Tag: gegard mousasi

The Mercurial, Magical Gegard Mousasi on the Cusp of Glory (And a Payday)

There was a time when Gegard Mousasi entered the UFC that he heard boos and whispers.
He’s overrated.
He’s boring.
He’s in over his head.
For anyone who had watched him in the past—say, before the spring of 2013—those kinds of statements we…

There was a time when Gegard Mousasi entered the UFC that he heard boos and whispers.

He’s overrated.

He’s boring.

He’s in over his head.

For anyone who had watched him in the past—say, before the spring of 2013—those kinds of statements were downright head-scratching.

The man who came into the UFC with a gaudy 33-3-2 record was suddenly not that good? The middleweight who once knocked out Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, the fearless one who stepped into the cage with and submitted heavyweight Mark Hunt—MARK HUNT!—in Dream’s Super Hulk Grand Prix tournament, that guy was unexciting?

If it all seemed like nonsense, that’s because it was.

Sure, there was a learning curve for Mousasi, who suddenly found himself in the thick of a division with a good number of wrestlers and with a deeper talent pool, but when he arrived, he still had youth on his side—he was 27 years old—and his skill set still had the ability to dazzle. 

Fast-forward a few years, and the now 31-year-old Mousasi is surging in the way that those who’d long followed him had expected. He’s won four fights in a row in dominating style, and a win over former middleweight champion Chris Weidman at UFC 210 Saturday will move him closer to a title shot in a crowded division.

It also may provide him with a sweet payday…or a ticket out of town.

Mousasi has become a subspot of his own at UFC 210 due to the major stakes in play for him, as well as his sudden willingness to candidly discuss his present and future.

Last week, the No. 5 ranked middleweight confirmed to SiriusXM radio host Luke Thomas that he would become a free agent after fighting Weidman.

Given his history of working with Bellator President Scott Coker—Mousasi was the light heavyweight champion in Strikeforce when Coker ran that organization—he is almost certainly going to be the next free agent to go to bid with a likely suitor waiting. And his price will be largely impacted by his Saturday night result.

For Bellator, his utility may bring with it a premium. His willingness to fight in more than one division would allow him to slot into both middleweight and light heavyweight bouts. Coker has continually shown an interest in fighters with that kind of versatility.

UFC President Dana White is known to like Mousasi, but the organization has been surprisingly laissez-faire in letting go of other fighters who in the past likely would never have reached the free-agent stage. If Mousasi goes to bid with a five-fight win streak, he will be among the most coveted free agents to reach the open market.

“Vitor Belfort makes a lot more, Dan Henderson makes a lot more; Michael Bisping, let’s be honest, I would be favored in that fight,” Mousasi told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani in a recent interview. “Now he’s champion, but even before he was champion, he was getting paid a lot more. So I should get what I deserve. I don’t have extreme demands. They should pay me what’s fair.”

Relatedly, the UFC matchmakers have long noted that their job is to set up matches that create contenders. If they do that with Mousasi and the promotion lets him go anyway, well, that makes a statement about the state of the UFC in 2017.

For reference, Mousasi’s last publicly disclosed payday, at July 2016’s UFC 200, was $110,000 ($75,000 fight purse and $35,000 win bonus). In discussing his current contract, Mousasi told Helwani he was being “screwed.”

He can change the negotiating dynamic, but it is all dependent on winning. Oddsmakers currently peg the fight as a pick ’em.

Mousasi, with 34 finishes in 41 career wins, certainly has the finishing instincts to close out Weidman or anyone else in the division. If there is any question about his ability to win this fight, it comes with wrestling. There’s little doubt he’ll be tested in that department against the former collegiate All-American, who has lost two straight fights and has been stopped in both. In the midst of that streak, Weidman will have to consider a more conservative approach that emphasizes his background, particular given Mousasi’s reputation.

“I think he underestimates me a little bit,” Mousasi told Helwani during their interview. “He’s seen my previous fights where I get taken down and relies too much on that. But I know what I can do on a given day when my mind is right, and it is right. And I’ve worked a lot on my defense. I’m not a wrestler, I’m just working on my takedown defense.”

He went on to suggest that Weidman would not get a single takedown against him, and there are reasons to suggest that his confidence in gamesmanship might be rooted in factual basis. According to FightMetric statistics, he hasn’t been taken down a single time in his last seven fights, with opponents going a combined 0-of-11 against him.

That’s a far cry from the 2010 fight that gave him his reputation, when Muhammed Lawal took him down 11 times during a Strikeforce bout. 

