Following a tough loss in late April—which was only the fifth of his professional career—Jake Shields, although disappointed, views UFC 129, its lead-up, and fallout, as positive experiences and is hungry to make his way to the top of the d…
Following a tough loss in late April—which was only the fifth of his professional career—Jake Shields, although disappointed, views UFC 129, its lead-up, and fallout, as positive experiences and is hungry to make his way to the top of the division once again.
The defeat, which came at the hands of UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre, albeit disappointing to Shields, was a long time coming.
“I really liked fighting right away. I think, initially, I thought it was a one- or two-time thing, but I think after four or five fights, I thought that I could make it,” said Shields in an exclusive interview with Ed Kapp, “Of course, it took longer than I thought; I thought that I’d be fighting for UFC titles in just a few years. It took a bit longer, though [laughs].”
Despite dropping two out of his first five matches, Shields, from February 2001 to October 2010, only lost a pair of bouts and registered notable victories over Hayato Sakurai, Yushin Okami, Carlos Condit, Nick Thompson, Paul Daley, Robbie Lawler, Jason Miller, Dan Henderson and Martin Kampmann before falling to St. Pierre in Toronto.
“Losing sucks—I broke my huge winning streak—but to go out there and fight GSP for five rounds in front of 60,000 people was quite a cool experience.”
“Of course, it’s a little disappointing; when you go out there and lose, it’s always disappointing. I look back at a lot of things that I did wrong and wish I did it differently, but you can’t dwell too much on the past. All you can do is move forward, try to learn from your mistakes, and get prepared for your next fight. “
As for Shields’ next match, although he is unsure when he will return to the Octagon, the Cesar Gracie student admits that he, once again, is feeling “the itch to compete.”
“I’m starting to feel that again. I was a little burnt out after the last fight from the long training camp and all of the media. Plus the letdown of losing really had me burnt out for a month afterwards, but two months later, I’m ready to call the UFC and ask who they’ve got for me.”
Shields, although ready to make a call to the UFC, in an effort to establish another impressive winning streak and an eventual title shot in the Octagon, is ready and willing to take on all callers.
“It’s not up to me who I fight—I’m willing to fight whoever—so I’m just waiting for the UFC to call me, so I can get back on the winning track. I’ve just got to get back on track. I still want that belt, so I’ve got to go on to win a couple fights and, hopefully, I can get a title shot, again.”
Although many fighters, following disappointing losses, question their future in the sport, Shields’ lofty ambitions in mixed martial arts, after more than a decade of professional competition and championships in Shooto, EliteXC and Strikeforce, are yet to waver.
“My goal—even though I fell short last time—is to hold the UFC belt. That’s the most honourable belt that anyone can hold in this sport.”
A lot of would-be mixed martial artists have walked through the doors at Adrenaline Training Center, in London, Ont. Most of them have dreams of becoming professional fighters. Alex ‘Pecker’ Gasson, who is the manager and one of the instruc…
A lot of would-be mixed martial artists have walked through the doors at Adrenaline Training Center, in London, Ont.
Most of them have dreams of becoming professional fighters. Alex ‘Pecker’ Gasson, who is the manager and one of the instructors at ATC, remembers one in particular.
“This guy packed up his family and moved here from New Brunswick,” Gasson said. “He wanted to be a fighter. He never came back after the first day of training.”
The realities of what it takes to become a pro fighter are a shock for many people. Dreams of fame and glory may bring people to ATC, said Gasson, 33, but without dedication and sacrifice, those dreams can fade quickly.
“People don’t talk about the sacrifice, because it’s not glamorous,” said ‘Pecker’. “But training isn’t easy, and I don’t sugarcoat it for anyone. If they can’t handle the training, they can’t handle the ring.”
In the world of professional fighting, the real story is what goes on behind the scenes, outside of the spotlights and away from the screaming fans, said Gasson. Meeting the demands of a fighter’s life and maintaining commitments to family and friends can be difficult.
“Be prepared to sacrifice a lot,” Gasson said.
