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As the gravity of what just happened sank in, Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White’s sickness became severe.
“I’m really not feeling good, let someone else talk,” White announced to reporters late Friday night following the first-round technical knockout loss and subsequent retirement by heavyweight Brock Lesnar, the organization’s most popular fighter.
Indeed, White has some thinking to do.
PHOTOS: UFC 141
Even though he fought only seven times in the UFC Lesnar was a pay-per-view audience magnet because of his compelling past as a “champion” in the scripted action of World Wrestling Entertainment.
He reigned as heavyweight champion, headlined UFC 100, continued to generate the most Internet traffic of any mixed martial arts fighter and actually has fights left on his contract.
His departure is sobering, perhaps sickening.
Looking around, the UFC’s next most popular champion, Georges St-Pierre, is recovering from a knee injury and likely out of action for nine months. Middleweight champion Anderson Silva has cleaned out his division. And Lesnar’s conqueror, Alistair Overeem, is a lesser-known veteran of other circuits who made his UFC debut Friday.
Overeem’s next fight ikely will be in the summer against UFC heavyweight champion Junior Dos Santos, who will be making his first title defense.
White and UFC Chairman Lorenzo Fertitta took the high road with Lesnar Saturday even after the fighter blew off the post-fight news conference of his final fight.
White said, “When a guy decides he wants to retire, you let him do it. This is not, ‘Go hit a ball with a stick for the next two or three years on your way out.’ This is the real deal, guys. We’ll figure it out.”
Fertitta maintained he’d have to “look up” how many UFC fights Lesnar had on his UFC contract, adding, “Doesn’t matter. If he’s done, he’s done.”
What complicates this situation is the depth of the behind-the-scenes plotting about Lesnar’s post-UFC career.
He told the MGM Grand Garden Arena crowd that he was poised to retire if he lost Friday after battling for two years the effects of the intestinal disease diverticulitis. Lesnar said if he won in Las Vegas, he would pursue a chance to recapture the belt he took from Randy Couture in 2008 and lost three title defenses later to Cain Velasquez in October 2010.
“Tonight is the last time you’ll see me in the octagon,” Lesnar said.
Said White: “I had no idea he was going to do that. There were no signs.”
Some wonder if Lesnar, 34, would have bolted from the UFC if he could have beaten Overeem and Dos Santos, exiting with belt in hand.
There have been rumors dating to last year that Lesnar was exploring a return to WWE. He told The Times recently he wouldn’t shy from doing business with Vince McMahon.
The WWE will start a new television network April 1 when it stages its annual Wrestlemania event in Miami, and it is feasible he could be added with a UFC blessing to appear at the event alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena and special guest Shaquille O’Neal.
READ MORE HERE
Source: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-spw-brock-lesner-ufc-114-20111231,0,2143070.story
It’s been a long time coming but Chicago is finally playing host to the UFC again! This will mark UFC’s chance at nationally televised redemption after the disastrous 60 second bout between Junior dos Santos and Cain Velasquez. Not only will we get a look at Rashad Evans, but we’ll witness a stiff test for Chael Sonnen (left), who will face Mark Munoz in just his second trip to the octogon after his year-long suspension for performance enhancing drugs.
READ ON:Tickets go on sale to the general public this Friday (12/9) though a pre-sale period begins on Wednesday.
As MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) reported on Saturday, Evans vs. Davis will be contested as a five-round non-title fight, according to a UFC official. Both co-headliners serve as title eliminators, and each winner is promised a title shot.READ MORE AND SEE THE FULL CARD HERE
Source: http://mmajunkie.com/news/26388/ufc-on-fox-2-evans-vs-davis-tickets-on-sale-this-week.mma
The Ultimate Fighting Championship bought its way into Saturday’s San Jose debut in more ways than one.
This weekend’s UFC 139 (6 p.m., online Facebook stream; 8 p.m. ET, Spike TV; 9 p.m. ET, pay-per-view) card in San Jose includes three bouts involving six former champions: light heavyweights Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua; middleweights Cung Le vs. Wanderlei Silva; and Brian Bowles vs. Urijah Faber. But they earned most of their accolades before UFC absorbed them.
Henderson leads the pack as the reigning light-heavyweight champion of Strikeforce and one of the most accomplished American fighters in mixed martial arts. He was a beltholder in two divisions for Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships when UFC parent Zuffa bought that brand in 2007, though he subsequently lost title-unification bouts in both weight classes.
