Why aren’t more people talking about how great this fight between Hideo Tokoro and Darren Uyenoyama was? Easily the fight of the night at Dream.4, these two showed us what great MMA really looks like. It’s just a shame that it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle with all the action over the weekend.
I’m not really a big fan of the Olympics, as I think the whole concept is one of the biggest con jobs in the history of sports.
That being said, I will still be tuning in with great interest when it comes to the Greco-Roman and Freestyle wrestling events. I’m interested in how the wrestling [...]
Former IFL fighter and Team Quest member Devin Cole was arrested for rape in Oregon over the weekend. Sherdog reports that Cole was picked up at 7:40 am on Saturday morning and charged with two counts of first-degree sexual penetration and two counts of first-degree sodomy and is being held on $5 million bail.
Needless to say, this is very bad news for the MMA community. The former All-American wrestler at Southern Oregon University left Team Quest recently and defeated Vince Lucero in the Palace Fighting Championships in May.
(Nick Diaz makes the most of the one comment allotted him by Bill Goldberg.)
Here’s what seems just a little disingenuous about this situation in Elite XC over the weekend: you don’t invite/allow Nick Diaz into the cage here if you don’t want trouble. If you truly want to let KJ Noons have his moment and enjoy his successful title defense, you keep Diaz and his brother out of there altogether. The fact that Elite XC went the opposite direction really only tells you that they were probably hoping for a WWE moment such as this one.
Judging by the past couple of Elite XC events, it’s starting to seem as if they are interested in putting on a certain kind of fight. They either want the type that is entirely one-sided, or they want the kind that stays standing for the entire fight and ends in a knockout. Of course, getting both is ideal, but they’ll settle for one or the other.
Perhaps this is what Gary Shaw meant when he said he wanted only “action fighters” and not guys who would lay on the mat and have a love fest. As we’ve all seen, there’s nothing that endears you to MMA fans so much as suggesting that ground fighting is gay.
But when you combine that with the post-fight antics they encouraged this weekend, it makes you wonder what’s going on over at Elite XC. Are they trying to out-sensationalize the UFC? Do they think that a reputation for mismatches and quick knockouts and post-fight brawls will help them siphon off some the UFC viewership that has been slow to embrace MMA outside of the Octagon?
Maybe the better question is, could it work? Maybe. It might not be the best thing for the sport in the long run, but it might be effective for a little while. If people start tuning in to see what crazy thing will happen on Elite XC rather than coming just to watch the fights, it still equals ratings in the end. That might be all Elite XC wants, however they have to get it.
FiveOuncesOfPain.com has learned that EliteXC signed a pair of top fight prospects over the weekend in Honolulu, Hawaii while conducting its “Return of the King” event.
According to Mike Camp of F1 Management, the promotion has inked both Torrance Taylor (pictured) and Tiawan Howard to three-fight, one-year contracts. The half-brothers both train out of Ohio [...]
(The Fertitta brothers doing their best to look upstanding.)
With their efforts to get MMA legalized in New York, the UFC has drawn a lot of attention in the Big Apple recently, and not all of it is positive. New York Magazine published its own piece on the legislative push and the UFC itself recently, and they aren’t afraid of a little implied character assassination in their articles:
Frank Fertitta III and his brother Lorenzo made the cover of Forbes last month for what the magazine dubbed their “Ultimate Cash Machine.†The Fertittas come from a long line of casino entrepreneurs. Their grandfather, Anthony, ran gambling halls in Galveston, Texas, where he was convicted for beating up a Life reporter who came to town to investigate the scene. Frank Jr., the brothers’ father, was running Las Vegas’s Fremont Hotel when the Feds busted up the place to break a money-skimming operation (he wasn’t charged); the ordeal is said to have become the basis for Martin Scorsese’s Casino. He later opened a local-friendly casino miles away from the Strip, and he passed that business to his sons.
