World Series of Fighting 4 headliner Angel DeAnda is an unheard of 14-1 underdog to highly regarded kickboxer Tyrone Spong, but that doesn’t mean “The Dream” is ready to lay down in tonight’s main event. As a matter of fact, he believes he can beat Spong striking and after that, he’d like a step up […]
World Series of Fighting 4 headliner Angel DeAnda is an unheard of 14-1 underdog to highly regarded kickboxer Tyrone Spong, but that doesn’t mean “The Dream” is ready to lay down in tonight’s main event. As a matter of fact, he believes he can beat Spong striking and after that, he’d like a step up […]
Fearsome Dutch kickboxer Tyrone Spong reappeared in the MMA world Saturday night at World Series of Fighting 4. Facing off with the virtually unknown Angel DeAnda, Spong scored a convincing, but not especially impressive, unanimous decision victory. From the very beginning of the fight, Spong peppered DeAnda with fearsome leg kicks. While DeAnda found homes […]
Fearsome Dutch kickboxer Tyrone Spong reappeared in the MMA world Saturday night at World Series of Fighting 4. Facing off with the virtually unknown Angel DeAnda, Spong scored a convincing, but not especially impressive, unanimous decision victory. From the very beginning of the fight, Spong peppered DeAnda with fearsome leg kicks. While DeAnda found homes […]
Nick Newell, the mixed martial artist who has made a sizable splash in the MMA world by finding success in spite of congenital amputation leaving him without half his left arm, made his long-awaited debut in a major promotion Saturday during World Series of Fighting 4. Newell made the most of that opportunity, scoring an […]
Nick Newell, the mixed martial artist who has made a sizable splash in the MMA world by finding success in spite of congenital amputation leaving him without half his left arm, made his long-awaited debut in a major promotion Saturday during World Series of Fighting 4. Newell made the most of that opportunity, scoring an […]
I’ve been speaking with Ray Sefo for a few minutes now and it doesn’t seem like he understands my question. I asked the multiple time Muay Thai world champion and successful kickboxing and MMA coach why he ever felt the need to step out of his comfort zone and fight under MMA rules.
The former K-1 star, now in his early forties, has fought three times in MMA and will once more tonight on the World Series of Fighting 4 card in California. The striking legend is also the President of WSOF.
I asked Sefo the question and he began to tell me of how he was introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA by his friend Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion, back in 2000 in Japan where they were both competing at the time. He then went on to describe his next step into MMA, then his next, but I felt I had to politely interrupt and reiterate my initial question. I wasn’t asking for a step by step process of how he got into MMA but why he ever decided to.
He had made a name and good living from kickboxing. He transitioned into a full-time career coaching other elite fighters and now Sefo is a top executive at a major MMA organization.
He understands me quite well. Turns out that I was the one that didn’t understand Ray Sefo. “Listen, I’ve always fought,” he explains patiently.
“I’ve been boxing since I was a kid. I did Kung Fu for years. Back home when I started kickboxing my family all thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, they were suspicious of it because boxing was so big. But then they saw me fight and their minds changed. I love to learn and love to develop and challenge myself as a martial artist and fighter. MMA was the next natural step in that.”
I had been confused. To Ray Sefo, fighting isn’t a means of procuring and then protecting status at all costs. He wasn’t afraid of stepping out of his strength and comfort zone and fighting MMA. He isn’t afraid to continue to fight MMA now, in his forties and against younger opponents and risk losing.
I’ve been speaking with Ray Sefo for a few minutes now and it doesn’t seem like he understands my question. I asked the multiple time Muay Thai world champion and successful kickboxing and MMA coach why he ever felt the need to step out of his comfort zone and fight under MMA rules.
The former K-1 star, now in his early forties, has fought three times in MMA and will once more tonight on the World Series of Fighting 4 card in California. The striking legend is also the President of WSOF.
I asked Sefo the question and he began to tell me of how he was introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA by his friend Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion, back in 2000 in Japan where they were both competing at the time. He then went on to describe his next step into MMA, then his next, but I felt I had to politely interrupt and reiterate my initial question. I wasn’t asking for a step by step process of how he got into MMA but why he ever decided to.
He had made a name and good living from kickboxing. He transitioned into a full-time career coaching other elite fighters and now Sefo is a top executive at a major MMA organization.
He understands me quite well. Turns out that I was the one that didn’t understand Ray Sefo. “Listen, I’ve always fought,” he explains patiently.
“I’ve been boxing since I was a kid. I did Kung Fu for years. Back home when I started kickboxing my family all thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, they were suspicious of it because boxing was so big. But then they saw me fight and their minds changed. I love to learn and love to develop and challenge myself as a martial artist and fighter. MMA was the next natural step in that.”
I had been confused. To Ray Sefo, fighting isn’t a means of procuring and then protecting status at all costs. He wasn’t afraid of stepping out of his strength and comfort zone and fighting MMA. He isn’t afraid to continue to fight MMA now, in his forties and against younger opponents and risk losing.
For Ray Sefo, fighting is breathing. He fights, that’s it. The particular rules he does so under are incidental.