Adrenaline Training Center instructor Adam Higson knows about making sacrifices. A former amateur boxing champ and seven time kickboxing and Muaythai champ, Higgson, 35, has been training for over 20 years.
“Fighting cost me my marriage,” said Higson, before a workout with ATC strength and conditioning coach Brain Fletcher. “We see who our friends are when we’re not in the spotlight, when we’re training or dealing with a loss.”
This is why there is a strong sense of community in mixed martial arts, Gasson said. Fighters need a strong support network to help them survive the physical and emotional challenges that come with training and competing at the professional level.
Fighters must structure their lives around training. It is not uncommon for fighters to train six days a week, four to five hours a day, leaving little time or energy for anything else.
Days are typically divided into morning and afternoon sessions, training either striking, wrestling or jiu jitsu in one session, and strength and condition in the other. Mixed martial arts requires power and endurance, and so work outs are often based on circuit training that works the muscles and body to exhaustion, said Gasson.
This might include one minute sets of flipping a 350 pound tire, followed chin-ups, tossing around a medicine ball and ending off with rope exercises. And then repeat.
“Train as much as you can, and then double it,” said Gasson. “Remember, while you’re taking a break, what’s your opponent doing?”
The core group of people behind ATC has been together for more than a decade and they know what it takes to make it in the world of professional MMA.
Mark ‘The Machine’ Hominick, Sam ‘Hands of Stone’ Stout and Chris ‘The Polish Hammer’ Horodecki have all competed at the highest levels of the sport.
Stout, 27, recently competed at UFC 131, in Vancouver, B.C., on June 11. Stout defeated Yves Edwards with a first round knockout, earning himself a $70,000 ‘Knockout of the Night’ bonus. It was the sixth fight-night bonus of Stout’s career.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship is the largest mixed martial arts organization in the world, drawing thousands of fans to their live events, with millions of more fans tuning in to watch from around the world.
Hominick, 28, who has been fighting professionally for almost a decade, recently fought for the featherweight belt at UFC 129, at the end of April, in Toronto, Ont. The event was held at the Rogers Center in front of 55,000 fans, the biggest MMA event in North American history.
Although Hominick lost the fight, his performance earned him a Fight of the Night bonus of $129,000.
Horodecki, 23, began training when he was 13 years old and started fighting professionally just after his 18th birthday. He has fought around the world in MMA’s biggest promotions, including the UFC, the WEC and Affliction.
Gasson, who began training mixed martial arts in his late teens, is a former North American kick boxing champion and has competed in events around the world. But his days of competing are over, after breaking his neck last November. Now, Gasson sees it as his job to help the members of ATC reach their own personal goals.
Not everyone who comes to train at ATC aspires to a career in fighting, so training is tailored to the individual. As demanding as the training regime may be, sometimes the most difficult thing is building up the nerve to train at ATC.
From outside, the building is a nondescript warehouse, but inside the gym equipped for serious training. Divided into sections, one half of the gym is dedicate to training strength and cardio, and the other half is lined with wrestling mats for working on grappling and fighting techniques.
A number of heavy bags hang from the ceiling, and there is a boxing ring and an MMA cage, costing over $20,000 combined, for all out sparring, said Gasson.
Many people are intimidated when they first come to ATC, and Gasson tries to make the new students comfortable. “That’s my job, to make sure it’s a smooth transition.”
With MMA’s crossover into mainstream acceptability, it has become a popular form of exercise. Gasson estimated that 90% of ATC’s 424 clients are fitness orientated. The remaining 10% are serious about becoming professional fighters, of which 1% might actually make it.
It is not uncommon for some of the aspiring pros to work at the gym in exchange for memberships, said Gasson. Training fulltime makes holding down a job difficult, so fighters typically struggle to pay for necessities like food and shelter, meaning many cannot afford the cost of working with professional trainers.
“The gym couldn’t survive with only pros,” Gasson said. “Often those guys have nothing.”
Nothing but dreams about becoming professional fighters.
