referee Josh Rosenthal allowed the New Yorker to land about a dozen or more unnecessary shots to a clearly unconscious and exponentially bleeding Munoz, causing this writer to scream at his television in honest to God horror for the first time in recent memory. As is usually the case with a free card, last night contained its fair share of ups and downs.
But perhaps the most disorienting moment of the night (aside from the few seconds I thought we had seen the last of Mark Munoz) came during the post-fight show, which featured Jay Glazer, Chael Sonnen, and CagePotato contributor/future UFC HOFer Stephan Bonnar. When the three finally calmed down and Sonnen had finished stroking Weidman’s ego with the fervor of a Taiwanese transsexual prostitute, Ariel Helwani was able to snag a short interview with UFC bossman Dana White. After White announced the coaches for The Ultimate Fighter: Billy no-mates vs. Banana Benders, Helwani proceeded to ask about the futures of the fighters that sat just a few feet behind him.
White declared that “He hadn’t even talked to Chael yet” and that “Only [Chael] knows what he wants to do,” but the real bombshell was dropped when White was asked about Bonnar. After skewering, then roasting Bonnar’s dreams of coaching the next season of The Ultimate Fighter opposite Forrest Griffin over an open flame, White claimed that the last time he and “The American Psycho” spoke, Bonnar was considering retirement.
What followed was a heartfelt, if not mildly confusing speech by Bonnar that more or less confirmed this.
“Put it this way, I have no interest in fighting the next big thing before the world realizes the talent of the guy,” Bonnar said, obviously referring to his fights against Jon Jones and Mark Coleman(see what I did there?):
I’ve been doing this eleven years, and I’ve been through the ringer. So I promised myself I’d put a nice streak together, and I said if I want my last fight, I’m gonna go back in there against someone with a lot of Twitter followers. The story of my career has been fighting a lot of the best guys right before they got on top, you know. So I said, ‘Hey, if I can’t get that big marquee fight then yeah, it’s God’s way of telling me to go do something else for a while.’
Sonnen immediately offered an empathetic shoulder rub, leading me to believe that Silva might have kneed Sonnen so hard that he literally unclogged about a decade’s worth of false machismo bullshit from his insides. Sharing our confusion, Glazer asked Bonnar to clarify.
Glazer: “Let’s clear this up. What are you saying here?”
Bonnar: “Hey who knows…um…”
Glazer: “It sounds like you’re saying you’re retiring.”
Bonnar: “Maybe they’ll still let me fight Forrest. Maybe there’s the chance that Rampage wants to fight again. That’s a fight I really wanted too. But, hey, if he doesn’t got a lot of Twitter followers, then maybe it’s God’s way of saying maybe do something else.”
I may not be a man of faith, but even I find it a little odd that Bonnar would coalesce an overseeing deity and a social networking device into the governing body upon which he bases his decision. Perhaps that’s why he has the nickname he has.
But on a serious note, and with all due respect to Roy Nelson and Shane Carwin, who out there would rather see two mid-to-upper-tier heavyweights duke it out over the two guys who’s first fight helped make the UFC what it is? Both Stephan and Forrest have now hinted at retirement, and what better way would it be to end their careers than in the exact fashion they truly started them? It would not only be the barnburner to end all barnburners, making Hendo/Rua look like a sissy fight between two theater nerds in the process**, but would make for a far more entertaining season than any other I could imagine. It could even make for the first time in UFC History that both fighters announced it would be their last fight in the months leading up to it. In a word, it would be legend.
And I for one, don’t give two shits that Stephan is 0-2 against FoGriff in his career. The first fight was razor-thin, and I honestly believe that, in this point in their respective careers, Bonnar has the best chance of beating Griffin now that he’s ever had. He’s put together three straight wins over decent competition, and has shown that he still has a few tricks up his sleeve when the odds are stacked against him. Forget a fight with that drama queen Rampage; his heart simply ain’t in it anymore, and Bonnar deserves better. THIS is the fight we should be clamoring for. Can you even imagine how epic the pranks alone would be, being that these two are both good friends and on their way out of the building? Screw mariachi bands and fire extinguishers, we’d be looking at full on tribal warfare.
Do what you gotta do, Potato Nation, be it a Twitter campaign, an occupy movement, or perhaps something that will actually work, to turn this hope of Bonnar’s into a reality. We owe him that much.
*Obvious exaggeration is obvious.
