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Monday maintenance: Lots of activity in the UK
By Zach Arnold | August 20, 2007
K-1 announced Masato vs. Buakaw Por Pramuk for their 10/3 K-1 World MAX tournament show in Tokyo at Nippon Budokan.
Just an embarassing article in Advertising Age parroting The Zuffa Myth. The author’s e-mail address is here.
Here is the Cage Rage 23 card line-up, set for 9/22 in London.
IFL TV is coming to Sweden.
Kid Nate has the fifth installment of his MMA history series online, discussing the reign of Royce Gracie.
The Fightworks Podcast has a 2007 BJJ Mundials preview show for you.
Onto today’s headlines.
- MMA Weekly: Brad Pickett scores win at Cage Rage Contenders
- Sam Caplan: What’s next for Wanderlei Silva?
- Bloody Elbow: Inside the Cage radio and some good news
- Fightlinker: Maybe Alberto Crane isn’t such a can after all
- Dave Doyle (Yahoo Sports): Gabriel Gonzaga sniffs out his biggest opportunity
- Steve Sievert (Houston Chronicle): GSP searches for a new beginning
- MMA Madness: Cage Warriors’ 10/14 ‘Enter the Rough House’ card taking shape
- MMA Analyst: An interview with Cub Swanson, WEC featherweight contender
- The Berkshire Eagle (MA): Muay Thai’s master student, Elcio Machado, in ultimate bout (Machado is a manager at a Dunkin’ Donuts)
- The Dayton Daily News (OH): Love him or hate him, Brandon Vera is back in UFC action
- Gambling 911: The betting lines for UFC 74’s main event
- The Hickory Daily Record (NC): Ailing martial arts teacher Russell Willey aims to be positive influence
- The Hawke’s Bay Today (New Zealand): Daniel Digby makes his mark
- The Baltimore Sun: Matt Serra is coming to Baltimore
- Radio (Eddie Goldman): Dr. Margaret Goodman on boxing’s watergate
- MMA on Tap: King of the Cage – Brawl at the Mall event results
Topics: Boxing, Japan, K-1, Media, MMA, UFC, UK, WEC, Zach Arnold | 42 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Here is a link to add, Chris Howie’s new interview with Joe Stevenson.
Joe is genuinely one of the most well spoken people in the sport.
hey folks, we are doing a Live broadcast of MMA Smackdown tonight. We will still be publishing on Wednesday but you can listen to the show early tonight, at around 4:30 CT.
If the .pls isn’t working for you, then just type the following into your winamp or windows media player:
http://mma.komikazee.com/uploads/mmasmackdownradio.pls
http://powerofinformation.net:8000
There’s music on for you to enjoy in the meantime 🙂
Seeing how somebody edited my link to fit instead of just deleting it, I’d say he doesn’t have a problem with it… and I wasn’t plugging MMANews, I was doing a favor for Chris Howie, who happens to be a selfless person who interviews fighters in his spare time. I’m not sure what you think a “fluff interview” is, but Chris often gets answers out of fighters than nobody else seems to be able to.
Come on people, Zach’s a teddy bear on links. But speaking of links, Zach the link to Advertising Age is broken.
The link to Ad Age is fixed. (Thanks Euth.)
Regarding MMA News links… I got no problem with them. My friendly advice to the folks over there is to create two RSS feeds – one for news, one for interviews.
First of TV4 is huge here in Sweden it’s the biggest privately owned tv channel.
If IFL Battlegrounds were to be broadcasted on TV4 here in Sweden that would mean that IFL would soon be more recognized then the UFC as “mma”.
Can you imagine some swedes seeing the UFC and talking about “is that that IFL stuff?”.
However I think that they will put it on one of their smaller cable sister channels like they done to TUF here.
