The former Ultimate Fighter bad boy Junie Browning isn’t a bad boy anymore — he’s just a bad fighter.
Browning lost by first round submission Saturday night at MMA Fight Pit Genesis, tapping out when Jacob Clark got on top of him and started raining down punches and elbows. It was the kind of loss that calls into question whether Browning really wants to be a fighter at all.
Clark did a nice job of avoiding Browning’s early submission attempts and eventually got on top of Browning on the ground and started pummeling him, and Browning didn’t have much of an answer: He covered up at first, and then tapped out when the elbows started connecting.
The official time of the stoppage was 4 minutes, 18 seconds of the first round.
Browning weighed in at 162.25 pounds — a whopping 7.25 over the lightweight limit — and was noticeably chubbier than he had been on The Ultimate Fighter. He doesn’t appear to be committed to MMA.
The victory was a solid one for Clark, who improves his record to 9-3. But the real story is that Browning, who was once the focal point of the UFC‘s reality show, now looks like he has no business in the cage.
Pictured: Cagepotato.com interns reenacting the weigh-in for Browning vs. Clark.
I’ll be completely honest: I forgot about Junie Browning over the past few years. Well, maybe not so much “forgot about” as “assumed that he, like that other crazy MMA fighter with lame tattoos, has been crushing cans and causing shenanigans”. Given his three fight losing streak coming into his fight with Jacob Clark at tonight’s MMA Pit Fight: Genesis, he hasn’t been crushing cans. And unless we’re being lenient with our usage of “shenanigans”, his weigh-in for the fight didn’t provide them, either.
Yes, Junie Browning missed weight. Badly. As MMAFighting.com reports, Junie Browning weighed in at 162.25 pounds for what was supposed to be a lightweight fight, or seven and a quarter pounds over the limit. Missing weight, especially by that much, isn’t so much shenanigans as it is being irresponsible. But don’t be quick to feel bad for his opponent, Jacob Clark. Despite the New Mexico Athletic Commission’s generous two pound weight allowance, Clark also missed weight, weighing in at 158 pounds. MMA Fight Pit plans on fining both fighters an undisclosed sum of money per pound over the 155 pound weight limit.
All other fighters made weight for what is shaping up to be a pretty good card for a regional event. If you’re itching to watch some MMA before tomorrow’s UFC Live on Versus 5, it may be worth some change. Whether it’s more worthy of your money than the Taco Bell Party Pack and fifth of Evan Williams you’re currently planning on consuming in a dark room by yourself tonight is up to you.
Pictured: Cagepotato.com interns reenacting the weigh-in for Browning vs. Clark.
I’ll be completely honest: I forgot about Junie Browning over the past few years. Well, maybe not so much “forgot about” as “assumed that he, like that other crazy MMA fighter with lame tattoos, has been crushing cans and causing shenanigans”. Given his three fight losing streak coming into his fight with Jacob Clark at tonight’s MMA Pit Fight: Genesis, he hasn’t been crushing cans. And unless we’re being lenient with our usage of “shenanigans”, his weigh-in for the fight didn’t provide them, either.
Yes, Junie Browning missed weight. Badly. As MMAFighting.com reports, Junie Browning weighed in at 162.25 pounds for what was supposed to be a lightweight fight, or seven and a quarter pounds over the limit. Missing weight, especially by that much, isn’t so much shenanigans as it is being irresponsible. But don’t be quick to feel bad for his opponent, Jacob Clark. Despite the New Mexico Athletic Commission’s generous two pound weight allowance, Clark also missed weight, weighing in at 158 pounds. MMA Fight Pit plans on fining both fighters an undisclosed sum of money per pound over the 155 pound weight limit.
All other fighters made weight for what is shaping up to be a pretty good card for a regional event. If you’re itching to watch some MMA before tomorrow’s UFC Live on Versus 5, it may be worth some change. Whether it’s more worthy of your money than the Taco Bell Party Pack and fifth of Evan Williams you’re currently planning on consuming in a dark room by yourself tonight is up to you.
If you’re a fight fan looking for a way to burn through some spare cash in August, you’ve got options. Between UFC 133 last weekend and UFC 134 later in the month, the committed MMA fan is likely to add a hundred bucks to the cable bill this month just…
If you’re a fight fan looking for a way to burn through some spare cash in August, you’ve got options. Between UFC 133 last weekend and UFC 134 later in the month, the committed MMA fan is likely to add a hundred bucks to the cable bill this month just to keep up with all the pay-per-view action.
