Nate Marquardt will make his BAMMA debut on Dec. 10, the organization announced on Wednesday.
The former UFC middleweight contender, who signed a multi-fight contract with the UK-based organization in July, will compete at BAMMA 8, which will be held at the Capital FM Arena in Nottingham, England. No opponent has been signed for his debut.
This will mark Marquardt’s first fight since his release from the UFC in June after the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission ruled that his testosterone levels were too high to compete against Rick Story at UFC Live on Versus 4.
BAMMA 7 takes place this Saturday night in Birmingham, England, and chances are high that if Paul Daley beats Jordan Radev, “Semtex” will be the one to welcome Marquardt to BAMMA.
“I don’t think it’s any secret that Paul Daley is one of the bigger names here in the UK,” Marquardt’s manager Lex McMahon told MMAFighting.com on Thursday. “If he wins Saturday, that is a fight we would be interested in.”
Speaking of BAMMA 7, the organization announced on Thursday that the card will air live outside the UK and Canada on Facebook. UK fans can watch the main card live on Syfy and Canadian fans can watch it live on The Fight Network. The event will be headlined by Frank Trigg vs. “Judo” Jim Wallhead.
Filed under: UFCWhen Trevor Wittman heard the news, all he wanted was to disappear. For years he’s worked with Nate Marquardt, honing his striking in Denver’s Grudge Training Center, and he went to Pittsburgh with his fighter last week expecting to com…
When Trevor Wittman heard the news, all he wanted was to disappear. For years he’s worked with Nate Marquardt, honing his striking in Denver’s Grudge Training Center, and he went to Pittsburgh with his fighter last week expecting to come home a winner in yet another big UFC fight.
Then on the day of the weigh-ins he found out that Marquardt had been pulled from the fight and fired from the UFC for the elevated testosterone levels that were a result of his hormone replacement therapy, and suddenly Wittman felt like he could barely stand to show his face around colleagues and competitors he’s known for years.
“When it hit — and I know Nate feels the same way — but I can’t tell you the feeling I had at the weigh-ins when this was happening,” Wittman said. “I really felt like I wanted to go and put a hood over my head and walk out of there. There were spots where I was pushing myself to go back in the room and not answer calls from the press. I had to hide in the bushes, basically, all out of respect for Nate.”
To Wittman, the issue of testosterone replacement isn’t as complex as it is to some others. He sees it in terms of right and wrong, black and white. Either everyone should be allowed to see a doctor sanctioned by the UFC and the athletic commissions to address these issues, he said, or no one should be allowed to do it at all.
But using testosterone injections to artificially raise hormone levels from whatever point they’re at in a person’s body? That, Wittman said, is something he can’t support even when the levels are dropping naturally and legitimately.
“To me, if your testosterone levels are getting lower over the years, that’s normal. You’re getting older. As you get older in this sport, it’s common sense you’re not going to have the same testosterone levels as a 21-year-old man. But the big disadvantage a 21-year-old has when he comes into this is the knowledge and experience.
“If you have a 21-year-old come into this with those naturally high testosterone levels, and then you’ve got an older fighter — I’ll just pick an age, say, 35 — who has lower testosterone levels, the advantages of the older man are knowledge, experience. He’s seen it in all different aspects. He’s a veteran. To me, that’s a huge disadvantage for the younger man. Yeah, he’s going to be able to go, go, go. But that’s his advantage. Let him have it. And let’s outwork him. Let’s beat him with our experience. But if we make a 35 or 40-year-old fighter as strong as a 21-year-old, to me, that’s cutting corners.”
In the case of Marquardt, Wittman knew his fighter was undergoing testosterone treatments. He didn’t agree with it, he said, but he also didn’t feel like it was his place to tell a veteran fighter how to conduct his career.
What’s more, even though he felt like the testosterone use shouldn’t have been allowed, technically — at least if Marquardt could provide proof of his need for it and get his levels down to within a range acceptable by the commissions before each fight — it was. Marquardt was attempting to follow the rules laid out by the commissions, Wittman said. That’s why, in Marquardt’s mind, it wasn’t cheating at all.
“Nate Marquardt is a guy who’s never been untruthful with me. Everything that he tells me, and everything he told me going into this fight and back before New Jersey, it’s something that he truly believes in. He went and had his testosterone checked. And when I spoke to him about it, I could tell he really believes he’d done the right thing, because the doctors are telling him, ‘Your levels are low. You need this. This is why you’re tired. We’ll give you this and you’ll perform like you’re young again.’ Man, you start telling a guy that, he’s going to believe you.