UFC 129 was an ambitious undertaking for the UFC. It was the first event the promotion ever held in Toronto, Ontario and it was also the first event they ever held in a stadium setting. The fight card was held at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, the home of Ma…
UFC 129 was an ambitious undertaking for the UFC. It was the first event the promotion ever held in Toronto, Ontario and it was also the first event they ever held in a stadium setting. The fight card was held at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, the home of Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays, and sold out all 55,000 tickets the UFC offered.
From an attendance and live-gate perspective, the event was the largest in UFC history. After the fight card, UFC president Dana White announced that 55,724 fans attended the event and the gate was $12.075 million.
The event, which saw UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre successfully defend his title against Jake Shields, was a success for the local economy as well. The Toronto Star is reporting that the event pumped and estimated $40 million into the local economy.
The financial impact was felt by restaurants which saw their business increase by 19.2 percent while bars and pubs saw a jump of 15.7 percent.
Other businesses that saw huge increases in week over week business were certain retailers, as apparel businesses saw a 41.3 percent increase in business and sporting goods stores saw a 33 percent increase.
The Star reported that the full financial report for the event will not be completed until August.
While this event is the exception and not the rule as far as attendance is concerned, the takeaway from something like this is that the UFC and their fans can have a huge impact on tourism dollars for a city.
It’s somewhat comical that this report comes one day after New York left a bill to legalize MMA in the state off the voting agenda.
Like many fight fans, I fell in love with boxing fan from an early age, and became progressively intrigued by the scintillating lure of arguably the purest sport on earth, which involved two men enclosed in a ring vis-à-vis, with a view to ultim…
Like many fight fans, I fell in love with boxing fan from an early age, and became progressively intrigued by the scintillating lure of arguably the purest sport on earth, which involved two men enclosed in a ring vis-à-vis, with a view to ultimately disconnecting his adversary from consciousness, thereby determining the better individual combatant. Isn’t this, after all, the very essence of all sport, the veritable embodiment of competition?
Then along came MMA and the UFC, which assured us that this is “as real as it gets”. Inspired by “Vale Tudo” tournaments in Brazil, the UFC and the sport of MMA have roots in the ancient Olympic combat sport of Pankration in 648 BC”. Indeed, the UFC showcased fighters of multiple disciplines in order to identify the most effective martial art in a real fight. Could anyone dispute that this was the purest form of existing combat, replicating true-to-life NHB combat scenarios? (ok, aside from the fact that most belligerent men in bars don’t wear spandex nuthuggers).
I believe that my route into MMA fandom is a rather conventional one, paralleled by a vast number of my contemporaries that pertain to the “MMA Community”. Of course there are those for whom boxing and MMA will forever prove mutually exclusive, to be adjudged in isolation, with those people liable to perceive my endeavour to compare and contrast the sports as sacrilege.
It is generally anti-MMA boxing fans that express such a grievance since this cohort invariably constitutes combat sports’ version of a “snob”, whist conversely MMA fans tend to simultaneously display an admiration for its pugilistic predecessor. This is neatly epitomised by spearheads of both sports, Bob Arum, Bert Sugar, Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta. Bob and Bert openly confess their distaste for the sport of MMA (though they harbour a respect for the majestic marketing of the UFC), whilst Dana and Lorenzo are self-professed boxing enthusiasts (Dana in fact instructed boxing before encountering MMA) who believe that both sports may coexist harmoniously.
For others boxing and MMA may be inextricably linked, falling under the bracket of “combat sports”. Many, like myself, will have been introduced to/encountered one sport through the other, having been enticed into MMA as a natural progression to an initial appreciation of boxing or vice-versa.
I would now like to return to the initial title and enumerate the multiple elements which have contributed to cultivating a sport in MMA that in my humble opinion is better to, and for, the fans than boxing. And, just to qualify this assertion, I am not contesting which sport is better per se (as this is wholly/holy subjective), nor am I arguing which sport is more popular (After all, the 16,412 fans that packed Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Garden Arena for Pacquiao vs Mosley is nearly 1,600 more enthusiasts than the UFC has ever drawn to the same venue), but rather which is better to and for the fans, hence purely from an objective fan perspective.
