Filed under: UFC, Rankings, Light HeavyweightsOther than Jon Jones, no light heavyweight in mixed martial arts has been more impressive than Dan Henderson in the last 12 months.
Henderson brutally knocked out Renato “Babalu” Sobral in December, won th…
Other than Jon Jones, no light heavyweight in mixed martial arts has been more impressive than Dan Henderson in the last 12 months.
Henderson brutally knocked out Renato “Babalu” Sobral in December, won the Strikeforce light heavyweight title with a TKO over Rafael “Feijao” Cavalcante in March, took another TKO victory over Fedor Emelianenko in July as a light heavyweight fighting against a heavyweight, and then beat Shogun Rua in an all-time classic at UFC 139.
So where does that put Henderson? He’s certainly in our light heavyweight Top 5, but it’s still tough to justify Henderson going higher than fifth. Henderson did, after all, lose to Rampage Jackson, who lost to Rashad Evans, who lost to Lyoto Machida (who also lost to Rampage). The light heavyweight division has been so competitive for so long, with so many of the top fighters picking each other off, that after Jones, any of the next five guys could easily be put in any order. My order is below.
1. Jon Jones (1): The light heavyweight champion has easily separated himself from the pack, with two dominant wins over two other Top 10 light heavyweights, Shogun Rua and Rampage Jackson. Jones will try to make it three dominant wins over three other Top 10 light heavyweights when he takes on Lyoto Machida on December 10 at UFC 140.
2. Rashad Evans (2): Evans is a tough one to rank because he’s been so inactive of late: He’s only fought three times in the last two and a half years. But he’s been impressive in all three of those fights, beating Tito Ortiz, Rampage Jackson and Thiago Silva, and he has earned the light heavyweight title shot that he’ll supposedly get whenever he and Jones are healthy and able to fight at the same time.
3. Lyoto Machida (4): Machida is a tough one to rank: Should he be below Evans, even though he brutally beat Evans? Should he be above Rampage and Shogun, even though both of them beat him? There’s really no fair way to rank them, since Evans, Machida and Jackson all went 1-1 in their fights against each other. Machida will get a chance to show where he belongs in the light heavyweight division when he takes on Jones.
4. Rampage Jackson (5): Jackson has fought all the best of the best in the light heavyweight division, beating Machida and Henderson in the UFC, and losing to Jones, Evans and Forrest Griffin in the UFC and Shogun in Pride. It’s impossible not to put Rampage behind someone he’s beaten and above someone he’s lost to, but given the totality of his career No. 4 sounds about right.
5. Dan Henderson (6): As great as Henderson has looked in the last year, I can’t rank him ahead of Rampage, given what happened when Rampage and Henderson fought. I’d sure love to see a rematch of that one, though.
6. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua (3): Shogun is only 2-3 in his last five fights, but it’s about as impressive a 2-3 record as a light heavyweight could possibly have: The two wins were brutal first-round knockouts of Machida and Griffin, while the three losses were close decisions against Machida and Henderson, and a loss to Jones in which he admittedly looked bad — but then again Jones makes everyone look bad.
7. Forrest Griffin (7): The biggest question about Griffin is whether, at age 32 and having a wife and kid, he’s still interested in completely committing himself to MMA. When Griffin is on, he’s good enough to beat high-quality opponents like Rich Franklin, Rampage and Shogun. He looked decidedly off in his rematch loss to Shogun in August, however.
8. Rafael Cavalcante (8): Feijao bounced back from his loss to Henderson and beat Yoel Romero Palacio in September, and now would be a good time to see him in the UFC, where there are a lot more good fights for him.
9. Phil Davis (9): The 9-0 Davis was pulled from a fight with Evans in August because of a knee injury, and there’s still no word on when he’ll be ready to return. A former NCAA wrestling champion, Davis is one of the most talented athletes in the light heavyweight division, and he’ll be fighting for the belt eventually.
10. Thiago Silva (10): I’ve been waiting for someone to step up and take the bottom spot in the Top 10 from Silva, who’s been suspended all year for taking performance-enhancing drugs. But no one has really been able to do that, and so Silva stays. He should return early in 2012.
