The UFC has recently run into a string of bad luck, losing their next two pay-per-view card’s main events due to injury and illness.First, Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard were both injured while training for their UFC 130 main event. Neither fighter wil…
The UFC has recently run into a string of bad luck, losing their next two pay-per-view card’s main events due to injury and illness.
First, Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard were both injured while training for their UFC 130 main event. Neither fighter will be able to compete on the May 28 card, as Edgar has back issues while Maynard has sustained a knee injury.
Due to the short notice, the new main event of UFC 130 will be Quinton “Rampage” Jackson vs. Matt Hamill.
On Thursday, the promotion revealed that Brock Lesnar would be forced out of his UFC 131 main event battle with Junior dos Santos due to a recurrence of the diverticulitis that forced him out of action for a year, earlier in his career.
The UFC moved fast, replacing Lesnar with Shane Carwin, who was already scheduled to fight on the June 11 card with his original opponent being Jon Olav Einemo.
Jon Jones is another fighter whose loss will be felt by the UFC in 2011. Jones was set to face his former friend and training partner Rashad Evans when a hand injury forced him out of that fight.
At the time Jones withdrew from the fight, there was no official date or location for the Jones versus Evans match up, but they hype for that fight had been building even before Jones defeated “Shogun” Rua for the UFC light heavyweight championship in March.
Phil Davis has been booked in Jones’ place and he will face Evans at UFC 133, which will take place on Aug. 6.
Bleacher Report takes a look at how the injuries and illness could impact the pay-per-view buys for these upcoming events.
Matt Hamill could be on the brink of becoming a light heavyweight contender. After losing a close split decision to Michael Bisping and a TKO loss to former middleweight champion Rich Franklin, Hamill has won five straight.This includes wins over middl…
Matt Hamill could be on the brink of becoming a light heavyweight contender.
After losing a close split decision to Michael Bisping and a TKO loss to former middleweight champion Rich Franklin, Hamill has won five straight.
This includes wins over middleweight up and comer Mark Munoz, tough fighter Keith Jardine, former UFC light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz, and current champion Jon Jones.
Hamill’s fight with Jones was his to lose until Jones made the mistake of throwing down illegal elbows.No one likes to win or lose by disqualification, but unfortunately it happens.
I’m sure Matt Hamill would love another shot at Jones, but in order to do that he’ll have to take some big name fights.
In comes the opportunity of a lifetime to take on Quinton “Rampage” Jackson at UFC 130.
Rampage is one of the best UFC fighters today.The former champion has KO victories over Chuck Liddell, Wanderlei Silva and a memorable KO slam over Ricardo Arona.
Besides the Jones fight, this will be Hamill’s biggest test.Not only does Hamill risk being knocked out, he’s also taking this fight on short notice.
It will also be the first PPV fight that Hamill headlines, thanks to the original main event getting canceled.
When this fight was first announced, some fans thought Hamill would not stand a chance.Style wise, the fight may favor Rampage. His good boxing and great defense (besides leg kicks), is tough for anybody.
I believe this is a fight Hamill had to take though.
If he wants to make a serious push for a title, he’ll have to take on the top guys in the division.
Although Rampage is still considered one of the top light heavyweights in the world, his career has been on somewhat of a decline.
Despite going 9-2 in his last 11 fights, he has not had a KO victory since 2008. His last fight against Lyoto Machida could have easily gone the other way.
Jackson’s motivation for fighting has also been brought into question time and time again over that span of fights.
Hamill has everything to gain and nothing to lose in this fight.
This is MMA. Any fighter can beat any other one, if it’s their time.
Rampage is tough, but Hamill may prove he wants it more.
The term “expected” is seldom thrown around much in MMA circles unless you ask someone that goes off of name recognition to make their picks, but when it is said that we as a sports community should have seen something coming, the first question relate…
The term “expected” is seldom thrown around much in MMA circles unless you ask someone that goes off of name recognition to make their picks, but when it is said that we as a sports community should have seen something coming, the first question relates to how we should have seen it coming.
Fedor losing two fights in a row, Randy Couture losing a fight against a top-five light heavyweight after defending the sport’s honor, Jose “Scarface” Aldo looking vulnerable, Urijah Faber being booked for a fight against a guy that he genuinely did not like—these are all the things we should have seen coming when they went down, but the fan in all of us prevented us from seeing the events of the past year coming.
Maybe we just wanted those dream fights to happen, but for whatever reason we chose and are sticking by, the fact is we chose to not see those upsets coming.
Maybe it’s me, but we may have to add the brand new UFC 131 headliner—the long-debated Junior dos Santos vs. Shane Carwin bout, still existent as a UFC heavyweight title eliminator until otherwise confirmed—to the list of MMA events in time that we should have expected.