According to UFC Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs, Marc Ratner, who responded to a request from CagePotato.com today for test results from the event, all of the samples came back clean two weeks ago “for both [performance enhancing drugs] and illegal street drugs.”
(If the OAC wants to be taken seriously, it can’t expect promotions to self-regulate.)
According to UFC Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs, Marc Ratner, who responded to a request from CagePotato.com today for test results from the event, all of the samples came back clean two weeks ago “for both [performance enhancing drugs] and illegal street drugs.”
This isn’t the first time that the UFC has administered its own tests. An independent lab discovered that Chris Leben had the anabolic steroid Stanazolol in his system for his UFC 89 loss to Michael Bisping October 18, 2008. He was handed a nine-month suspension from Zuffa for his indiscretion.
What’s of note is that the results of the UFC 129 tests were not made public by the Ontario Athletic Commission, which begs the question: Is the OAC properly regulating the sport in the province, or are they depending on promotions to self regulate?
Part of the OAC’s mandate in sanctioning MMA in the province was that it would provide drug testing for promotions that require it of its fighters. Right off the bat they dropped the ball with the first promotion that required testing.
What other rules are being overlooked by the established commission that many feel is ill-equipped to handle regulating MMA as it stands today due to deficiencies in manpower, experience and knowledge of the sport?
During the illustrious eighteen-year history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, we’ve witnessed countless brutal beatings, killer knockouts, and spectacular submissions. Simply put, we’ve witnessed a ton of holy $&*% moments!
I’m sure you have your favorites that you’ll share with your grandkids when you’re sitting in the old man’s chair. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself which moments in the past two decades were the biggest on a large scale? Well I did and I went to the largest scale imaginable: the almighty Google and here’s what I found. Remember, Google doesn’t have emotional or monetary interest at stake here. These moments are the ones that have generated the most web traffic via searches, not which ones impacted the sport the most.
Why it’s ranked: Jake Shields left Strikeforce as champion so essentially casual fans and mainstream media alike viewed this as the first major inter-promotional, champion vs. champion fight. Georges St. Pierre, reigning UFC Welterweight champion and winner of nine straight came out on top of Shields who was riding a fifteen-fight win streak over the past five years.
The UFC went all in on this one hyping this event with the normal Countdown shows in addition to a pretty sweet commercial, the Primetime series, and a flyer in my mailbox reminding me to order the PPV. It was a huge moment in both men’s career primarily because it was the first tough competition either had faced in quite some time up to that point. The underlying reason this mattered so much is that we all wanted to see the GSP vs. Silva super fight.
By CagePotato contributor Jason Moles
During the illustrious eighteen-year history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, we’ve witnessed countless brutal beatings, killer knockouts, and spectacular submissions. Simply put, we’ve witnessed a ton of holy $&*% moments!
I’m sure you have your favorites that you’ll share with your grandkids when you’re sitting in the old man’s chair. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself which moments in the past two decades were the biggest on a large scale? Well I did and I went to the largest scale imaginable: the almighty Google and here’s what I found. Remember, Google doesn’t have emotional or monetary interest at stake here. These moments are the ones that have generated the most web traffic via searches, not which ones impacted the sport the most.
Why it’s ranked: Jake Shields left Strikeforce as champion so essentially casual fans and mainstream media alike viewed this as the first major inter-promotional, champion vs. champion fight. Georges St. Pierre, reigning UFC Welterweight champion and winner of nine straight came out on top of Shields who was riding a fifteen-fight win streak over the past five years.
The UFC went all in on this one hyping this event with the normal Countdown shows in addition to a pretty sweet commercial, the Primetime series, and a flyer in my mailbox reminding me to order the PPV. It was a huge moment in both men’s career primarily because it was the first tough competition either had faced in quite some time up to that point. The underlying reason this mattered so much is that we all wanted to see the GSP vs. Silva super fight.