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Filed under: UFCIf things go very, very well for Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 — which is to say, if he not only beats Brandon Vera, but also earns one of the UFC’s bonus awards for the best submission, knockout, or fight of the night — it will be a prof…
If things go very, very well for Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 — which is to say, if he not only beats Brandon Vera, but also earns one of the UFC’s bonus awards for the best submission, knockout, or fight of the night — it will be a profitable night in the Octagon for the Colorado-based light heavyweight.
But if he merely wins without collecting a big bonus, he told MMA Fighting, he’ll probably just break even in the end.
“That’s how much I’ve put into this [training] camp, financially,” said Marshall. “Spending money to travel, go here and do this, do that, it’s not cheap. I’m a hundred percent committed.”
At this point, he pretty much has to be. That’s because Marshal knows he’s likely just one loss away from being cut by the UFC for a second time in two years. And if that happens, Marshall said, he plans to hang up the gloves and call it a career.
His thinking on the matter is simple, he explained. He’s already been cut from the organization once, and had to volunteer for a short-notice fight with Luiz Cane at UFC 128 just to get back in. He lost that one via first-round TKO, but his willingness to step up when the UFC needed someone was apparently enough to earn him this second chance.
If he gets beat by Vera this Saturday night, he’ll drop to 0-2 in his current UFC run and will almost certainly get his walking papers as a result. If that happens, he’s not sure what the point would be of continuing on with his fighting career.
“How many guys do you know who get brought back for a third time?” he pointed out.
That’s why, at least to hear Marshall tell it now, this could very well be it for him. He knows he’ll be the underdog heading into the bout with Vera, and if things go the way oddsmakers expect them to the 31-year-old Marshall might be on his way to retirement this time next week.
Maybe that helps to explain why he’s invested so much time and money into this training camp. With so much at stake, he wanted to make sure he was as well prepared as possible, he said, which meant multiple trips down to Greg Jackson’s gym in Albuquerque, N.M., as well as driving all around Colorado to get in the gym with as many different sparring partners as he could find.
“That way you don’t get used to anybody’s style,” he explained. “Sometimes you get used to what guy A does or guy B does, and then when you get in the cage to really fight, the guy you’re fighting doesn’t do what guy A or B does and you have to adapt. I’ve had to adapt every sparring session. My mind and my body is used to it, so it’s not so much about what they’re going to do, it’s what I’m going to do.”
But against an opponent like Vera, figuring out a path to victory isn’t so easy, as Marshall has learned from hours of watching film.
“He’s very, very tough,” Marshall said. “Even when he’s losing, he takes it. Thiago Silva whooped his ass, and he wasn’t close to being stopped. He switches stances well. Obviously, he kicks hard. I guess on paper he should be the champ of the world, right?”
So why isn’t he? Instead of being champ of the world, why is Vera winless in his last three fights, and just barely holding on to a spot in the UFC himself?
“I just don’t think he wants it that bad,” said Marshall, who added that, in the end, that’s what he believes will make all the difference.
“What’s going to decide the fight is who wants it more. I don’t think any one skill-set is going to decide this fight. It’s going to be, who’s willing to get beat up? Who’s willing to suffer to win this fight?”
The way Marshall sees it, that person is him. That’s because he has to win this fight. If he doesn’t, his stay in the UFC — and, so he says, his career in MMA — will both come to an end.
That explains why he’s invested so much in his own training and preparation, he said. There’s no reason not to go all-in now and see what happens. At this point in his career, there might not be a next time.
Next weekend at UFC 137, light heavyweight Brandon Vera will step into the octagon for the first time since early January to face Elliot Marshall. The last time Vera fought, he lost a unanimous decision to contender Thiago Silva and was handed his walk…
Next weekend at UFC 137, light heavyweight Brandon Vera will step into the octagon for the first time since early January to face Elliot Marshall.
The last time Vera fought, he lost a unanimous decision to contender Thiago Silva and was handed his walking papers from the UFC.
However, after the fight, it was revealed by the Nevada State Athletic Commission that Silva’s drug tests had come back positive for steroids. At first denying it, Silva would later come clean and admitted to using a urine adulterant following the fight.
Silva had injured his back prior to the fight, and because he had been out of action for so long, decided to take injections into his back so that he could still fight.
Because of his actions, the fight was ruled a no contest, Silva was suspended for a year and Vera was brought back into the organization and given a second chance.