From the moment it was announced that Lesnar and dos Santos were announced as coaches for The Ultimate Fighter 13 and UFC 131 headliners, there’s one question we all had before and during TUF 13 before we found out about Lesnar’s recurring diverticulitis:
Why is there not the same hype for this fight as the Velasquez bout got?
Was one of the men involved not named Brock Lesnar?
Maybe it was because the belt was on the line in the Velasquez fight, but Brock Lesnar is arguably the most polarizing name in the sport right now, so the belt should not have been preventing Dana White from hyping the bejeezus out of this sucker.
We also could have pointed to Junior dos Santos, who only had the hype of being unbeaten in the UFC and being one of the three arguable most technical strikers, pound-for-pound, in the UFC heavyweight division to his credit.
Aside from that and the fact that he’s learning English and able to conduct an interview without subtitles, there’s not much you can do with JDS because he’s so damn nice.
You’ve seen him on the show…you guys know what I’m talking about.
The dude couldn’t be a jerk if it meant saving his career.
Anyway, it seemed like we had all the answers, but then diverticulitis forced itself into a rematch with Lesnar as of yesterday, so Carwin had to step in for the man who took his “0”.
Then during a discussion someone sparked up earlier today, the thought came up about why a Brock Lesnar fight, of all fights, would not be as heavily promoted up to this point, and that’s when I started questioning it myself.
Should we have expected this dream-fight to become a reality from the minute we first heard that Lesnar and Dos Santos would first coach TUF, and then meet up in Vancouver?
I mean, Velasquez and Lesnar didn’t trade too much trash talk either.
The most offensive thing I can think of was Lesnar saying he’d eat a burrito and drink a Corona after beating Velasquez, but he didn’t say too many outlandish words to Velasquez either.
Maybe the fight was never meant to happen, or maybe Dana White just wanted us to have this fight since we’ve been talking about it for so long.
Whatever the reason was, whether we should’ve seen this coming or not, let’s answer one question honestly:
Whether we should’ve seen this one coming or not, can we really say the end result is disappointing?
Au contraire, I don’t think the end result could make me any happier than I am right now.
If you follow mixed martial arts, you know about the entire Jon Jones vs. Rashad Evans beef.You know how they once said in interviews that they would never fight each other, but that started to change once Jones beat Ryan Bader at UFC 126 this past Feb…
If you follow mixed martial arts, you know about the entire Jon Jones vs. Rashad Evans beef.
You know how they once said in interviews that they would never fight each other, but that started to change once Jones beat Ryan Bader at UFC 126 this past February, and now that they’ve both said they’re on board, now they hate each other’s guts.
It’s understandable that you’d want to fight the other guy and settle the beef once and for all, but answer me this:
When is it okay to postpone an injury just to get that fight to happen?
You see, Mr. Jones, there’s a bit of a problem here with you and Malki Kawa going to the doctor and choosing to postpone the injury when given the option rather than taking the surgery.
Where may I begin?
Well, there’s the issue that raises up now that you’ve postponed the surgery—Phil Davis is supposed to face Evans at UFC 133, a fight that was made after you bowed out due to that hand injury you’ve had since before Mauricio “Shogun” Rua.
It would have been fine with me if you had taken the surgery and, much like Shogun when he fought you, ended up losing the belt in your first fight back from healing—although that was really part of why Shogun was out for so long.
I would have been fine with the same tired arguments that “Jones had just come off of a layoff,” because layoffs can be a tricky subject in MMA.
Bowing out of UFC 133 due to an injury and then choosing to not go through with the surgery might open the doors for the match to finally happen, but it’s bad enough that people actually saw Tito Ortiz as a nicer guy than you in the weeks between UFC 126 and UFC 128.
Now, everyone but myself is convinced that there was never an injury—that you basically did duck out of the Evans fight intentionally, even though we’re all pretty convinced that there are no real alternatives for the time being.
Couple that ducking question with the one of your now-deemed-alleged injury, and that also brings up the question of if you lose the fight with the hand being as it is right now without surgery.
You’ve gone for this long without much trouble, but even if postponing the shot meant facing Evans and possibly facing Davis down the line, you denied yourself the chance to get rid of that nagging injury once and for all.
Even if it’s not that serious of an injury now, it will as you continue to train for your first defense, and if it gets bad by the time you have to actually defend the belt, a loss means that you lost due to taking the fight with an injury as well as the manner in which the world saw you lose the fight.
If you have to go through a layoff and you wind up not fighting until December or January at the earliest, at least a loss means that you were beaten by a better fighter and not because of some injury that you didn’t take care of.
At the end of the day, it’s like Alice In Chains said: It’s your decision.
All I’m saying is that you should at least consider getting the surgery done just to be safe.