Why it’s ranked: This was Brock Lesnar‘s first fight since giving Diverticulitis the F5. (Too bad it was only a two count.) No one knew what to expect. How much cage corrosion would Lesnar have? What about his cardio? Would Shane Carwin win another fight in the first round? That was all answered in the first five minutes as ‘The Engineer’ laid out the blue print for not only how to beat the UFC heavyweight champion, but also what a 10-8 round looks like.
Looking back, it was such a noteworthy night because it capped off, or so we thought, the trials and tribulations of the biggest draw in MMA and left us all with a warm fuzzy feeling. Not Shane, though, he was still sucking wind worse that Roy Nelson a few weeks ago. Regardless, the first round and the shocking result raised a lot of eyebrows, hence it’s spot on the list.
Why it’s ranked: Finally! Something that actually deserves to be on this list, right? I know, I know, settle down scooter. Remember, Google analyzes what EVERYONE is searching for, not just the hardcore fans that spend their free time commenting on a niche website trying to provoke a flame war. Now where was I? Oh yeah, this is the first moment that actually has long-term significance to most of us.
The WEC was home to some of the best fighters in the game today and sadly, they were gobbled up by the UFC like the last piece of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. Usually when one promotion is consumed by another, much larger and well known promotion, heads turn and people seek out any little nuggets of truth they can. It marked the beginning of a new chapter for the mma world as a whole. Little did we know at the time that the WEC was just the appetizer.
Why it’s ranked: Honestly, I think it’s high on the list merely because some crackpot former pseudo badass named Steven Seagal claimed to have taught UFC Middleweight champion Anderson Silva the single most lethal front kick in all of combat sports. Seriously, WTH? It was a joke. No, no it wasn’t. It was just a media stunt to get more attention. For real now, I most definitely taught him that kick and to prove it I trained my dragon to do the same thing.
This is a classic example of what a holy $&*% moment is because when you first see it your instinct is to yell out “Holy $&*%!!!” and then look at the guy next to you and repeat. Unforgettable moment + delusional B-list Hollywood celeb = mass hysteria.
The single biggest moment in UFC history according to Google is (drum roll please)…………..
Why it’s ranked: UFC 100 was the biggest, baddest, most heavily promoted fight card up to that point and it smashed records left and right including gross revenue, tickets sold, and PPV buys. Two title fights including transcendent fighters Brock Lesnar and GSP plus the culmination of Michael Bisping writing a check his chin couldn’t cash after an entire season of trash talking Dan Henderson on The Ultimate Fighter. Everyone and their mother heard something about the epic event thanks to ESPN and others mentioning it leading up to fight night. Oh yeah, there was that little incident after the main event that got a little attention too.
It seemed like the mma community was stricken with an ailment that prevented the poor soul from acknowledging anything outside of UFC 100 the week of and after the event. We just couldn’t help ourselves. It was our Super Bowl, granted it didn’t kick0ff an annual pop-cultural mega event, but it was significantly larger than anything else we had seen. There’s just something magical about the number 100. We did it, err, they did it. They fought the politicians, PPV blackouts, and the economy while nearly going bankrupt in the process. MMA soared out of the shadows and boldly announced its presence that night putting everyone on notice; in case you weren’t aware, MMA is here to stay.
I know. You know. I know you know. I know you know I know. Don’t get all pissy at me, I didn’t make the list. All I did was try to make sense of what the data said and make you laugh in the process. Double fail, right? But go ahead; tell me what should have been on this list in the comments. Do you want a follow up with what CagePotato thinks are the biggest moments in UFC history? How about the biggest moments in PRIDE FC’s history? Strikeforce? Ah, who am I kidding? You stopped reading after you saw Steven Segal mentioned.
Following a tough loss in late April—which was only the fifth of his professional career—Jake Shields, although disappointed, views UFC 129, its lead-up, and fallout, as positive experiences and is hungry to make his way to the top of the division once again.