His win probability will almost directly correlate with takedown defense success. On his feet, Mousasi is a terror, with a disciplined approach that is heavy on a jab that emphasizes distance control but with enough power to punish anyone who tries to wade past it. He also smells blood in the water and capitalizes as well as anyone in the game.

Whether that plays against the rugged Weidman will make or break not just the fight, but his next career move. 

Mousasi said he “100 percent” wants to stay in the UFC, but money is known to change minds.

The stakes are high for Mousasi, and if his two goals are to make more money and to contend for the UFC belt, there is a clear roadmap to get there, and it goes through Weidman. And if he wins, the man who entered the UFC with so much promise may finally get both what was expected and what he wants.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

The Mercurial, Magical Gegard Mousasi on the Cusp of Glory (And a Payday)

There was a time when Gegard Mousasi entered the UFC that he heard boos and whispers.
He’s overrated.
He’s boring.
He’s in over his head.
For anyone who had watched him in the past—say, before the spring of 2013—those kinds of statements we…

There was a time when Gegard Mousasi entered the UFC that he heard boos and whispers.

He’s overrated.

He’s boring.

He’s in over his head.

For anyone who had watched him in the past—say, before the spring of 2013—those kinds of statements were downright head-scratching.

The man who came into the UFC with a gaudy 33-3-2 record was suddenly not that good? The middleweight who once knocked out Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, the fearless one who stepped into the cage with and submitted heavyweight Mark Hunt—MARK HUNT!—in Dream’s Super Hulk Grand Prix tournament, that guy was unexciting?

If it all seemed like nonsense, that’s because it was.

Sure, there was a learning curve for Mousasi, who suddenly found himself in the thick of a division with a good number of wrestlers and with a deeper talent pool, but when he arrived, he still had youth on his side—he was 27 years old—and his skill set still had the ability to dazzle. 

Fast-forward a few years, and the now 31-year-old Mousasi is surging in the way that those who’d long followed him had expected. He’s won four fights in a row in dominating style, and a win over former middleweight champion Chris Weidman at UFC 210 Saturday will move him closer to a title shot in a crowded division.

It also may provide him with a sweet payday…or a ticket out of town.

Mousasi has become a subspot of his own at UFC 210 due to the major stakes in play for him, as well as his sudden willingness to candidly discuss his present and future.

Last week, the No. 5 ranked middleweight confirmed to SiriusXM radio host Luke Thomas that he would become a free agent after fighting Weidman.

Given his history of working with Bellator President Scott Coker—Mousasi was the light heavyweight champion in Strikeforce when Coker ran that organization—he is almost certainly going to be the next free agent to go to bid with a likely suitor waiting. And his price will be largely impacted by his Saturday night result.

For Bellator, his utility may bring with it a premium. His willingness to fight in more than one division would allow him to slot into both middleweight and light heavyweight bouts. Coker has continually shown an interest in fighters with that kind of versatility.

UFC President Dana White is known to like Mousasi, but the organization has been surprisingly laissez-faire in letting go of other fighters who in the past likely would never have reached the free-agent stage. If Mousasi goes to bid with a five-fight win streak, he will be among the most coveted free agents to reach the open market.

“Vitor Belfort makes a lot more, Dan Henderson makes a lot more; Michael Bisping, let’s be honest, I would be favored in that fight,” Mousasi told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani in a recent interview. “Now he’s champion, but even before he was champion, he was getting paid a lot more. So I should get what I deserve. I don’t have extreme demands. They should pay me what’s fair.”

Relatedly, the UFC matchmakers have long noted that their job is to set up matches that create contenders. If they do that with Mousasi and the promotion lets him go anyway, well, that makes a statement about the state of the UFC in 2017.

For reference, Mousasi’s last publicly disclosed payday, at July 2016’s UFC 200, was $110,000 ($75,000 fight purse and $35,000 win bonus). In discussing his current contract, Mousasi told Helwani he was being “screwed.”

He can change the negotiating dynamic, but it is all dependent on winning. Oddsmakers currently peg the fight as a pick ’em.

Mousasi, with 34 finishes in 41 career wins, certainly has the finishing instincts to close out Weidman or anyone else in the division. If there is any question about his ability to win this fight, it comes with wrestling. There’s little doubt he’ll be tested in that department against the former collegiate All-American, who has lost two straight fights and has been stopped in both. In the midst of that streak, Weidman will have to consider a more conservative approach that emphasizes his background, particular given Mousasi’s reputation.

“I think he underestimates me a little bit,” Mousasi told Helwani during their interview. “He’s seen my previous fights where I get taken down and relies too much on that. But I know what I can do on a given day when my mind is right, and it is right. And I’ve worked a lot on my defense. I’m not a wrestler, I’m just working on my takedown defense.”