“His honesty from the beginning — doing these tests, asking for permission to do this — that’s what hurt him. His honesty got him put in this situation. It’s so hard to watch one of the most honest guys I’ve ever trained — the biggest family man, the guy who signs every autograph — get scolded and cut and lose his career and get this brand on him, all because he felt like he was doing the right thing.”
Now Wittman’s fear is that the “brand” is not just on Marquardt, but also on his gym. He’s never advocated use of hormone replacement therapy, he said, but by not doing more to dissuade his fighters from it, he can’t help but wonder if he’s not complicit in it.
“I didn’t get into it. I kind of put my earplugs in,” Wittman said. “I look at it as white and black, like you’re still doing an enhancing kind of thing. But if the doctor okays it, does that make it right? I don’t know. That’s something I can’t explain, but I’ll tell you what I’m doing now, and that’s sit down with every fighter I deal with and find out if they’re seeing a doctor and for what reason. If it’s anything that has to do with enhancing, then I’m going to step away.”
Maybe the worst part, according to Wittman, is that as far as he can tell, the hormones and injections don’t make that much of a difference on fight night. He thinks it’s more of a mental aid than a physical one, he said, and when he sees fighters trying to become experts at it, he can’t help but think back to boxer Verno Phillips, who used to drop weight by eating two mangoes a day.
At the end of the day, Wittman said, you still have to fight the fight, and a few nanograms per deciliter of testosterone rarely has the final say on the outcome.
“I don’t care what you put in your system. I don’t care who you hire to do your nutrition. It comes down to, you got two men in the ring. You might break your hand in there. Well, you’ve got to overcome the broken hand. You might have a bad weight cut and you still have to get the last five pounds off, even if it’s unhealthy. I don’t care. Those are excuses that go out the window the moment the close the cage door. You might have the flu a week and a half before. Fine. This is the fight game. This is what you deal with. You deal with injuries. You deal with illness. You deal with getting older. That’s the game.”
Filed under: UFCIf you have to do a live interview where you answer questions about the testosterone injections that cost you your job — and, ideally, you’d probably rather avoid that situation altogether if possible — the way Nate Marquardt did it i…
If you have to do a live interview where you answer questions about the testosterone injections that cost you your job — and, ideally, you’d probably rather avoid that situation altogether if possible — the way Nate Marquardt did it is probably the best way.
In his interview with Ariel Helwani on Tuesday’s edition of The MMA Hour, Marquardt was open and direct about his hormone replacement therapy (HRT, if you’re down with the lingo). He explained what he did, when he did it, and why. He appeared emotional, vulnerable, and — as far as we could tell — honest.
Even the people who wanted to string him up the moment they heard UFC president Dana White say he was “disgusted” with Marquardt must have at least considered putting down the torches and pitchforks when they heard his side of it.
But even with all the questions Marquardt answered in the hour-long interview, the one that still bugs me is the one we may never be able to pin down: does any of this make Marquardt a cheater, or does it simply make him unlucky?
At least in the eyes of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, receiving testosterone injections is not, in and of itself, cheating. If you can prove (to the satisfaction of the commission) that you need it, and if you can make sure your hormone levels fall within a pre-determined range by the day before the fight, it’s really no problem at all.
In fact, if Marquardt had managed to hit that range — and by all accounts, he just missed it — the fight would have gone on, he’d still have a job, and none of us would have ever known that he was getting a little hormonal help on the side.
If that’s the case, then the difference between illegally using performance-enhancing drugs and competing entirely on the up-and-up is a matter of degrees. It’s a difference of a few nanograms per deciliter. It’s less about what you’re doing, and more about how much of it you’re doing.
Marquardt knew those were the rules when he decided to play this particular game, and now he’s suffering the consequences of failing to abide by them. But maybe what we should really be asking is if these rules are all that fair to begin with.
There’s a reason you can’t compete with too much testosterone in your system. It’s a performance-enhancing drug. It’s one that the body produces naturally, but it’s also a powerful substance than can change your whole personality in the right (or, depending on the personality you started with, wrong) doses.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons Marquardt said he needed it. He was tired and grumpy all the time, to the point where his wife didn’t want to be around him, he said. So he went to the doctor, got a prescription for testosterone, and presto chango, he’s a changed man. No more fatigue. No more irritability. Just full speed ahead.
That, by definition, makes it a performance-enhancer. But it doesn’t make it cheating, apparently. Not unless you do just a tad too much of it, and then it’s scorched earth for you, my friend. Then you’re pulled from the main event, fired from your job, and verbally blasted on national TV by your boss, who will claim to be “disgusted” by you for engaging in a practice that he was totally fine with just a few months ago, and would have been totally fine with again if only your hormone levels had dropped just a wee bit faster.
