UFC 139 will take place Saturday, November 19 from the HP Pavilion in San Jose, CA. The fight card is stacked with former champions from various MMA promotions, including UFC, PRIDE, WEC and Strikeforce. Headlining the card will be Dan Henderson an…
UFC 139 will take place Saturday, November 19 from the HP Pavilion in San Jose, CA. The fight card is stacked with former champions from various MMA promotions, including UFC, PRIDE, WEC and Strikeforce.
Headlining the card will be Dan Henderson and Mauricio Rua, two former champions that will be looking to put themselves in line for the shot at the ultimate prize. That is, Jon Jones’ UFC light heavyweight title.
Henderson, a former champion in Strikeforce and PRIDE, is 4-1 in his last five fights with all four of those victories coming via knockout. The last time Henderson fought in the UFC was at UFC 100, where he delivered one of the most memorable knockouts in UFC history by putting Michael Bisping to sleep at the 3:20 mark of Round 2.
Henderson’s opponent, “Shogun” Rua, has a record of 4-3 since joining the UFC in 2007. Two of those wins came by knockout and the other two came via TKO. Of Rua’s three losses in the Octagon, the one that most likely nags at him the most is the loss to Jon Jones at UFC 128 in a fight that saw Jones wrestle the title away from Rua in dominating fashion.
The co-main event of the evening will see former Strikeforce champion Cung Le face off against former PRIDE champion Wanderlei Silva.
Le brings a record of 7-1 into his Octagon debut. Of those wins, five have come via knockout and two via TKO. He will look to add another stoppage victory to that list when he faces the struggling “Axe Murderer.”
Silva has a record of 2-6 since 2006. Of his six losses, four have come via knockout or TKO. After his last loss, a 27-second knockout at the hands of Chris Leben, UFC president Dana White openly expressed the fact that he was considering pulling a “Chuck Liddell” and basically forcing Silva into retirement.
While that did not come to pass, to say that Silva needs a big win in this fight would be an understatement.
Also on the pay-per-view card, former WEC champions Urijah Faber and Brian Bowles will face off, with the winner looking to get a shot at current UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz.
An event stacked with some of the greatest fighters in MMA history, UFC 139 is only days away, which means it is time for Dan Henderson, Mauricio Rua and the rest of the event’s fighters to make their final statements before stepping into the Octagon o…
An event stacked with some of the greatest fighters in MMA history, UFC 139 is only days away, which means it is time for Dan Henderson, Mauricio Rua and the rest of the event’s fighters to make their final statements before stepping into the Octagon on Saturday.
A live stream of the UFC 139 pre-fight press conference will be available on the above video player.
In addition to the light heavyweight bout that many fans hoped to see under the Pride banner years ago, Wanderlei Silva will welcome Cung Le to the UFC, and Urijah Faber and Brian Bowles will be looking to earn another shot at UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz.
Saturday’s fights will take place at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California. A number of other big names, such as Ryan Bader and Miguel Torres, will also be competing at the event.
Sean Smith is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report MMA. For the latest insight and updates on everything MMA, you can follow Sean on Twitter @SeanSmithMMA.
Walking into what might possibly be his final bout, Wanderlei Silva has prepared himself to walk into UFC 139 with one intention: to win. The Brazilian has gone 1-1 since dropping down to 185 lbs, but he has yet to score a decisive victory inside …
Walking into what might possibly be his final bout, Wanderlei Silva has prepared himself to walk into UFC 139 with one intention: to win.
The Brazilian has gone 1-1 since dropping down to 185 lbs, but he has yet to score a decisive victory inside the Octagon since knocking out Keith Jardine in 2008.
To help get prepared and familiarized with Cung Le and his unorthodox style, Silva has enlisted the services of some the sport’s top fighters, including UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva.
In an interview with TATAME.com, Silva said he enjoyed his time training with “The Spider” and he praised the champion for his skills and intelligence as a martial artist.
“He’s got a pretty evolved way of seeing martial arts. His coaches must be congratulated, they’ve built a super athlete,” Silva said. “Back there we noticed his potential, he knew great Boxing and how to move, but he overcame himself and became one of the best of all time.”