He went on to suggest that Weidman would not get a single takedown against him, and there are reasons to suggest that his confidence in gamesmanship might be rooted in factual basis. According to FightMetric statistics, he hasn’t been taken down a single time in his last seven fights, with opponents going a combined 0-of-11 against him.

That’s a far cry from the 2010 fight that gave him his reputation, when Muhammed Lawal took him down 11 times during a Strikeforce bout. 

His win probability will almost directly correlate with takedown defense success. On his feet, Mousasi is a terror, with a disciplined approach that is heavy on a jab that emphasizes distance control but with enough power to punish anyone who tries to wade past it. He also smells blood in the water and capitalizes as well as anyone in the game.

Whether that plays against the rugged Weidman will make or break not just the fight, but his next career move. 

Mousasi said he “100 percent” wants to stay in the UFC, but money is known to change minds.

The stakes are high for Mousasi, and if his two goals are to make more money and to contend for the UFC belt, there is a clear roadmap to get there, and it goes through Weidman. And if he wins, the man who entered the UFC with so much promise may finally get both what was expected and what he wants.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Chris Weidman Says he is Too Much For Gegard Mousasi

Chris Weidman feels that he possesses too much for Gegard Mousasi ahead of their middleweight clash at UFC 210 on Saturday. Weidman certainly showed the world his true potential when he ended MMA legend Anderson Silva’s record UFC win in shocking circumstances. “The Spider” was riding a winning a streak of 16, which was ended by Weidman’s […]

Chris Weidman feels that he possesses too much for Gegard Mousasi ahead of their middleweight clash at UFC 210 on Saturday. Weidman certainly showed the world his true potential when he ended MMA legend Anderson Silva’s record UFC win in shocking circumstances. “The Spider” was riding a winning a streak of 16, which was ended by Weidman’s […]

UFC 210 Preview: Chris Weidman Faces Do-or-Die Situation Against Gegard Mousasi

The time when Chris Weidman was regarded as the future of the middleweight division seems very far away right now.
As Weidman prepares to meet the surging Gegard Mousasi Saturday in UFC 210’s co-main event, the magic of just a few years ago is long gon…

The time when Chris Weidman was regarded as the future of the middleweight division seems very far away right now.

As Weidman prepares to meet the surging Gegard Mousasi Saturday in UFC 210’s co-main event, the magic of just a few years ago is long gone. These days, the MMA world is starting to ask some pretty disquieting questions about Weidman, as the former 185-pound champion finds himself suddenly reeling and on the heels of back-to-back losses.

This is a fight he desperately needs to win, not just to avoid slipping into the dreaded territory of three straight defeats, but to preserve any semblance of hope that the 32-year-old New York native might still be able to resurrect his glory days.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say things are close to do-or-die for him here in a what might turn out to be a very competitive pairing. Severe MMA’s Sean Sheehan tweeted:

Mousasi is a fighter that spectators have been waiting years to see cross over into the elite of the 185-pound division. He’s riding a four-fight win streak, including three consecutive stoppages over Thiago Santos, Vitor Belfort and Uriah Hall.

The 31-year-old native of Iran has garnered a cult following in MMA circles with his dry wit and low-key, unchanging demeanor. If he’s able to beat Weidman on Saturday—where he’s going off as a slight favorite, according to most of the lines listed by OddsShark—it would make him a legitimate title threat.

Mousasi began to forge his reputation as a talented, ice-cold competitor while spending the first 10 years of his career fighting in organizations like Pride, Dream and Strikeforce.

He got off to an up-and-down start after coming to the UFC in 2013, going just 4-3 in first seven fights. Since then, however, it has been all W’s. Along the way, Mousasi appears to have sharpened the verbal part of his game as well.

He comes into this bout with an apparent chip on his shoulder, telling the Fight Society Podcast (via MMA Fighting’s Jed Meshew) that he needs to beat Weidman to continue working his way toward a title shot, yes, but also to punch his ticket to some bigger paydays:

I just see that Vitor Belfort is making tons more money than me. I defeated Dan Henderson, he’s making tons more money than me. I defeated Mark Hunt, he’s making $800,000 a fight. I can beat [champion] Michael Bisping and even before he was champion he was making a lot more than me. Why don’t I deserve to make some money? … How is it possible Mark Hunt is making $800,000 with a record of 10-10? He has a record of 10 wins, 10 losses. Look at my record. How the f–k is that possible?

Weidman, on the other hand, continues to struggle to regain the championship form that once made him seem like he’d be a pillar of this division for years to come.