Even though Sefo always respected MMA enough to view it as a new and unique challenge, at first he says he underestimated certain elements of it.
“I always had respect for submissions because of my friend Royce Gracie but when I started training for MMA I honestly kind of dismissed wrestling at first. I thought that stuff was easy,” he says with a chuckle, acknowledging the profound ignorance of his old attitude.
“Then I met Randy [Couture] back in 2005 and started training with these guys in wrestling. Man, wrestling is one of the hardest workouts you can do. There’s so much skill involved in it.”
Sefo tells CagePotato that, heading into tonight, he’s gotten a full training camp behind him. He’s had a chance to work on just those skills and others needed to fight his opponent, twenty five fight veteran Dave Huckaba. He partially blames an abbreviated training camp for his 2011 Strikeforce loss to Valentijn Overeem.
Sefo says that the plan is for this bout to be the final fight of his career. He says a sense of finality has not permeated his training camp, however.
“This possibly being my last match isn’t something that I’ve been thinking about each day. It’s the same thing it always is,” Sefo says.
“I go into the gym and train with the guys each day like always. I do that when I’m not fighting, I do it now training for my own fight and even if this is my final fight, I’ll do it every day afterwards. I first put on a pair of boxing gloves when I was a kid. I put them on today and I’ll keep putting them on the rest of my life.”
I’ve been speaking with Ray Sefo for a few minutes now and it doesn’t seem like he understands my question. I asked the multiple time Muay Thai world champion and successful kickboxing and MMA coach why he ever felt the need to step out of his comfort zone and fight under MMA rules.
The former K-1 star, now in his early forties, has fought three times in MMA and will once more tonight on the World Series of Fighting 4 card in California. The striking legend is also the President of WSOF.
I asked Sefo the question and he began to tell me of how he was introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA by his friend Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion, back in 2000 in Japan where they were both competing at the time. He then went on to describe his next step into MMA, then his next, but I felt I had to politely interrupt and reiterate my initial question. I wasn’t asking for a step by step process of how he got into MMA but why he ever decided to.
He had made a name and good living from kickboxing. He transitioned into a full-time career coaching other elite fighters and now Sefo is a top executive at a major MMA organization.
He understands me quite well. Turns out that I was the one that didn’t understand Ray Sefo. “Listen, I’ve always fought,” he explains patiently.
“I’ve been boxing since I was a kid. I did Kung Fu for years. Back home when I started kickboxing my family all thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, they were suspicious of it because boxing was so big. But then they saw me fight and their minds changed. I love to learn and love to develop and challenge myself as a martial artist and fighter. MMA was the next natural step in that.”
I had been confused. To Ray Sefo, fighting isn’t a means of procuring and then protecting status at all costs. He wasn’t afraid of stepping out of his strength and comfort zone and fighting MMA. He isn’t afraid to continue to fight MMA now, in his forties and against younger opponents and risk losing.
I’ve been speaking with Ray Sefo for a few minutes now and it doesn’t seem like he understands my question. I asked the multiple time Muay Thai world champion and successful kickboxing and MMA coach why he ever felt the need to step out of his comfort zone and fight under MMA rules.
The former K-1 star, now in his early forties, has fought three times in MMA and will once more tonight on the World Series of Fighting 4 card in California. The striking legend is also the President of WSOF.
I asked Sefo the question and he began to tell me of how he was introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA by his friend Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion, back in 2000 in Japan where they were both competing at the time. He then went on to describe his next step into MMA, then his next, but I felt I had to politely interrupt and reiterate my initial question. I wasn’t asking for a step by step process of how he got into MMA but why he ever decided to.
He had made a name and good living from kickboxing. He transitioned into a full-time career coaching other elite fighters and now Sefo is a top executive at a major MMA organization.
He understands me quite well. Turns out that I was the one that didn’t understand Ray Sefo. “Listen, I’ve always fought,” he explains patiently.
“I’ve been boxing since I was a kid. I did Kung Fu for years. Back home when I started kickboxing my family all thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, they were suspicious of it because boxing was so big. But then they saw me fight and their minds changed. I love to learn and love to develop and challenge myself as a martial artist and fighter. MMA was the next natural step in that.”
I had been confused. To Ray Sefo, fighting isn’t a means of procuring and then protecting status at all costs. He wasn’t afraid of stepping out of his strength and comfort zone and fighting MMA. He isn’t afraid to continue to fight MMA now, in his forties and against younger opponents and risk losing.
For Ray Sefo, fighting is breathing. He fights, that’s it. The particular rules he does so under are incidental.
Even though Sefo always respected MMA enough to view it as a new and unique challenge, at first he says he underestimated certain elements of it.
“I always had respect for submissions because of my friend Royce Gracie but when I started training for MMA I honestly kind of dismissed wrestling at first. I thought that stuff was easy,” he says with a chuckle, acknowledging the profound ignorance of his old attitude.
“Then I met Randy [Couture] back in 2005 and started training with these guys in wrestling. Man, wrestling is one of the hardest workouts you can do. There’s so much skill involved in it.”
