(All of these fighters have been ordered to wear sumo suits over the holidays.)
Well, it’s looking like UFC 142 may give a few of Zuffa’s most injury-plagued cards a run for their money.
According to various reports, the current body count stands at four as as many fighters have pulled out of the event for various reasons.
As a result the UFC is now scrambling to find replacements for Paulo Thiago (injury), Rob Broughton (injury), Siyar Bahadurzada (injury) and Stanislav Nedkov (visa issue) to face their respective former opponents Mike Pyle, Edinaldo Oliveira, Erick Silva and Fabio Maldonado.
Tatame first reported the news today of Thiago’s elbow injury, while the UFC tweeted that Broughton, Nedkov and and Bahadurzada were all off the card due to unnamed afflictions. Conflicting reports have since surfaced stating that Nedkov had issues securing a work visa for the January 14 show in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
If replacements can’t be found, one or maybe two of the bouts in question could be salvaged, but with six scratches, the card would take the final slot in the five most cursed cards in UFC history.
Check out the top four after the jump.
(All of these fighters have been ordered to wear sumo suits over the holidays.)
Well, it’s looking like UFC 142 may give a few of Zuffa’s most injury-plagued cards a run for their money.
According to various reports, the current body count stands at four as as many fighters have pulled out of the event for various reasons.
As a result the UFC is now scrambling to find replacements for Paulo Thiago (injury), Rob Broughton (injury), Siyar Bahadurzada (injury) and Stanislav Nedkov (visa issue) to face their respective former opponents Mike Pyle, Edinaldo Oliveira, Erick Silva and Fabio Maldonado.
Tatame first reported the news today of Thiago’s elbow injury, while the UFC tweeted that Broughton, Nedkov and and Bahadurzada were all off the card due to unnamed afflictions. Conflicting reports have since surfaced stating that Nedkov had issues securing a work visa for the January 14 show in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
If replacements can’t be found, one or maybe two of the bouts in question could be salvaged, but with six scratches, the card would take the final slot in the five most cursed cards in UFC history.
Check out the top four after the jump.
UFC 108 scratches (11): Anderson Silva (injury), Brock Lesnar (diverticulitis), Shane Carwin (knee surgery), Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (staph infection), Gabriel Gonzaga (injury), Carlos Condit (injury), Tyson Griffin (injury), Sean Sherk (injury), Rory Markham (injury), Steve Cantwell (injury) and Vladimir Matyushenko (healthy scratch).
UFC 133 scratches (10): Jon Jones (injury), Phil Davis (injury), Michael McDonald (healthy scratch), Nick Pace (injury), Jose Aldo (injury), Riki Fukuda (injury), Vladimir Matyushenko (injury), Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (injury), Rich Franklin (healthy scratch) and Alessio Sakara (injury).
UFC 85 scratches (9): Mauricio Rua (injury), Chuck Liddell (injury), James Irvin (injury), Rashad Evans (healthy scratch), Jonathan Goulet (lack of training time), Paul Kelly (injury), Chris Leben (lack of training time due to jail), Ryo Chonan (injury) and Neil Wain (injury).
UFC 98 scratches (7): Frank Mir (injury), Quinton Jackson (injury), Josh Koscheck (injury), Chris Wilson (lack of medicals), James Irvin (injury), Yushin Okami (injury) and Houston Alexander (injury).
UFC on Versus 3 scratches (7): Mark Scanlon (injury), Matt Riddle (injury), Maiquel Falcao (injury), Rafael Natal (injury), Alexandre Ferreira (death in family and lack of training partners), Francisco Rivera (injury) and Cub Swanson (injury).
It has recently been reported that a welterweight contest between Paulo Thiago and Mike Pyle has been added to the rapidly awesomingUFC 142 card, which goes down January 14th in Rio. Thiago, a Brazilian superhero of sorts, last competed in the UFC’s return to Brazil at UFC 134, notching a unanimous decision victory over David Mitchell. It was Thiago’s first win in his past three contests, so a win over Pyle is likely necessary if he wants to keep his job that doesn’t involve Brazilian gangs, which, according to this one documentary I saw, are fucking terrifying. Pyle, on the other hand, just saw a three fight win streak (one that included an upset win over British prospect John Hathaway) snapped at the hands of Canadian wrecking machine Rory MacDonald.