Back in 2013, when the then-undefeated fighter bested Anderson Silva in back-to-back fights at UFCs 162 and 168, he appeared primed for a legendary run. Viewed, with the benefit of hindsight, however, some of the shine has started to come off his sprint to a 13-0 overall record (9-0 in the UFC) by the spring of 2015.

Since losing to Weidman and then suffering a career-threatening leg injury in their second bout, the once-great Silva has gone just 1-4-1. That raises legitimate questions about whether Weidman’s pair of dominant performances over Silva—which ended in, admittedly, somewhat fluky stoppages—were really as iconic as they seemed at the time.

It could be, conventional wisdom now proffers, that Weidman merely caught Silva at an advantageous stage in his career. Perhaps Silva’s skills were already in deep decline by then and Weidman just happened to be the guy to come along and point it out to the world.

That’s unfair, of course. You can’t very well take Weidman’s wins over the greatest of all time away from him. Viewing Silva’s golden years in a bit more context, though, is enough to make you wonder if we had overestimated Weidman based on that pair of victories.

It also casts his successful title defenses, against also declining versions of Lyoto Machida and Belfort, in somewhat less impressive light.

All told, it’s more difficult to know what to make of Weidman now than at perhaps any time in his career.

His pair of losses were disastrous, but also not the sort that necessarily signaled the end of him. For starters, both came at the hands of elite middleweights—Luke Rockhold and Yoel Romero—in fights where Weidman was affording himself well before suffering stoppage losses.

The Romero defeat was especially brutal, as the former Olympic wrestler caught Weidman with a flying knee early in the third round that left him bloodied and separated from his senses. It was violent enough to be a change-your-career kind of knockout, so it remains to be seen how Weidman will return.

In the wake of those poor outcomes, even longtime coach Ray Longo admits his most accomplished pupil may have “plateaued” a bit in recent years.

“If you think about it, there was only one way to go,” Longo told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour, via MMA Fighting’s Chuck Mindenhall. “You can’t keep going up and up and up. So we plateaued a little bit before. I think that’s going to be the mantra. That’s behind us, and we really had to go back to what got us there and really just move forward.”

Adding to the unknowns for Weidman was a serious neck injury that forced him to have surgery in June 2016, five months before the Romero bout. Assuming he’s fully healed, then the Mousasi fight shapes up as about as important a litmus test for him as you could imagine.

Mousasi is well-regarded enough that a win for Weidman—especially an impressive stoppage or clean-slate decision—would re-establish him among the top players at 185 pounds.

It would also be easier to look upon those losses to Rockhold and Romero as isolated incidents. If not flukes, exactly, then certainly not career-defining, either.

But a loss would cast a shadow long enough that it might begin to shroud the rest of Weidman’s career.

This is a guy whose coaches bragged he would be world champion before he even arrived in the UFC.

He’s also a guy who looked crazy dominant through more than a dozen fights.

Without being a physical dynamo the likes of Romero or a traditional martial arts world champion like contender Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, Weidman managed to craft himself into one of the sport’s most complete athletes during his rise.

Now, to see him fall off the pace so badly at such a young age would be shocking. Is it even possible for Weidman to be over the hill at 32?

Best he beats Mousasi on Saturday, lest the notoriously persnickety MMA world continues asking such questions.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Gegard Mousasi Questions ‘How The F*ck’ Mark Hunt Makes More Money Than Him

Gegard Mousasi is not happy that he’s making less money than certain fighters on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) roster. Mousasi is entering the final fight on his UFC contract this Saturday night (April 8) against Chris Weidman. “The Dreamcatcher” could’ve re-signed with the promotion beforehand, but decided to take the risk. If he defeats […]

Gegard Mousasi is not happy that he’s making less money than certain fighters on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) roster. Mousasi is entering the final fight on his UFC contract this Saturday night (April 8) against Chris Weidman. “The Dreamcatcher” could’ve re-signed with the promotion beforehand, but decided to take the risk. If he defeats […]

UFC 210: Breaking Down Saturday’s Co-Main Event Between Chris Weidman-Gegard Mousasi

Next up from John Gooden and Dan Hardy is Saturday’s co-main event at UFC 210 between Chris Weidman and Gegard Mousasi. The middleweight contest goes “Inside the Octagon,” as Gooden and Hardy offer up in-depth analysis and thoughts for the fight. Weidman, a former UFC champion, is looking to get back on track after a […]

Next up from John Gooden and Dan Hardy is Saturday’s co-main event at UFC 210 between Chris Weidman and Gegard Mousasi. The middleweight contest goes “Inside the Octagon,” as Gooden and Hardy offer up in-depth analysis and thoughts for the fight. Weidman, a former UFC champion, is looking to get back on track after a […]