Silva’s career has been on the decline for a few years and UFC President Dana White has made it clear that “The Axe Murderer” should no longer continue fighting. Silva has accumulated a UFC record of 2-4 since his acquisition from Pride FC in 2007. Despite his boss’s wishes, Silva doesn’t see a reason to retire momentarily, although there will be a lot of pressure on him to perform well this weekend.
“The training makes you more confident, so I’m feeling fine. It’s normal to be under pressure,” he said. “I’m fighting professionally for 15 years, and it’s always been like that.”
While he does hold a lot of experience to his name, Silva will look to put on an entertaining bout for the fans, regardless of the outcome. His skills might have diminished over time, but his passion for the sport is still alive and well and it is what makes him still want to fight and compete.
Filed under: UFCSAN JOSE, Calif. — Bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz wasn’t at the UFC 139 open workouts on Wednesday afternoon. He didn’t have to be. Between Urijah Faber and Brian Bowles, the champ managed to loom over nearly every conversation ev…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz wasn’t at the UFC 139 open workouts on Wednesday afternoon. He didn’t have to be. Between Urijah Faber and Brian Bowles, the champ managed to loom over nearly every conversation even in absentia, though his former foes weren’t exactly singing his praises.
For instance, when asked what he thought of Cruz’s decision win over Faber in July, Bowles seemed unimpressed.
“It was a typical Cruz fight,” said the former WEC 135-pound champ. “He did what he did. He was able to dance around and keep from being on bottom. He does what he does. He just executed his game plan and does what he does best. He hits you without getting hit. A typical Cruz fight.”
If that sounds like Bowles isn’t in a hurry to get his popcorn and locate the edge of his seat every time the champ defends his belt, that’s no mistake.
As Bowles said of Cruz: “If he’s fighting on TV, I’m not watching him as a fan because I like watching his fights. I would be watching because he’s my competition and I’m trying to take something from it. If he wasn’t in my weight class, I probably wouldn’t watch him fight.”
Faber, however, insisted he follows every fighter mostly because he’s “a huge fan,” and claimed that he actually enjoys watching Cruz fight. But even that praise had a needle hiding behind it.
“I think Dominick’s style is entertaining. It’s not dangerous. It’s not a guy you’re scared to fight. Anybody, you shouldn’t be scared to fight him either,” Faber said, adding, “It’s not that he doesn’t hit hard, it’s that he doesn’t hit hard enough to hurt me.”
It’s almost enough to make you forget that Bowles and Faber are fighting each other on Saturday night, not Cruz. Maybe it’s the lack of any personal rivalry between the “California Kid” Faber and, as UFC PR man Dave Sholler jokingly tabbed him, the “Southern Gentleman” Bowles. Or maybe it’s just that former champs can’t stop thinking about the current champ and how much they’d love to snatch that hardware from around his waist.
As Bowles put it, “The belt is the most important thing, I think, in doing what you’re doing. If you’re not wanting to be a champion, then you probably shouldn’t be in it. Another thing is, if I’m not trying to be champ, the guy standing across from me probably is. He might be training harder. I train like I’m fighting for the belt every time.”
Faber has good reason to do the same since, at least for the past few years, it sure feels like he’s fighting for the belt every time, or at the very least fighting for the chance to fight for the belt next time.
Then again, as he sees it, that’s not a mistake of marketing so much as the natural and justifiable order of things.
“If [Bowles] is the number one contender and I beat him, then what’s the sense of going any lower than that?” Faber said. “It doesn’t make any sense. If he beats me, that’s a different story. But I’m not going to let that happen. There’s a reason I’ve been at the top of the weight class — any weight class — since I started this sport, and that’s because there’s not many guys up there that can beat me.”
Of course, you could also make the case that one reason why Faber never falls far from a title shot is his popularity with fans. With or without the belt he’s still one of, if not the biggest draws below 155 pounds, and some would say that the UFC grants him special treatment because of it. Why else would exactly half of his last eight fights have been title fights, even though he lost all of them?
Bowles thinks he has a pretty good idea. Not that he’s terribly upset about it.