Rashad Evans or no Rashad Evans, it’s better to keep us waiting until you’re ready to fight at 100 percent rather than give us a forum to make excuses for why you lost and ultimately help us forget that this all happened during the fight.
Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time Rashad’s had to wait his turn.
There is no arguing that Brock Lesnar is the pound-for-pound king when it comes to selling pay-per-views. In the three events he has headlined, not a single one has raked in less than one million buys.On an open media call on Thursday, Brock reassured …
There is no arguing that Brock Lesnar is the pound-for-pound king when it comes to selling pay-per-views. In the three events he has headlined, not a single one has raked in less than one million buys.
On an open media call on Thursday, Brock reassured the members of the media that he will be back once this second battle with diverticulitis is over with.
There are only two guarantees in life—death and taxes.
Although Lesnar has every intention of coming back and once again being a force in the Octagon, nobody can say with 100 percent certainty that he will ever fight again.
If you look at the worst-case scenario, Brock would never step foot in the Octagon again. If that were to be the case, who could step in and become the new golden goose of the UFC? Here are a few options.
Jon Jones
He looked like an absolute beast when he took the light heavyweight title away from Shogun Rua at UFC 128, but his drawing power is still up in the air. UFC 128 only brought in around 450,000 buys.
Should a fight between “Bones” and Rashad Evans ever come to fruition, that would undoubtedly draw huge numbers considering all the trash talk between the two. But after that, it would seem like it would take a little time for Jones to become a superstar in the sport.
His front kick knockout of Vitor Belfort will forever live in infamy. But if you look at past trends, Silva’s biggest draw was at UFC 126, an event that drew an estimated 725,000 buys.
If Silva can look impressive against Yushin Okami at UFC Rio, there is a probability that he could become a huge draw.
Now with those two out of the way, the most likely fighter to become the biggest draw in the UFC would be Georges St-Pierre.
St-Pierre has been a solid second behind Lesnar when it comes to pay-per-view buys. Early estimates put UFC 129 drawing a little over one million buys.
When you take that and combine it with holding the record for the largest gate in UFC history, St-Pierre should be a no-brainer to take over the No. 1 slot.
But as everyone knows, MMA fans are fickle. Given St-Pierre’s last four performances, he may not be the drawing force he once was.
Fans across the globe may have been so impressed with Jones that he may be propelled to that spot.
If Silva makes the move to light heavyweight, that may be intriguing enough to bring more eyes to the events he headlines.
A fortnight on from what was undoubtedly a groundbreaking event for MMA as a sport, I thought it appropriate to revisit and analyse UFC 129 from a slightly different perspective to that which was presented during the euphoria of the imme…
A fortnight on from what was undoubtedly a groundbreaking event for MMA as a sport, I thought it appropriate to revisit and analyse UFC 129 from a slightly different perspective to that which was presented during the euphoria of the immediate aftermath.
1. WOW is all that needs to be said regarding the landmark event itself; if Brock Lesnar was judging the event on his TUF 13 poultry-based scale of chicken salad-chicken sh*t, this was definitely a large bowl of Chicken Caesar salad, consisting of organic free-range chicken, extra croutons and a shed load of dressing.
Dana inadvertently said it best in his vlog when he stated that the Rogers Centre looked “like the Dallas Cowboys stadium on steroids.” Steroids indeed, in the sense that the fans seated at the back of the upper tiers were definitely going home with a nosebleed (though I doubt Dana picked up on the irony of his statement).
Incidentally, how long does everyone think it will be before the UFC surpasses the 70,000 plus attendance record set by PRIDE in Japan?
2. Dana White is a hard man to gratify. In the extensive build-up to Saturday night’s unprecedented festivities, he seemed his customary chirpy self, eagerly anticipating this landmark occasion and busting everyone’s chops in his vlogs.
“Business as usual,” you might say. However, he appeared decidedly uptight at the post-fight presser (perhaps Dana was exhausted and had suffered a post-event adrenaline-dump, or maybe he had not consumed one of his beloved “Pink Berry” yoghurts and his blood sugar levels had crashed. This is all of course, pure conjecture).
This was somewhat baffling, given that he had just witnessed a seminal moment for the enterprise/sport that he has so vigorously nurtured, and very much befitting of the occasion, the event proved a resounding success (aside from the main event ironically, though this didn’t serve to tarnish the overall occasion given the calibre of the preceding fights).
Whatever the source of Dana’s downturn in mood, he will soon rejoice over the event.
3. The bulk of initial reaction to GSP’s performance was inevitably negative (even certain sections of the Ontario faithful were apparently raining down boos during the fight, indicative of the disappointment felt by his adoring Canadian public. I wonder if Wayne Gretzky ever received boos for failing to woo a Canadian crowd, maybe that’s one for Dana White to address given his penchant for comparing the two).