Now that’s how you suggest that someone is an immoral crook without ever explicitly saying it. You just mention that they come from a long line of crooks, and then let the reader come to their own conclusions after that. I hope you’re taking notes, journalism students.
The article also adds some insight as to the obstacles the UFC faces in the New York legislature, and it doesn’t seem as if the Elite XC event on CBS helped them any.
During what should have been a routine vote in the Assembly’s Tourism, Arts, and Sports Committee on June 11, Assemblyman Bob Reilly, a former high-school teacher, made an impassioned speech against the legalization measure—he asked why a state that banned cockfighting and dogfighting should allow this—that turned several lawmakers against it. A new vote is scheduled for June 16, with an eye to getting it passed by the end of the session, June 23. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver doesn’t watch UFC fights. (“Not a fan,†he declares.) Senate leader Joe Bruno, a former boxer, hasn’t weighed in. And Governor David Paterson says he’s not sure how he feels about it. But he was listening to a recent CBS telecast of a fight, the first appearance of a mixed-martial-arts event on network TV, when one combatant’s bulbous, cauliflower ear popped and spurted a fountain of blood. “It was gross,†says the governor.
I’m sorry, he was listening to the event? The governor has time to listen to MMA events, but his eyes are simply too busy to be bothered with watching it? And how did he know it was gross if he didn’t see it?
EDIT: Actually, he’s blind, as readers pointed out, so it turns out I’m the idiot.
If you watched DREAM 4 on HDNet, you were amazed by the submission move Shinya Aoki pulled out of his bag of tricks. Bas Rutten was commentating and said he had never seen a submission like that ever before - it was a version of gogoplata from the top position.
We here are Five Ounces of [...]
(’Little Wanderlei and I are ready to do our duty for Mr. Dana White.’)
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the UFC, it’s that if you invited them to your birthday party and they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t just not show up. They’d throw their own damn party on the same damn night, and it would have a petting zoo and “Rampage” Jackson would make balloon animals and even your closest friends would be tempted to go check it out. It ain’t nice, but that’s just how the UFC do.
They employed this strategy against Elite XC with their ‘Ultimate Iceman’ special on Spike TV, hoping to steal a few viewers. Apparently they’ve decided that simply repackaging old fights isn’t enough, so they’re taking their counter-programming efforts to a whole new level to try and stop Affliction in its tracks.
Sherdog reports that the UFC is trying to put together a live event on July 19, the same night as Affliction’s MMA debut, and they plan to offer it free on Spike. Both Wanderlei Silva and Brandon Vera have been approached about fighting on it, possibly against each other.
Heavyweight prospect Cain Velasquez has also been approached about fighting on the show, according to MMA Mania.
This means the UFC is trying to put together a show on about five weeks notice, which isn’t easy, all just to screw with Affliction. Of course, they’ll probably also have it in Las Vegas, where maybe they can steal some would-be ticket buyers from southern California. Affliction almost has to feel pleased that the UFC hates them this much already.
Maybe in the future this will become a yardstick by which to measure how seriously the UFC takes a competitor. If they throw together a last-minute live show to rival yours, then you’ve got them a little worried. If you’re only kind of on their radar, they’ll settle for a Spike TV highlight show of some kind. ‘Ultimate Iceman’ means you’ve got their attention. ‘Ultimate Koscheck’ however, means you’re really a nobody.
Remember when it was announced that an EliteXC welterweight title match between Jake Shields vs. Drew Fickett had been re-scheduled for June 14 in Honolulu, Hawaii?
Then remember when it was postponed after Fickett reportedly had suffered an injury?
Well, soon after it was announced that Fickett was scheduled to fight Ryan Ford for the vacant MFC [...]
Sherdog.com is reporting this morning that the UFC and Spike TV are considering a live special that would take place Saturday, July19.
Sherdog is citing multiple unnamed sources within the television industry as indicating that the event is a possibility.
If the July 19 date rings a bell, it is because it is the same date as [...]