“Some people are going to be popular and some people aren’t. Sometimes you’re just gifted with that. It’s like the cool kid in school: you don’t know why he’s cool, but he is. I happen to not have it. Some people have it. Faber has it. It is what it is.”
For Bowles, a win over Faber might be a chance to get some of that popularity to rub off on him, or at least get enough of the pixie dust to earn him another shot at Cruz.
For Faber, it’s a chance yet another crack at that same title. This time he even has a plan for how to get through to the dense judges at cageside.
“You’ve got to paint a picture that a kindergartner could understand,” Faber explained. “So [if] attempting 12 takedowns and getting one is what I have to do to tell them that, hey, I’m going to win this fight, then so be it. If slap-boxing and touching a guy a couple times instead of knocking him down is what I’ve got to do, I’ll do some of that in addition to knocking him down. You’ve just got to do more.”
Not that he’s still stewing over that loss or anything. Not at all.
Filed under: UFCSAN JOSE, Calif. — The old Wanderlei Silva is still in there somewhere. You know he is. You catch glimpses, like the shadow of the famous tattoo on the back of his head, now just barely showing through his hair. You see his old face lu…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The old Wanderlei Silva is still in there somewhere. You know he is. You catch glimpses, like the shadow of the famous tattoo on the back of his head, now just barely showing through his hair. You see his old face lurking there just beneath the taut mask of his new one, and you know.
He knows you, too. Better than you think. He knows what you’ve been saying about him. He knows you wanted him to quit after he got knocked out by Chris Leben in his last fight. He also knows you said it out of love and a genuine sense of compassion, and he’s not mad at you, even if you just don’t get it.
“After that last fight,” Silva said, “it’s normal.”
In other words, when he gets knocked out he fully expects the criticism and the retirement talk to start up again. But he’s not ready to go just yet, no matter what you or Dana White or even his peers say about it.
Ask Silva why he’s still getting in the cage at 35, now that he doesn’t need the fame or the money anymore, and he’ll tell you that it’s simple: he just wants to show us all that he can still fight.
“I don’t know how long, but I can do it right now,” he said.
And the knockouts? The increasing frequency with which he’s ended his nights asleep on the mat? The fights he has no memory of beyond one or two good blows? He takes worse than that in sparring, he said, as if that’s supposed to be somehow encouraging. Besides, the doctors look at him before and after every fight, and they tell him his brain is fine, he insisted.
“I think the punches make me more smart,” he joked. “They shake my head up.”
But it’s not a laughing matter to anyone else. Not to UFC president Dana White, who says he could still make money by putting weathered old fighters like Silva and Chuck Liddell into one brain-damaging brawl after another at the end of their careers, but “I don’t want to make one dollar of that kind of money.”
Not to former foe Dan Henderson, who himself added to Silva’s knockout total when he starched him back in 2007 — the second outright KO he’d suffered in a year’s time inside the Pride ring.
“I think his ability to take a punch has gone down,” Henderson said of Silva at Wednesday’s open workouts. “His chin isn’t there anymore, and with his style it’s not conducive to winning fights if you’re going to go out there and bang with guys and you can’t take a punch. It’s unfortunate. I was a big fan of his as well, and I loved watching him fight. But that happens I think to a lot of guys with that style — Chuck [Liddell] is the same way, that’s his style too. There just comes a time when you’ve got to realize that.”
Even Cung Le, Silva’s opponent at UFC 139 on Saturday night, agreed that the hits have taken their toll on “The Axe Murderer.”
“It’s true. You take a lot of damage and it adds up,” said Le. “But I don’t know. Some fighters, they pull another fight out of their back pocket and they rise to the occasion.”
Obviously, that’s what Silva is hoping for on Saturday night, but his aspirations don’t end there. His fans might be hoping that he can win one last battle and then ride off into the sunset, but he’s not. To hear him tell it, he’s nowhere near done — and that’s the scary part.
“My dream is, I start my career right now, because right now is another moment in this sport,” said Silva. “This sport is so big. I hope I’m still fighting for a couple more years.”