Am I the only who feels like this makes absolutely no sense?
The problem with hormone replacement therapy for pro fighters is that athletic commissions haven’t really made up their minds about it yet. That much was clear when Chael Sonnen went before the California State Athletic Commission to make his case for an after-the-fact therapeutic-use exemption for testosterone.
The commission agreed that firmer, more coherent policies on HRT were absolutely necessary, then it took no clear action to make any of that happen. Instead, it decided that Sonnen had failed to give proper notice to the right people at the right times. It nailed him on a paperwork issue, more or less. As for whether he should have been mainlining testosterone to begin with? That one they weren’t about to touch.
The fact that Sonnen was still being offered an Ultimate Fighter coaching job after that incident while Marquardt and his camp got to find out via Twitter that he’d been fired from the UFC altogether, that tells us where the UFC’s concern really lies in this discussion.
If you get in trouble after an event — that is, after the UFC has already made its money off you — then your hormones are your problem. The fines, the suspensions, that’s between you and the athletic commission once the fight’s over.
But if those same exact hormones get you pulled from a main event the day before it’s supposed to go down — that is, after the UFC has done the work of promoting the fight but before it has reaped the lion’s share of the profits — then brother, look out. Then it won’t matter that you told the UFC about it months beforehand, or that you tried to go about it in the most transparent possible way.
If that’s how the UFC wants to play it, that’s the UFC’s choice. Whenever the issue of drug testing comes up, it can — and usually will — step back and let the commissions take the flack. It will also make its hiring and firing decisions based on financial considerations first, and everything else a distant second.
But while the UFC’s main concern is profit, the commissions are supposed to be the ones ensuring fairness. Right now the commissions seem to think that letting one fighter artificially raise his natural testosterone levels is fair — as long as he gets a doctor’s note first, and as long as he keeps those levels below at a certain point.
Whether that’s a version of fair play we agree with, or one we truly want to hold our athletes to, that’s something this sport has yet to decide.
Filed under: UFC, MMA Fighting Exclusive, NewsNate Marquardt remains on suspension from the state of Pennsylvania after failing to receive medical clearance prior to the weekend’s UFC on Versus event. In the aftermath of the shocking development, which…
Nate Marquardt remains on suspension from the state of Pennsylvania after failing to receive medical clearance prior to the weekend’s UFC on Versus event. In the aftermath of the shocking development, which included Marquardt’s firing from the promotion, many questions have arisen.
Which part of the medical review did Marquardt fail to clear? How did six weeks go by without a resolution? And how did Pennsylvania suspend Marquardt when it appeared he’d never been licensed in the first place?
While most of the situation is still shrouded in mystery, at least one of those questions can be answered.
Gregory Sirb, the executive director of the state’s athletic commission told MMA Fighting on Monday that Marquardt had indeed been granted a license to fight, pending medical clearance.
“He was licensed. He completed all his paperwork for licensing probably a week before,” Sirb said.
But Sirb said that regardless of whether or not the license had been granted, Marquardt would have faced the same possible outcome for failing to clear his medical issue.
“He knew full well what the ramifications were, whether licensed or not,” Sirb said. Sirb told reporters on Sunday that Marquardt had six weeks to resolve an outstanding issue, but would not divulge what it was. Neither would UFC president Dana White. Sirb has also said that Marquardt will be taken off suspension once he clears the issue.
According to the commission’s website, while in the course of applying for a license, a professional fighter must provide a negative HIV, Hepatits C and Hepatitis B surface antigen exam. They must also provide the results of an annual medical exam. That exam is wide-ranging and covers potential issues related to vision, lungs, heart rate, the nervous system, coordination and more that could disqualify a fighter from competition. In addition, there is language in the regulations that offers the commission the latitude to request other exams. The stated medical requirements are similar to those of other states, including fight hubs Nevada and New Jersey.
All of the aforementioned test results are considered the fighter’s private medical information and kept confidential under federal HIPAA laws. Federal or Pennsylvania state law does not, however, prohibit disclosure of a positive drug test result, nor the type of drug which led to a confirmed positive test.
Sirb confirmed that if Marquardt had failed a drug test, the commission would have released those findings.
“I’ve been here 22 years and we do not embarrass anybody,” he said. “But we would have said, ‘drug test.'”