All these men have two things in common: 1) they used to fight in the UFC, and 2) they don’t anymore. So how do you convince people to pay money to see them fight after the UFC has decided it can’t even use them on free cable TV fight cards anymore?
“I think people are looking for an alternative to UFC events these days as well, and I think this is a card, as a fan, that I want to see,” said Torry Crooks, one of the promoters behind Saturday night’s event in Albuquerque, N.M. “These are some of my heroes that are on this card. These are guys who have a chance of making their way back, or as we expand as a promotion, going on to bigger and better things with us.”
In other words, the one thing we know about these promoters is that they’re optimistic.
It’s a tough time to hit up fight fans for some cash. One week after UFC 133 and two weeks after Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Henderson, MMA Fight Pit is squeezing in on a rare open Saturday night, but it’s also doing so just one day after a Strikeforce: Challengers card on Showtime and one day before a free UFC card on Versus. Even if it is available for twenty bucks less than a UFC pay-per-view, the main selling point is still fighters who the UFC decided it could do without.
That makes for a tricky little marketing tango. The main reason most fans know these names is because of UFC exposure, but now that the UFC is done exposing them, how much value remains?
The answer changes as you go down the card. Alexander still has the appeal of a slugger who’s long on power and short on defense. With Pulver, there’s the sense we’re seeing the final act in a great career, and whether it’s going to be a tragedy or a redemption story is still unclear. Browning brings little more than the allure of chaos, and after coming in more than seven pounds over the 155-pound limit for his bout, he seems poised to deliver.
Put them all together and you do have something resembling a draw, but is it the kind of draw fight fans are really going to pay $30 for?
A few probably will. Maybe they’ll be the independently wealthy types, or maybe just teenagers indiscriminately running up their parents’ cable bill with no thought to the consequences. But if the last few years worth of would-be competitors to the UFC have taught us anything, it’s that it’s hard enough to sell tickets with UFC castoffs, but almost impossible to do well on pay-per-view with them.
Then again, maybe it depends on how you measure success.
MMA Fight Pit promoter Crooks said he was encouraged by the early response from fans, who in his opinion, “either want to see these guys win or they’re controversial characters and they want to see them get beat up. Either way, it’s a fight they want to watch. We’re not as expensive as the UFC on pay-per-view, and I think people are hungry for an alternative.”
And who knows, maybe he’s right. It’s just hard to imagine that fans have thirty bucks worth of hunger in them for this particular alternative, and on this particular Saturday night.
Filed under: MMA RumorsJunie Browning, the former Ultimate Fighter bad boy who was cut by the UFC after an arrest in 2009, has his biggest fight since then on Saturday night, on the MMA Fight Pit: Genesis pay-per-view. But if Friday’s weigh-in is any i…
Junie Browning, the former Ultimate Fighter bad boy who was cut by the UFC after an arrest in 2009, has his biggest fight since then on Saturday night, on the MMA Fight Pit: Genesis pay-per-view. But if Friday’s weigh-in is any indication, Browning still doesn’t have his head screwed on right.
Browning weighed in at 162.25 pounds for the lightweight fight, or 7.25 pounds over the limit. A fighter coming in overweight by any amount is unprofessional, but coming in overweight by that much is absolutely inexcusable.
Browning’s opponent, Jacob Clark, also came in overweight, at 158 pounds. MMA Fight Pit says both fighters will be fined per pound over 155, although there was no word on how much the fine would be.
All the other fighters on the card made weight, some taking advantage of the two-pound buffer that MMA Fight Pit and the New Mexico Athletic Commission allowed. The full weigh-in results are below.
205 lbs. – Houston Alexander (205 ½) vs. Razak Al-Hassan (204)
135 lbs. – Jens Pulver (136) vs. Coty “Ox” Wheeler (137)
185 lbs. – Jamie Yager (185 ½) vs. “Slick” Willie Parks (187)
155 lbs. – Junie Browning (162 ¼) vs. Jacob Clark (158)
Heavy – Tyler East (240 ½) vs. Prince Mclean (220)
105 lbs. – Angelica Chavez (106 ¼) vs. Diana Rael (105 ¼)
Yes, Jens Pulver is still at it. Twelve years and 40 fights after his debut at the Bas Rutten Invitational 2, the former UFC lightweight champ is still getting in the cage, still trying to find some peace amid the chaos.