And sure, he’s had a great run. From when he first knocked out a teenage Muay Thai champion in a tournament in Brazil when he was 15, to the wars he waged in the Pride ring, he’s been to the mountaintop and back several times by now. Can’t he just be content with that, people wonder. Doesn’t he know that he has nothing left to prove in this sport?
The answer seems to be: not really. Because the people who make that claim are usually the same people who, with their very next breath, tell him he can’t do this anymore. And that’s what he’s trying to prove, Silva said. That those people are wrong. That he has not just one good fight, but several left in him.
“I have a great career,” he said. “I fought with the best guys in the world. I feel good about what I did in the past, but I know I can do better. I can still fight. I can be competitive right now.”
And if he can’t? If he steps into the cage with Le and ends up watching the ending on a big screen after the fact? What then?
Don’t expect him to doff his cap and announce that he’s had enough. Within the Silva camp, no one appears to be even considering that option. Of course, they assume he’s going to win, but even if he doesn’t get ’em this time, he’ll get ’em next time, said longtime trainer Rafael Cordeiro.
“His last fight, he was ready. He was. But now, I think it’s Wanderlei’s moment.”
This is part of the problem. Because you can’t simultaneously prepare for victory while also preparing for the consequences of defeat. And after spending your entire adult life pursuing one goal, you can’t give it up just because of one bad night. If you were the kind of person who could do that, you’d never have gotten here in the first place.
But the end is coming, as it comes for every fighter. Somewhere in that brain that has, by Silva’s reckoning, benefited from one good shaking after another, he knows this. He’s just doesn’t see any reason why the end has to come right now. Not that he’ll be any more ready in six months, or maybe even a year. Which makes you wonder: what’s it going to take? How will he recognize the end for what it is?
“Good question,” he said, after a pause. “In the moment, we’re going to know.”
And sometimes, sure, that’s the way it works. You see the exit coming and you know when to get off. Other times you find out later, when you see it in the rearview mirror. Then it only gets farther and farther away as you plow forward, trying to make up your mind about what to do next.
2011 has been a tough year for longtime MMA fans, as we’ve seen some of the greatest fighters of all time decide to hang up their gloves for good. Randy Couture, BJ Penn and Mirko Cro Cop have all decided to call it a career after recent los…
2011 has been a tough year for longtime MMA fans, as we’ve seen some of the greatest fighters of all time decide to hang up their gloves for good.
Randy Couture, BJ Penn and Mirko Cro Cop have all decided to call it a career after recent losses, and this weekend we may have to add another fighter to that list.
Wanderlei Silva is one of the best fighters to ever step into the cage (or a ring for you PRIDE fans), but his current UFC run has been disastrous, as he has gone just 2-4 since entering the Octagon back in December of 2007.
Wanderlei has been looking more and more mediocre with every fight, and it is getting depressing to watch a legend like “The Axe Murderer” decline so quickly.
While Silva put on inspired performances against Chuck Liddell and Rich Franklin over the last few years and even has a win over current middleweight contender Michael Bisping, it has become painfully obvious that Silva is always at risk when he steps into the cage, as his ability to take a punch has all but disappeared.
Losing fights to Rampage Jackson and Chris Leben by knockout is acceptable, but when you look at how easily those fighters put Silva to sleep, safety has to be a concern if you’re Joe Silva and thinking about putting Wanderlei on future cards, especially if he is knocked out by Cung Le at UFC 139.
This is why Silva needs to retire after his fight this weekend.
He will always be a fan favorite, and his legacy is still intact as one of the baddest men to ever compete in organized competition, so why not go out while you still have a little dignity?
Fans don’t want to see him go out like Liddell did, getting knocked out over and over again, and the UFC might see enough of a reason to let him go if he loses again anyway.
No one wants to see Wanderlei slumming it on the regional scene again, and even if he went to Bellator it would still be more depressing than exciting.
Wanderlei has nothing to gain by continuing his MMA career pass this weekend. And win or lose, he should hang up his gloves after he fights Le.
UFC 139 will take place Saturday, November 19 from the HP Pavilion in San Jose, CA. The fight card is stacked with former champions from various MMA promotions, including UFC, PRIDE, WEC and Strikeforce.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Bantamweight champion 
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The old