His main-event bout against Rua starts the third UFC stint for Henderson, who has had occasional disagreements with Dana White, president of Zuffa, usually during contract negotiations.
“I heard that Dana bought Strikeforce because he missed me,” Henderson joked Thursday.
Rua used to be UFC’s 205-pound champion, but he first became a star in mixed martial arts by winning a Pride tournament in 2005. Henderson also took part in that grand prix; the man who eliminated him, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, lost to Rua in the second round of the tourney.
Like Henderson, Rua and Silva signed with UFC in 2007 after the Pride acquisition.
Faber and Bowles became champions in World Extreme Cagefighting, a brand that Zuffa bought in 2006. The company retired the WEC brand at the end of last year and moved its top talent to UFC.
The winner of their bout likely gets a chance for a rematch with bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, who has beaten both men.
But Strikeforce will be represented most of all when UFC makes its debut in northern California’s most populous city. Strikeforce started in San Jose and it used to employ Le, who was the promotion’s middleweight champion from 2008 to 2009. A resident of San Jose, Le was a Strikeforce star going back to the late 1990s when the company promoted kickboxing rather than mixed martial arts. They entered the sport together in March 2006, when Le debuted in mixed martial arts by fighting on Strikeforce’s first MMA show.
Yet he’s more than happy to be fighting for UFC these days.
“UFC’s top of the food chain,” Le says. “It’s like going from the CFL to the NFL.”
By Sergio Non, USA TODAY
READ MORE ABOUT STRIKEFORCE AND BELLATOR EVENTS HERE
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/mma/post/2011-11-17/ufc-139-showcases-acquisitions/568079/1
We were grumpy about the 8p Central start times, too, Dana!
Man oh man, we get that the East Coast is the center of the universe, but it was such a drag for the UFC start times on its pay-per-views starting so damn early! After a seven-month experiment of holding their pay-per-view events an hour earlier, the UFC have decided to revert to the original pay-per-view start time of 10p.m. ET, starting with the blockbuster UFC 141 card this December.
Starting last April, the UFC responded to East Coast fan demand to start the pay-per-views an hour earlier, though the adjusted start time proved bothersome to many West Coast fans, who have swayed he promotion to move back to their original kick-off time of 10p.m. ET.
The start-time move may also be in response to dwindling pay-per-view buys reported over the last seven months.
UFC 141 is still materializing, but has been confirmed by the promotion to take place this December 30 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The card is expected to feature a main event between heavyweight MMA superstars Brock Lesnar and Alistair Overeem, competing in a a five-round, non-title main event. In addition to that match-up, welterweight fights between Johny Hendricks and Jon Fitch, as well as Dong Hyun Kim and Sean Pierson and a light heavyweight bout between Alexander Gustafsson and Vladimir Matyushenko have been rumored for the event.
Source: http://www.fightline.com/fl/news/2011/1011/545597/
God is this a sweet pic.
Q101.com has long reviled Larry Merchant. At times he has seemed drunk during his post-fight rambling soliloquies. Between him and the wretch-inducing HBO PBP man Jim Lampley, it’s been tough to sit through boxing on HBO for decades. That’s just our opinion. However…
The recent tussle between Merchant and the equally-addled Floyd Mayweather Jr. had us rooting for Larry. It may have been the only time we dug him. Now he’s facing slings and arrows from all sides, and in this fight, we’re actually rooting for the old coot. Read on:
HBO commentator Larry Merchant is a well-respected figure in the world of boxing.
The sports journalist has called hundreds, if not thousands of bouts in his 30-plus years with the organization, though no moment has been more significant than that of his in-ring encounter with pound-for-pound great, Floyd Mayweather.
After Mayweather knocked out former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz on Sept. 17, the colorful fighter drew the ire of Merchant.
After a deliberate clash of heads from Ortiz in the fourth round, the fighters were separated by referee Joe Cortez, who dropped the ball when he didn’t send both fighters to their respective corners. He called for a time-in while Ortiz appeared to distract, and shortly thereafter Mayweather connected on a powerful left-right combination that ended the bout.
Merchant infamously entered the ring questioning Mayweather’s tactics, to which the boxing great did not take kindly, vehemently calling for the HBO representative to be fired. Merchant responded by saying, “If I was 50 years younger, I’d kick your ass.”