Vera, who was dominated in the fight and suffered a broken nose, was not shy when it came to talking about Silva’s antics in the cage as he taunted while holding Vera down on the ground.
“I think he was just celebrating, but now that I know that he was a juice monkey, for sure, I think he’s a piece of sh**,” he said.
Vera went on to say that he was shocked at how Silva dominated him on the ground, and now that it was revealed that he had cheated, it all makes sense,
“The whole fight I just kept asking myself, ‘What the hell is going on? Why is this?’ You know,” Vera said. “I train with Phil Davis, ‘Hapa’ Travis Browne, the Nogueira brothers and Junior dos Santos. I train with some big dudes, man.
“Nobody has ever been able to hold me. The whole time during the fight, while we’re on the ground, I’m just thinking to myself, ‘What is going? Why is it like this?’ And it just wore on me the whole time.
“…as soon as we hit the deck, it just felt like I was a little child.”
Neither Vera or Silva have tried to contact each other after the fight and “The Truth” has no plans of it.
“Not till I smack him in his face again,” he said.
Vera will get another chance to prove that he deserves to stay in the UFC, and if he can get by Marshall, a rematch between the two may be in order.
Silva’s suspsension began on January 1 of this year and he will be able to reapply for his license at the beginning of next year.
If Vera is still around, he will be waiting for the Brazilian to return.
It has been nearly 10 months since Vera and Silva threw down at UFC 125: Resolution, with Silva coming away the victor by unanimous decision and handing Vera his walking papers. However, when the drug tests came back, it was revealed that Silva had altered the results of his urine in an effort to mask the steroids he had been taking for back pain. Silva was then fined over 33 grand for the incident, and suspended a year. Vera was invited back to the UFC, and is fighting for the first time since the incident against Elliot Marshall at UFC 137, barring any last second injuries.
When asked about the Silva fight, Vera lived up to his nickname, not holding any of his feelings back in regards to Silva.
(Steve Mazzagatti never could decide when it was the right time to pull the old hat-over-the-eyes prank.)
It has been nearly 10 months since Vera and Silva threw down at UFC 125: Resolution, with Silva coming away the victor by unanimous decision and handing Vera his walking papers. However, when the drug tests came back, it was revealed that Silva had altered the results of his urine in an effort to mask the steroids he had been taking for back pain. Silva was then fined over 33 grand for the incident, and suspended a year. Vera was invited back to the UFC, and is fighting for the first time since the incident against Elliot Marshall at UFC 137, barring any last second injuries.
When asked about the Silva fight, Vera lived up to his nickname, not holding any of his feelings back in regards to Silva.
On how Silva was able to hold him down so easily:
“The whole fight I just kept asking myself, what the hell is going on? Why is this? I train with Phil Davis, Travis Browne, the Noguiera brothers, Junior Dos Santos…I train with some big dudes man and nobody has ever just been able to hold me down you know?”
On Silva’s antics in the third round:
“I think he was just celebrating, but now that I know that he was a juice monkey, for sure I think he is a piece of shit. He is for sure just a piece of shit.”
It’s hard to blame the guy for his animosity toward Silva, who isn’t exactly known for being the most respectable of fighters. I mean, beside the fact that Silva used the third round to join our Bitch Slap Hall of Fame and perform his own rendition of “Hakuna Matata” on Vera’s back, he also did this to Vera’s face. The comments aren’t without merit is all I’m saying.
Anyway, Vera went on to talk about how it felt to be back in the UFC, which he described as, “…like when you cheated on your girlfriend in middle school and she broke up with you but you know she was the perfect one but you’ll never get her back. It was exactly like that.”
Ok then.
But perhaps the best line from the interview was when Vera was questioned about who he thought could beat current light heavyweight champ Jon Jones:
“There are at least three or four that can beat him, Rashad, Phil Davis, myself and Machida…and Shogun. I’ve never seen Shogun lose to the same person twice…ever. He lost to Jones once, I don’t think he will lose like that again.”
After what happened to Vera last time he fought Jones, you gotta give props to the guy for not immediately considering a drop to middleweight, let alone saying he could take the champ in a rematch. Apparently the truth really does hurt.
Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce, Rankings, Light HeavyweightsThe UFC’s light heavyweight division has been so talented for so long that it’s been impossible in the last few years for anyone to stay on top for long. Rampage Jackson looked like a force whe…
The UFC‘s light heavyweight division has been so talented for so long that it’s been impossible in the last few years for anyone to stay on top for long. Rampage Jackson looked like a force when he took the belt from Chuck Liddell, but it wasn’t long before Forrest Griffin took the belt from Rampage. Rashad Evans then took the belt from Griffin, but Evans lost the belt in his first title defense — at what was supposed to be the dawn of the Lyoto Machida Era. Except that Machida promptly lost his belt to Shogun Rua.
Now we have Jon Jones at the top of the division, however, and I think the belt is going to stay in place for a long time. Jones has absolutely obliterated both Jackson and Rua, and now he’ll get another former champion in Evans — with, I believe, similar results.
So as we list the top light heavyweights in mixed martial arts, we’re looking at an extremely talented division. But a division with one unique talent that stands far above the rest.
1. Jon Jones (1): There was never a moment during Jones’ victory over Jackson at UFC 135 that I even thought Jones was in the slightest bit of trouble. Jackson is a great fighter who appeared to be in good shape and ready for a big fight, but he simply wasn’t on Jones’s level. I don’t think anyone is.
2. Rashad Evans (2): Evans is finally close to the title shot that he’s been waiting on for more than a year, but I don’t think he has much of a chance of getting his belt back. Against Jackson, Jones did a great job of using his long legs to effectively fight at a distance, and if anything Jones will have an even greater reach advantage over Evans. It’s hard to see anywhere that Evans has an advantage over Jones. That title fight will not go well for Evans.
3. Shogun Rua (3): Shogun has a very big fight ahead of him against Dan Henderson at UFC 139, and if he wins that he’ll have a strong case that he’s the No. 2 light heavyweight in MMA. But given how thoroughly Jones beat Rua, it’s almost impossible to see the UFC giving Rua another shot at the title.
4. Lyoto Machida (4): Of all the light heavyweights in the sport, Machida is probably the one whose unorthodox stand-up style would present the greatest threat to Jones. If Machida wins his next fight, he’d make a lot of sense as an opponent for Jones in 2012.
5. Rampage Jackson (5): There have been times in Jackson’s career when it was fair to question his motivation and preparation, but UFC 135 was not one of those times. Jackson was well prepared for the Jones fight, he’s just nowhere near as good as Jones.
6. Dan Henderson (6): Henderson has left his Strikeforce light heavyweight title behind and will return to the Octagon to face Rua. A victory over Rua would give Henderson an excellent claim that he deserves a title shot against Jones, although as much respect as I have for Henderson I have an extremely hard time envisioning any way Henderson wins that fight.
7. Forrest Griffin (7): Griffin fights nothing but a who’s who of the all-time greats in the sport: His last seven fights consist of two battles with Shogun sandwiched around bouts against Rampage, Evans, Anderson Silva, Tito Ortiz and Rich Franklin. The biggest question for Griffin now is whether he wants to keep doing battle with the sport’s truly elite, or if now that he’s in his 30s and a husband and a father, he’d rather take a step down in quality of competition. Griffin will always be a fan favorite and a draw for the UFC, but he may no longer be prepared to fight in the upper echelon of the UFC’s light heavyweight division.
8. Rafael Cavalcante (10): Feijao looked very good in his victory over Yoel Romero Palacio on the September Strikeforce card. As long as he’s with Strikeforce, Feijao’s options for big fights are limited, but in the UFC there are any number of big fights for him at 205 pounds. MMA fans who just want to see the best fight the best should hope one of those big fights gets booked soon.
9. Phil Davis (8): The 27-year-old Davis was a great college wrestler who’s a lot of fun to watch, and he seems destined to take on Jones some day. The problem is that for as young and talented as Davis is, Jones is even younger and more talented.
10. Thiago Silva (9): We’re finally getting close to the end of Silva’s one-year suspension for taking performance-enhancing substances. I hope he’s stayed in shape and comes back hungry, because he’s a 28-year-old who’s a good enough striker that he can be a threat to anyone. He should be involved in some big light heavyweight fights in 2012.
Other than Jon Jones, no light heavyweight in mixed martial arts has been more impressive than Dan Henderson in the last 12 months.
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
If things go very, very well for 
Next weekend at UFC 137, light heavyweight 
The 