It has recently been reported that a welterweight contest between Paulo Thiago and Mike Pyle has been added to the rapidly awesomingUFC 142 card, which goes down January 14th in Rio. Thiago, a Brazilian superhero of sorts, last competed in the UFC’s return to Brazil at UFC 134, notching a unanimous decision victory over David Mitchell. It was Thiago’s first win in his past three contests, so a win over Pyle is likely necessary if he wants to keep his job that doesn’t involve Brazilian gangs, which, according to this one documentary I saw, are fucking terrifying. Pyle, on the other hand, just saw a three fight win streak (one that included an upset win over British prospect John Hathaway) snapped at the hands of Canadian wrecking machine Rory MacDonald.
Coming off a close decision loss to bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz at UFC on Versus 6, Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson will be looking to get back in the win column against the first ever WEC bantamweight champion, Eddie Wineland. Wineland is in a similar position as Thiago, having dropped two straight unanimous decisions to Team Alpha members Urijah Faber and Joseph Benavidez at UFC 128 and UFC Live: Lytle vs. Hardy, respectively, and will be a huge underdog coming into this bout.
UFC on FOX 2 is set to transpire January 28, 2012 at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.
Filed under: UFCJohn Gunderson remembers very clearly the first time he met Shawn Tompkins. He was fighting at an IFL event in 2007 and Tompkins was sitting ringside. Though he was then a coach for the IFL’s Los Angeles-based team, Tompkins wasn’t corn…
John Gunderson remembers very clearly the first time he met Shawn Tompkins. He was fighting at an IFL event in 2007 and Tompkins was sitting ringside. Though he was then a coach for the IFL’s Los Angeles-based team, Tompkins wasn’t cornering anyone that night, Gunderson recalled. He was only a spectator, at least in theory.
That didn’t last long.
“He ended up kind of coaching me along all during the fight,” Gunderson said. “Afterward he came up to me in the back and told me he’d like to work with me. That kind of stuck in my mind for about six months, and that’s when I decided to move to Las Vegas. I moved out to Las Vegas specifically to train with him.”
Talk to enough fighters in the Las Vegas MMA scene and you’ll hear similar stories over and over again. Tompkins was the guy who saw something in them. He was the one who gave them a place to train, a place to sleep, a surrogate home on holidays spent far from their families.
After attending an MMA event on Saturday night in Ontario, Canada, according to reports, Tompkins went to bed and never woke up. He died of an apparent heart attack, according to brother-in-law Sam Stout. He was 37 years old.
By the time the news got back to Las Vegas, where Tompkins and wife Emilie had lived for the past several years, the shock washed over everyone who knew him.
“You don’t want to believe it at first,” said Gunderson. “I just talked to him the other day. When you’re close with someone and you’ve just talked to them, you don’t want to believe that they’re just gone. You don’t know how to believe it. It’s so surreal.”
Tompkins rose to prominence as an MMA trainer when he worked as an assistant coach for the IFL’s Los Angeles Anacondas. Initially, the team was fronted by MMA legend Bas Rutten, who brought Tompkins on to help with striking training. But as Rutten moved into a full-time color commentary role for the IFL, he chose Tompkins to succeed him as head coach.
In the IFL days, Rutten used to tell the story of how he met Tompkins years earlier at a seminar. At first Tompkins struck him as just another “party boy,” Rutten said, but when he traveled to Los Angeles to train with Rutten and was willing to sleep on the mats in the gym just for a chance to learn from one of the greats, Rutten began to realize that maybe his first impression was misguided.
Rutten wrote on his Twitter on Sunday that Tompkins had texted him just a day earlier “telling me he loved me, so, thank God, I called him to tell him it was mutual.”
Benji Radach, who fought for Tompkins when he took over the IFL squad from Rutten, remembered him as a coach who was passionate about the sport, but also fun to be around outside the gym.
“He was a lot like Bas, actually,” Radach said. “He liked to screw around and have fun, but when it came time to get down to business he was serious and all about hardcore training. It was some of the hardest practices you could be in. … He loved the sport. The thing about Shawn, he could goof off, be a fun dude, but he loved the sport and he made it his life.”
UFC welterweight Mike Pyle, who worked with Tompkins when he was a coach at the Xtreme Couture gym in Las Vegas, said it was Tompkins’ sense of humor he’d remember most.
“He was a funny guy, man. He could really make you laugh.”
At the same time, Pyle said, he was committed to his fighters — especially the core three who he brought up through the ranks.
“He was so dedicated to the sport, dedicated to his guys, and he brought up some studs from young ages with Chris Horodecki, Sam Stout, and [Mark] Hominick. He developed some great fighters in those three.”
It was Horodecki, Stout, and Hominick who were always the most closely associated with Tompkins, regardless of what gym he was working out of at any given time. Tompkins was married to Stout’s sister, and had brought Horodecki along since he was a teenager who had to lie about his age to enter kickboxing tournaments.