Though he runs the largest mixed martial arts organization, UFC president Dana White has long been a boxing fanatic, even operating his own boxing aerobics classes before mogul-ing it up with the Las Vegas-based promotion.
Following the Mayweather-Merchant blowout, White didn’t hold back any punches about how he felt the veteran boxing commentator handled the situation.
“…Merchant gets in there—this babbling, senile, insane idiot. This guy has been around for way too long, he gets on there again and just embarrasses HBO,” the UFC exec began.
“Dude, you’re 107 years old. You have no business being on television anymore.”
Needless to say, White’s comments toward the 80-year-old (not 107) Merchant did not go unnoticed by the HBO representative, who complimented White on his endeavors by becoming a financially successful man thanks to his exploitation of this “Fight Club-esque” sport.
“Anyone who can make a multimillion dollar business out of street fighting has to be respected,” Merchant said when he spoke with BoxingScene.com.
“My opinion is that anyone is allowed to put up a tent, put on a show and invite people to come. And obviously he’s had a lot of success. Good for him.
“I don’t watch it. I don’t get a so-called sport in which you can have a 6-2 record and be called a world champion. I just don’t appreciate the finer points of MMA.”
Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/868545-hbos-larry-merchant-responds-to-ufc-president-dana-white
Stay tuned for White’s response. He won’t let this transgression go on without retort.
Ok, so it was Quinton Jackson. Q101.com is not going to annoint the kid, Jon Jones, all-world just for beating a has-been like Jackson. However, it was a dominating performance over a sometimes-dangerous opponent. The mission was to keep the trajectory Jones has been set upon to fight Rashad Evans, and then perhaps a dream match up with Anderson Silva.
We’re thrilled to report: Mission accomplished. We yearn for Jones-Silva. We need it. We can’t wait for it next spring. Here’s a writeup of the night’s main event from Kevin Richardson of http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com:
UFC light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones defended his title Saturday for the first time against Quinton “Rampage” Jackson at UFC 135 in Denver. Jones outfought Jackson for three rounds before he submitted him at 1:14 of the fourth round.
Jackson didn’t make any excuses for the loss. “I’m in the best shape of my life,” he said. “I thought he was all hype, but the kid is good. My hat is off to him. I did my best. This is the best Rampage ever, and he had me memorized.”
You could see from the start of the fight that Jackson’s game plan was flawed. Between rounds his corner would yell out instructions for him to get within punching range.
How can you get within punching range when your opponent has an 11-inch reach advantage?
From the start of the fight Jones used his legs, hands and elbows to dominate Jackson.
Jones came out in the first round in a low wrestling crouch, hoping to take Jackson down. “I had a little epiphany last night,” Jones said. “I have a really good misdirection single-leg takedown, where you fake to the right leg and shoot to the left leg, but it didn’t workout the way I planned.
Jones was able to get Jackson against the cage in the first round and throw elbows and knees. Jackson complained to referee Josh Rosenthal that he was hit in the groin, but the ref took no action. Jones ended the round with a wheel kick that didn’t connect, but it showed Jackson his arsenal of kicks.
In the second, Jones continued to land outside leg kicks and straight jabs on Jackson. In the round, Jones landed a sidekick to the midsection of Rampage. Just before the end of the round, Jones tried to land a triangle choke, but Jackson is saved by the end of the round.
Jackson team’s didn’t adjust its game plan when it was obvious that he couldn’t win trying to get within punching range to connect a big punch. This was the difference in the fight.
In the third, Jones once again dominated the round with kicks and takedowns. Jackson was able to land some leg kicks, but Jones had an answered by taking him down and mounting him. Jones landed an elbow on Jackson, creating a large cut of his right eye. Jones missed a flying knee attempt but landed a fast left.
“I was very confident and a couple of times I was getting desperate cause I wasn’t sticking to my game plan like I was trained to do,” Jackson said. “It was frustrating me. Jon’s presence and his reach is really hard to deal with.”
In the fourth round, Jones drove Jackson down against the base of the cage. Jackson tried to turn so that Jones wouldn’t reopen the cut over his eye, but Jones took his back. He sunk in his hooks to flatten Jackson out and executed a rear-naked choke. Jackson tapped at 1:14 of the fourth round. It’s was the first time Jackson had been submitted since Kazushi Sakuraba submitted him in 2001.
Source: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/sports/mma/blog/2011/09/ufc_champ_jon_jones_dominates.html
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