However, fans tend to judge those heralded as P4P greats more critically, harbouring insanely high expectations of the chosen few that ever grace this list or enter into its vicinity. To those that incessantly lambast the Canadian superstar, Dana will undoubtedly respond “if you don’t want to watch him, don’t buy the fu*k1ng PPV.”
What does appear slightly unjust, however, is the lack of sympathy afforded to Georges for the eye injury he sustained during the fight, which effectively rendered him blind out of his left eye.
Unfortunately for Georges, people’s perceptions were formulated by directly contrasting his latent cornea injury with the very prominent protuberance boasted by Mark Hominick.
4. On the one hand, Jose Aldo endured a battle that reminded us that this previously-perceived demigod is actually a mortal homo sapiens after all (akin to the impact of the Sonnen and Bigfoot fights on Anderson and Fedor, respectively).
On the other, it manifestly illustrated that Aldo possesses not only the skills but the heart of a champion, a prerequisite for any martial artist that aspires to acquire and retain the UFC gold strap. His ability to carve out victory in the face of adversity does not bode well for his prospective competitors that face a fully-fit version of “Scarface.”
The sole reservation over Aldo’s tenacious performance would be his apparent tampering with the cut under Hominick’s eye whilst on top position, constituting dirty play reminiscent of the infamous Arona vs Sakuraba incident back in 2005 (was I the only that spotted this? Or was I just hallucinating due to the fact that in England the bout aired at 4 a.m. by which point I was feeling rather deprived of slumber?).
5. Scarface vs Bulgehead (aka Aldo vs Hominick): One analyst commented, “Aldo took home the belt, whilst Hominick took home another head,” whilst another suggested that Hominick wanted to give birth at the same time as his pregnant missus, alluding to the rather sizable swelling that developed on his forehead during the fourth round.
Either way, when his newborn looks back at the baby photos in a decade’s time, she will forever be reminded of her father’s gruesome bulge, and consequently will always remember the name Jose Aldo.
6. Could Steven Seagal be legit?…It’s very easy to be skeptical as to Steven Seagal’s substantive input into the training of top level MMA fighters. It’s fair to say that following Anderson’s front-kick clinic on Vitor Belfort, most questioned whether Seagal had actually contributed to this violent yet highly-technical masterpiece, despite Anderson’s assertion in favour of the pony-tailed assassin.
I decided to conduct a little reconnaissance on the “Under Siege” protagonist, and discovered that he was once classed the highest-ranked Western martial artist in Japan. Sufficient credentials to impress me into attaching credence to Seagal’s proclamations.
Once may be a coincidence, but twice is beginning to seem rather convincing, so Machida’s support of “Master Seagal’s” assertions is beginning to vindicate his influence.
Either Seagal is a lucky charm, or he is paying these UFC luminaries to claim that he is instructing them, maybe with a view to resurrecting his acting career (just a conspiracy theory).
7. Despite Dana’s concerted efforts to convince us otherwise throughout the week leading up to the fight, Randy Couture was not a top ten LHW before the Machida fight. The basis for Dana’s claim was most tenuous.
Granted, he was riding a three-fight winning streak, but the calibre of adversary has to be taken into consideration; a one-dimensional, uneducated martial artist (though I use the term loosely) in James Toney, an aging (over-the-hill) Mark Coleman, and the perennial underachiever in Brandon Vera (unintentional rhyme).
Couture himself labelled the former two as “novelty” fights, whilst the general consensus was that he lost unanimously to Vera. This is not to detract from the legend that is Couture, but just to regain some sense of perspective on Dana’s tendency to overhype certain fighters.
8. Canadian MMA appears to be in pretty decent shape, attested to by the fact that the Canadians prevailed in six out of the 10 bouts in which they were involved, a significant improvement from the last time Canadians were pitted against their US counterparts at UFC 58 (only won three out of eight on that specific evening).
All the Tristar Canadians boasted aesthetically-pleasing stand-up skills, including a spinning back-fist KO and my personal favourite of MacDonald tossing around Diaz like the proverbial pancake.
9. Whilst nobody was blatantly robbed of a decision on Saturday evening, the inaugural provision of cage-side screens for the judges didn’t necessarily seem to enhance their capacity for scoring fights. The two scores of 48-47 in the main event were questionable.
The issue with judging was never that the arbiters had restricted vision, but rather that they are not adequately educated in the sport of MMA in order to be accurately scoring fights. And besides, judging will forever be subjective, screens or no screens.
10. As an aside, kudos to Britain’s principal MMA journalistic representative, Gareth A Davies, who was sat cage-side to witness the action unfold.
Gareth is becoming a prominent fixture and increasingly recognisable face at UFC events, which can only serve to be beneficial for British MMA (yes I’m British, which I’m sure most of you discerned from my spelling and slight patriotic bias).