To date, Marquardt and his team have said little regarding the situation. On Saturday, his team released a statement to MMA Fighting which read, “I was looking forward to my welterweight debut. I’m sorry I let everyone down.” On Sunday, he tweeted, “I’m sorry to all my fans and the UFC for not passing the medicals for tonight’s fight. I’m heart broken I couldn’t fight, but I will b (sic) back.”
Marquardt is expected to make his first extended statements about the matter on Tuesday’s edition of The MMA Hour, which airs at 1 pm on MMAFighting.com.
Filed under: UFC, NewsThe reason that Nate Marquardt failed to pass his required medical examinations remains murky, but one thing is clear: UFC President Dana White is not happy about it.
White said on the UFC Live pre-fight show on Versus that he’s …
The reason that Nate Marquardt failed to pass his required medical examinations remains murky, but one thing is clear: UFC President Dana White is not happy about it.
White said on the UFC Live pre-fight show on Versus that he’s angry at Marquardt for failing to adequately address the issues that the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission told him to address, and that Marquardt should come clean with UFC fans about what, exactly, those issues are.
Both White and a Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission official said they were legally prohibited from offering details about Marquardt’s pre-fight medicals.
White said that the Pennsylvania commission is “the best commission in the United States,” and that its privacy rules are strict, meaning Marquardt’s medical issues won’t be revealed unless Marquardt himself reveals them.
“Nate Marquardt’s gonna have to man up and come out and tell the world why he didn’t pass his medicals,” White said. “When he does that I think everybody is going to understand why he was cut from the UFC.”
White said he believes in second chances, but he doesn’t expect to give Marquardt another chance.
“I think it’s pretty clear to the fans and everybody else that I’m pretty disgusted with Nate Marquardt. He’s been cut from the UFC, he won’t fight in the UFC ever again,” White said. “Bottom line is, what Nate Marquardt’s thing is, it’s bad enough to be cut from the UFC.”
MMAFighting.com will have live UFC on Versus 4 results of Cheick Kongo vs. Pat Barry and the rest of the UFC Live card on Sunday, June 26 at the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh.
In the main event, Cheick Kongo returns after an eight-month absence and will face the charismatic kickboxer, Pat Barry.
The results are below.
Versus Bouts
Pat Barry vs. Cheick Kongo (live blog)
Charlie Brenneman vs. Rick Story (live blog)
Matt Brown vs. John Howard (live blog)
Matt Mitrione vs. Christian Morecraft (live blog)
Preliminary Bouts on Facebook
Manny Gamburyan vs. Tyson Griffin (live blog)
Joe Stevenson vs. Javier Vazquez (live blog)
Joe Lauzon def. Curt Warburton via submission (kimura) – R1, 1:58 (live blog) Rich Attonito def. Daniel Roberts via unanimous decision (29-27, 30-27, 29-28) (live blog)
Charles Oliveira def. Nik Lentz via submission (rear-naked choke) – R2, 1:48 (live blog)
*Commission will review the fight for an illegal knee by Oliveira not called by the referee Ricardo Lamas def. Matt Grice via TKO (punches) – R1, 4:41 (live blog) Michael Johnson def. Edward Faaloloto via TKO (punches) – R1, 4:42 (live blog)
MMAFighting.com will have live UFC on Versus 4 results of Cheick Kongo vs. Pat Barry and the rest of the UFC Live card on Sunday, June 26 at the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh.
In the main event, Cheick Kongo returns after an eight-month absence and will face the charismatic kickboxer, Pat Barry.
The results are below.
Versus Bouts
Pat Barry vs. Cheick Kongo (live blog)
Charlie Brenneman vs. Rick Story (live blog)
Matt Brown vs. John Howard (live blog)
Matt Mitrione vs. Christian Morecraft (live blog)
Preliminary Bouts on Facebook
Manny Gamburyan vs. Tyson Griffin (live blog)
Joe Stevenson vs. Javier Vazquez (live blog)
Joe Lauzon def. Curt Warburton via submission (kimura) – R1, 1:58 (live blog) Rich Attonito def. Daniel Roberts via unanimous decision (29-27, 30-27, 29-28) (live blog)
Charles Oliveira def. Nik Lentz via submission (rear-naked choke) – R2, 1:48 (live blog)
*Commission will review the fight for an illegal knee by Oliveira not called by the referee Ricardo Lamas def. Matt Grice via TKO (punches) – R1, 4:41 (live blog) Michael Johnson def. Edward Faaloloto via TKO (punches) – R1, 4:42 (live blog)
Nate Marquardt will make his BAMMA debut on Dec. 10, the organization announced on Wednesday.
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MMAFighting.com will have live