Though all three have dealt sparingly with the media since news of their mentor’s death, they’re the core contingent that’s been hit hardest by the news, said Gunderson.
“I was close with him, but not like those guys,” Gunderson said. “They were like his little brothers.”
But given the way fighters in the Vegas scene typically hop from one gym to the next to get all their training needs met, Xtreme Couture coach Joey Varner said there is hardly a pro fighter in all of Sin City who hadn’t benefited from Tompkins’ expertise at one point or another.
“I mean, literally. Every single guy at [Xtreme] Couture’s — from Randy [Couture] to Vitor [Belfort] to Ray Sefo to Gray Maynard to Jay [Hieron] — guys at the other gyms in town, every single person here has worked with him or had some relationship with him.”
The fact that Tompkins touched so many lives is why the loss is so devastating to the entire Las Vegas fight community, said Varner, who was instrumental in bringing Tompkins to Couture’s gym in the first place.
“It’s really just one of those holy s–t moments in life. You expect to see someone around, and they become this fixture, part of the scene, part of life, and then suddenly you remove that piece and it’s just this big huge void that everyone can’t help but stare at.”
For the fighters who worked with him, like Gunderson, the techniques and skills he imparted seem secondary now, almost like a byproduct of being around him. What they remember more is his generosity of spirit, like the time he traveled with Gunderson for a fight in Abu Dhabi, and raised no objection about sleeping on the floor of the hotel room all week.
“He was just very giving like that. Or you’d go into the gym and he’d be holding mitts for guys, four or five rounds a guy and there’d be five or six guys lined up. They weren’t paying him to do it, either. He did it because he loved it and wanted to see them become better fighters. That was Shawn. If you needed a sparring partner, he’d strap up and spar with you. That’s just how he was. He could get four hours of sleep, but he’d still be there in the morning working with guys.”
Sure, he had his run-ins and his falling outs, Gunderson said, but who doesn’t in this business? He was no saint, and didn’t claim to be. One thing people knew and could count on was that Tompkins was a coach who dedicated his life to his fighters. Whether they needed someone to help them perfect their left hook or they needed a couch to sleep on, Tompkins gave them everything he had.
And now, at just 37 years old, he’s gone.
“Words can’t even describe how terrible it is,” said Gunderson. “You never expect something like this. That’s life though, right? It comes and goes so fast.”
Since he’s on his way to Wisconsin for the lead-up media appearances for Sunday night’s UFC Live on Versus 5: Hardy vs. Lytle event, Dana White’s first video blog for the show is more of a recap of UFC 133, which is just as well.
It’s interesting to see Dana’s non reaction to Vitor Belfort’s win over Yoshihiro Akiyama. He can clearly be heard telling Lorenzo Fertitta that the finishing blows by “The Phenom” were to the back of “Sexyama’s” head. Neither UFC executive showed little emotion when Belfort came over to their side of the Octagon to let them know he’s back and White later said in an interview that the former UFC light heavyweight champion would have to chew on his loss to Anderson Silva for a while before he gets another title shot.
(Video courtesy of YouTube/UFC)
Since he’s on his way to Wisconsin for the lead-up media appearances for Sunday night’s UFC Live on Versus 5: Hardy vs. Lytle event, Dana White’s first video blog for the show is more of a recap of UFC 133, which is just as well.
It’s interesting to see Dana’s non reaction to Vitor Belfort’s win over Yoshihiro Akiyama. He can clearly be heard telling Lorenzo Fertitta that the finishing blows by “The Phenom” were to the back of “Sexyama’s” head. Neither UFC executive showed little emotion when Belfort came over to their side of the Octagon to let them know he’s back and White later said in an interview that the former UFC light heavyweight champion would have to chew on his loss to Anderson Silva for a while before he gets another title shot.
Another pair of interesting moments came when Rory MacDonald finished Mike Pyle and White was too busy texting or on tweeting to notice, and when Dennis Hallman came out in his grape smugglers and a disgusted Dana said that the shorts should be illegal.
Dana seemed genuinely freaked out when Rashad emerged from the dressing room wearing a splint following his win over Tito Ortiz, but according to Evans, it’s just a dislocation.
Any time you watch a 47-year-old man get kicked in the face by a levitating karate master – man, if we only had a nickel for every time that happens, right? – you have to wonder how the elder statesman is going to bounce back from it. In the case of Randy Couture, he appears to be recovering nicely. Aside from a small bruise under his eye, the newly retired “Natural” seems in great spirits when he meets up with MMA30’s Dave Fara at a gala event for the Xtreme Couture GI Foundation, which seeks to raise money for wounded vets. Couture also looks fully in control of his faculties, as evidenced when he correctly uses the word “assimilate” in casual conversation.