The question many people ask …
Yes, Jens Pulver is still at it. Twelve years and 40 fights after his debut at the Bas Rutten Invitational 2, the former UFC lightweight champ is still getting in the cage, still trying to find some peace amid the chaos.
The question many people ask the 36-year-old Pulver — and the question he’s been struggling with himself lately — is, why?
“It kind of dawned me a couple days ago,” he said Wednesday on a media conference call. “I thought I was doing it because it was fun, I love it, and that’s still part of it, but the reality is, I’m doing it now and giving it 100 percent the way I am…[because] when I walk away, I don’t want to walk away with any regrets. I don’t want to be 65, God willing, sitting in a chair on a deck in a rocking chair and wishing I would have gone out differently.”
In other words, he’s doing it so he can quit, but have it not feel so much quitting. He’s doing it so that he can feel good about how he’s doing, which in turn might allow him to feel good about stopping.
The only problem is, as long as a fighter feels good about how he’s doing, he isn’t likely to stop. He’ll probably just keep going, especially as long as he could use the money, which Pulver certainly could.
It makes you wonder what this happy ending for Pulver would look like at this point, and how he’d even know if he found it.
Things recently seemed like they were on the verge of turning around for him. After being dropped from the WEC following five straight losses and then adding a sixth on the small circuit, he won two in a row.
Sure, they weren’t big names or on big fight cards, but he got his hand raised again for the first time since 2007. Then he went to Kansas City for a fight in May and he lost again, this time via first round submission.
So much for that happy ending.
Now Pulver is back to take on former WEC bantamweight Coty Wheeler on a thirty-dollar pay-per-view card that’s littered with names fans used to know, but probably haven’t thought about all that much lately.
“Ironically, I spend more time remembering,” Pulver said. “…I watch interviews of mine from way back, especially when I had more confidence. I’m sitting there going, man, I remember that guy.”
The difference, Pulver said, is that now he doesn’t take several months off between fights, which means he doesn’t have to spend the bulk of his training camp “getting the fat off.” Physically, he’s not worn down, he said, and mentally, he’s no longer so burned out.
“I go with these guys that are my weight, and I’m right there with them. The problem is just trying to turn it on in the cage. I’ve become what I almost despised most or what I put down the most when I was a world champion, which was the gym fighter.”
In training, he said, he’s taking it to his younger, faster sparring partners. The broke-down old man looks pretty good then.
“It’s when the lights come on and the face in front of me is different” that he loses some of that pop, Pulver said.
“The mental side is what’s gotten the oldest. The physical skills are still there. I’ve got no injuries. …The mental side of me kind of got old, got tired, and that’s what I’m trying to fix more than anything. I don’t know how to adjust to that, because it’s new to me.”
Maybe it would be easier to deal with if it were a physical decline. Maybe then he could write it off as a natural and unavoidable consequence of age. The fact that he remains convinced that his problems are more mental than physical probably isn’t helping him find the strength to walk away.
As he put it: “I’m using this time to prepare myself to walk out the door of MMA, and when I do, I don’t want to have any regrets. Basically, my major reason why I’m fighting right now is I’m out there to send myself off the right way.”
Of course, that assumes that there is a right way, or that there’s any peace at all to be found in the last throes of a fighter’s career. It also assumes that you find that peace first, before you decide to leave, rather than after, when you don’t have any other choice.
Our host, Steve Cofield has a little fun cozying up to George Roop in his hotel bed and talks a do or die performance against Josh Grispi this weekend at the TUF 13 Finale as.
Our host, Steve Cofield has a little fun cozying up to George Roop in his hotel bed and talks a do or die performance against Josh Grispi this weekend at the TUF 13 Finale as his future in the UFC may depend on a win. Showing his lighter side, Roop tells shows us that the only chicks you can pick up in Vegas with a neck beard are the kind you gotta pay for. Watch the exclusive video below:
The former Ultimate Fighter bad boy Junie Browning isn’t a bad boy anymore — he’s just a bad fighter.
If you’re a fight fan looking for a way to burn through some spare cash in August, you’ve got options. Between 
Yes,