Sefo tells CagePotato that, heading into tonight, he’s gotten a full training camp behind him. He’s had a chance to work on just those skills and others needed to fight his opponent, twenty five fight veteran Dave Huckaba. He partially blames an abbreviated training camp for his 2011 Strikeforce loss to Valentijn Overeem.
Sefo says that the plan is for this bout to be the final fight of his career. He says a sense of finality has not permeated his training camp, however.
“This possibly being my last match isn’t something that I’ve been thinking about each day. It’s the same thing it always is,” Sefo says.
“I go into the gym and train with the guys each day like always. I do that when I’m not fighting, I do it now training for my own fight and even if this is my final fight, I’ll do it every day afterwards. I first put on a pair of boxing gloves when I was a kid. I put them on today and I’ll keep putting them on the rest of my life.”
Like many kids, young Nick Newell dabbled in a number of sports as a child. First, there was soccer, then karate and baseball.
Nothing really stuck with him, however, until he joined his high school’s wrestling team as a freshman. The fact that he was missing the lower portion of his left arm didn’t seem to matter to Newell.
His family had always encouraged Nick to take part in whatever interested him, like all the other kids, and now his interest was in combat sports. “I really loved one on one aspect,” he tells CagePotato in the days leading up to his fight against Keon Caldwell on tonight’s World Series of Fighting 4 event in California.
“I don’t like depending on anyone else to get the job done. At the end of the day, you have no excuses no one to blame.”
That Newell lost his first fifteen wrestling matches didn’t put a damper on his enthusiasm for wrestling, and it also didn’t bring scorn of teammates mad that he was losing so much. “I was the team’s only 103 pounder so if I went out there and got a forfeit win it was better than nothing,” he tells with a laugh.
“I got my balls busted because I was a freshman but that was about it. The wrestling team is a family. And the coach had a lot of faith in me expected a lot out of me, even when I sucked. He always believed in me. Everyone saw how hard I worked as well. You’re together six days a week and you develop a bond.”
During college Newell decided that he wanted to fight MMA because, well, he saw MMA fights and knew that he could be good enough to do it. “I knew that I wanted to fight when I went to see fights for the first time,” he says.
“There were some fights around where I was training wrestling in college and some friends asked if I wanted to go see some fights. I said, ‘yeah, I’ll go.’ When we were watching I thought to myself, ‘I could beat these guys.’ So, instead of just talking about it, I went out and started training and did it.”
Indeed he has. The lightweight has put together a perfect 9-0 record as a professional over the past four years and became the XFC champion.
Tonight, he makes the step up to The World Series of Fighting.
Like many kids, young Nick Newell dabbled in a number of sports as a child. First, there was soccer, then karate and baseball.
Nothing really stuck with him, however, until he joined his high school’s wrestling team as a freshman. The fact that he was missing the lower portion of his left arm didn’t seem to matter to Newell.
His family had always encouraged Nick to take part in whatever interested him, like all the other kids, and now his interest was in combat sports. “I really loved one on one aspect,” he tells CagePotato in the days leading up to his fight against Keon Caldwell on tonight’s World Series of Fighting 4 event in California.
“I don’t like depending on anyone else to get the job done. At the end of the day, you have no excuses no one to blame.”
That Newell lost his first fifteen wrestling matches didn’t put a damper on his enthusiasm for wrestling, and it also didn’t bring scorn of teammates mad that he was losing so much. “I was the team’s only 103 pounder so if I went out there and got a forfeit win it was better than nothing,” he tells with a laugh.
“I got my balls busted because I was a freshman but that was about it. The wrestling team is a family. And the coach had a lot of faith in me expected a lot out of me, even when I sucked. He always believed in me. Everyone saw how hard I worked as well. You’re together six days a week and you develop a bond.”
During college Newell decided that he wanted to fight MMA because, well, he saw MMA fights and knew that he could be good enough to do it. “I knew that I wanted to fight when I went to see fights for the first time,” he says.
“There were some fights around where I was training wrestling in college and some friends asked if I wanted to go see some fights. I said, ‘yeah, I’ll go.’ When we were watching I thought to myself, ‘I could beat these guys.’ So, instead of just talking about it, I went out and started training and did it.”
Indeed he has. The lightweight has put together a perfect 9-0 record as a professional over the past four years and became the XFC champion.
Tonight, he makes the step up to The World Series of Fighting. In his opponent Caldwell, Newell will be facing a man previously selected for The Ultimate Fighter. If Newell wins, the plan is for him to take part in the WSOF lightweight tournament to crown a champion.
That tournament could also include Dan Lauzon, JZ Calvacante and Tyson Griffin. Lauzon and Griffin are UFC veterans and Calvacante was a top-ranked international champion for years.
Newell has said he wanted better competition and he’s certainly getting it at WSOF. “I take it one fight at a time,” he says.
“My goal is always to fight better and better competition. If keep winning I’m gonna force people to recognize me. Everyone in the WSOF is a fantastic fighter. I’m happy with any fight I get. I’m ready to raise my stock. If I win this fight and I win the tournament, I’ll definitely be up there.”