The teeth however, were more of a problem. In the above vid, listen to Couture discuss the five-plus hours he spent at the dentist getting his pearly-white Hollywood-level choppers realigned. All that, and he even has to go back for more. Nonetheless, The Old Man is taking it in stride, relating to Fara that Lyoto Machdia put in a personal phone call to him a couple of days after the fight to make sure he was OK. Couture laughs off the Steven Seagal angle, keeps right on using the word “cat” as much as possible (which is only slightly less annoying than when guys in MMA insist on calling everyone “kid”) and even comments on rumors he personally took out Osama bin Laden. “It was a long plane ride,” says Couture. So you know, (if you’ll excuse the phrase) business as usual. Now if we could just do something about the epaulets on his dress blazer …
The rest of Couture’s quotes are after the jump, followed by a bevy of other Las Vegas-based fighters making appearances to pay homage to the 14-year vet. And damn, check out the jacket on Ray Sefo at 4:15. Looking good.
Any time you watch a 47-year-old man get kicked in the face by a levitating karate master – man, if we only had a nickel for every time that happens, right? – you have to wonder how the elder statesman is going to bounce back from it. In the case of Randy Couture, he appears to be recovering nicely. Aside from a small bruise under his eye, the newly retired “Natural” seems in great spirits when he meets up with MMA30’s Dave Fara at a gala event for the Xtreme Couture GI Foundation, which seeks to raise money for wounded vets. Couture also looks fully in control of his faculties, as evidenced when he correctly uses the word “assimilate” in casual conversation.
The teeth however, were more of a problem. In the above vid, listen to Couture discuss the five-plus hours he spent at the dentist getting his pearly-white Hollywood-level choppers realigned. All that, and he even has to go back for more. Nonetheless, The Old Man is taking it in stride, relating to Fara that Lyoto Machdia put in a personal phone call to him a couple of days after the fight to make sure he was OK. Couture laughs off the Steven Seagal angle, keeps right on using the word “cat” as much as possible (which is only slightly less annoying than when guys in MMA insist on calling everyone “kid”) and even comments on rumors he personally took out Osama bin Laden. “It was a long plane ride,” says Couture. So you know, (if you’ll excuse the phrase) business as usual. Now if we could just do something about the epaulets on his dress blazer …
The rest of Couture’s quotes are after the jump, followed by a bevy of other Las Vegas-based fighters making appearances to pay homage to the 14-year vet. And damn, check out the jacket on Ray Sefo at 4:15. Looking good.
“I had a rough day yesterday,” Couture says. “Got the teeth fixed yesterday. Five and a half hours in the dental chair. My lip is still a little swollen (and) I still feel like I’m talking a little funny, but (it’s) temporarily fixed now. The real bridge comes in a week and we’ll be back up and running.”
When asked by Fara what it was like to be feted by 55,000 strong at Rogers Centre during his final fight, Couture admits it was hard to wrap his mind around the whole thing. Especially that last part. The part with the flying crane kick.
“It was a little surreal,” he says. “It almost doesn’t sink in when it’s happening, you have to kind of sit back and reflect on it later. It was an amazing experience. Lyoto was a terrific competitor, obviously he’s a tremendous athlete. He’s everything he was billed to be, he’s elusive (and) he’s hard to get a handle on. That kick, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone set up that kick in competition. It’s been kind of the year for those strange kicks.”
Stick around for the full nine minutes and you’ll also get to hear from Ryan Couture, Sefo, Tyson Griffin, Frank Mir, Jay Glazer and some dude who looks like he just wandered off the set of “21 Jump Street” who claims to be Mike Pyle.
Filed under: UFCIt wasn’t any one thing that let Ricardo Almeida know it was time for him to retire. As the former UFC fighter told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour, his recent losses carried a certain sting, as always, but those alone…
It wasn’t any one thing that let Ricardo Almeida know it was time for him to retire. As the former UFC fighter told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour, his recent losses carried a certain sting, as always, but those alone probably couldn’t have driven him out of the sport.
“A big decision like that, it’s usually supported by many little things,” Almeida told Helwani. “It’s like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
The 34-year-old Almeida was running his own gym, training himself and others for UFC bouts, and trying to spend as much time as possible with his family, he said, and eventually he came to the conclusion that something had to give. After he lost a unanimous decision to Mike Pyle at UFC 128 in March, he began to feel like his MMA career might be that something.
It wasn’t any one thing that let