**This is clearly a joke as well. One that borders on blasphemy, but still. Take it sleazy.
(For his final masterpiece, Michelangelo decided to pay tribute to the Biblical hero’s fall from grace through the medium of hamstone. The results were shocking, yet delicious.)
As is likely the case for most of you, we here at CagePotato are more than willing to admit that we all but completely missed out on the failed experiment that was TUF Live. The placement of the show on Friday nights, the rehashed trash-talk and pranks between coaches; it just seemed all too played out and tired to really get us hooked. The fact that Dominick Cruz tore his ACL with only a couple episodes to go only furthered our belief that the season would have been a complete loss if not for the uplifting story of the season’s lightweight winner, Don Cheadle (or something like that).
So when Dana White informed USA TODAY Sports yesterday that the coaches for this season would be polar opposite heavyweights Roy Nelson and Shane Carwin, it more than piqued our interest. Aside from being the winner of the show’s tenth (and arguably least talent filled) season, TUF: Heavyweights, Nelson is by all accounts, one entertaining and funny sumbitch. Carwin, on the other hand, has shown before that he is up for a good joshing as long as it is not aimed at him. If you recall, the last time we got on Carwin’s bad side, Old Dad packed up his things, fled, faked his death, died his eyebrows, and attended his own funeral as a man named Phil Schiffley. The last we heard, he was still reporting on all things MMA from a one man vessel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean out of fear that “The Engineer” was still looking for him. So clearly, the potential for hilarity between these two on the set is higher than Nelson’s cholesterol levels.
(For his final masterpiece, Michelangelo decided to pay tribute to the Biblical hero’s fall from grace through the medium of hamstone. The results were shocking, yet delicious.)
As is likely the case for most of you, we here at CagePotato are more than willing to admit that we all but completely missed out on the failed experiment that was TUF Live. The placement of the show on Friday nights, the rehashed trash-talk and pranks between coaches; it just seemed all too played out and tired to really get us hooked. The fact that Dominick Cruz tore his ACL with only a couple episodes to go only furthered our belief that the season would have been a complete loss if not for the uplifting story of the season’s lightweight winner, Don Cheadle (or something like that).
So when Dana White informed USA TODAY Sports yesterday that the coaches for this season would be polar opposite heavyweights Roy Nelson and Shane Carwin, it more than piqued our interest. Aside from being the winner of the show’s tenth (and arguably least talent filled) season, TUF: Heavyweights, Nelson is by all accounts, one entertaining and funny sumbitch. Carwin, on the other hand, has shown before that he is up for a good joshing as long as it is not aimed at him. If you recall, the last time we got on Carwin’s bad side, Old Dad packed up his things, fled, faked his death, died his eyebrows, and attended his own funeral as a man named Phil Schiffley. The last we heard, he was still reporting on all things MMA from a one man vessel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean out of fear that “The Engineer” was still looking for him. So clearly, the potential for hilarity between these two on the set is higher than Nelson’s cholesterol levels.
And although Carwin did in fact take a year away from action following his UFC 131 loss to Junior Dos Santos to search the world over for Fowlkes, he also spent a good deal of time rehabilitating his back. Coincidentally, it was this very injury that forced him out of his original matchup with Nelson at UFC 125.
“Big Country” most recently found his way back to the win column with a first round knockout of Dave Herman at UFC 146. Just 2-3 in his past five, Nelson certainly won’t be looking at a title shot with a win over Carwin, but a victory would undoubtedly be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, of his Zuffa career.
And in other TUF coaching news…
For those of you who didn’t stick around to catch the post-fight show on FUEL TV last night, DW also announced that the coaches for the second international season of TUF, which will see fighters from the UK square off against Australia’s finest, will be TUF 9 winner Ross Pearson and TUF 6 standout George Sotiropoulus. Both men have fallen on hard times as of late, with G Sots dropping his past two to Dennis Siver (via decision) and Rafael Dos Anjos (via lawn chair KO). After dropping to featherweight following a 4-2 UFC stint at lightweight and scoring a unanimous decision victory over Junior Assuncao, Pearson most recently screwed our parlay over royally when he was knocked out by Cub Swanson in the second round of their tilt at UFC on FX 4.
So, Potato Nation, do these matchups do anything for you?
Forrest Griffin‘s barn-burner of a fight with Stephan Bonnar back in 2005 may have done more than any other bout in history to propel the UFC into the mainstream. The two men went back and forth for 15 minutes in a display of heart and skill that couldn’t be denied. The fight made Spike television believers in the power of MMA. The rest is history.