When I recently opened an issue of MAD Magazine while waiting at Penn Station for a train home, I saw a ‘MAD Magazine looks at… Mixed Martial Arts’ section which had some funny/awkward situations involving MMA fighters, refs and fans. Anyway, they kept on putting in IFL logos into the segment. Pretty decent semi-subliminal advertising, though I doubt it’ll be much help in the long run…
You gotta feel for Masato. Especially if the judges decide to prolong the beating he’s going to take for an inexplicable extra round, like they did the last time he fought BPP.
Steve Sievert says “Something tells me that GSP won’t get his hand raised Saturday night … call it a gut feeling. While all the changes St-Pierre made are designed to ensure there is no sequel to the Serra beat down, change of any kind is often disruptive and challenging. That, coupled with the fact that GSP has had some trouble with guys who are solid on the ground (see the first Hughes fight and the battle with Penn), has me leaning Koscheck in this one.”
I’ll have to totally disagree with Steve on this one.
If anything, GSP has shown that he is able to dominate good wrestlers.
The first Hughes fight was long ago. Their rematch is a better indication.
GSP has notable wins against the top wrestlers in the division, and Koscheck will only be another notch on the belt.
Glad to hear GKH point that out — Masato is going to take an unholy beating at the hands (elbows, feet, and knees) of Buakaw.
Speaking of links, here is one to an NBC video of your future UFC LW champion of the world, Frankie Edgar. The guy is still working his day job.
http://video.nbcsports.com/player/?id=141663
The IFL show in NJ had $300,000 worth of ticket sales. Perhaps the company has a chance after all…. Still highly unlikely, but that is a nice gate for them.
Buakaw is going to dash the hopes of the Japanese again.
Was there an official paid attendance figure released for the IFL NJ show?
Meltzer is the one who said it. And I typo’d it… It really is $350,000….. He didn’t have a paid attendance, but made the comment that he thought the majority of the 7,000 were paid attendance based on the ticket prices.
He also said that Arlovski has 1 fight left o his contract and his management is asking for a huge raise. This is likely why he is not fighting right now.
Keep in mind that Arlovski got $140,000 for a win at UFC 66. Making over $400,000 a year with 3 fights is about where he should be. Once again, bad management for him. He isn’t worth much more.
My semi-scientific guesstimate of the IFL attendance based on that figure is 3,500.
Watching that Royce video, I almost forgot what a DIRTY fighter Royce was back in the NHB days. I blame the Ken Shamrock fight for that, but holy hell the ref basically, actually LITERALLY had to PRY him off every opponent, who was frantically tapping anything in sight (including Royce’s face).
The Gracie’s don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to being model citizens. People often sing the praises of Renzo, and he has stepped & spit on his opponents. And Rickson kicked Funaki in the back after their Colosseum fight in 2000. He tried to pass it off as trying to wake him up. I never bought that excuse.
I can already tell just from reading the Sherdog p4p rankings that it’s going to cause a ton of controversy/bitching etc.
To me Sherk getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar negates most, if not all, of what he’s done since he entered the LW division.
The smaller guys didn’t get enough “love” imho.
I like Sam Caplan’s article on the dilemma with Silva. I wonder if Dana is gun-shy about all the “upsets” with all his big free agent signings and their flag bearers (I wrote in “quotes” just for you 45)?
(A) Does he cancel Liddell x Jardine and make Silva’s first fight against Liddell in December, hoping he can hype Silva on name and HL packages and hoping Jardine doesn’t catch Liddell?
(B) Does he feed Silva someone and risk him having a boring fight or catching one on the chin and then lose?
(C) Both.
Either (A), (B) or (C) could potentially be disastrous for Dana’s big dream fight.
Personally I say feed Silva a revenge win over Ortiz or let him plow Bonnar who I find to be pretty useless and unmarketable and then have the big one in Jan/Feb.
Thoughts?
“The smaller guys didn’t get enough “love” imho.”
If only Hokazono had’ve fought and beat Matsune, he would’ve been on there. I don’t think we’re far away from having a 145’er on there, as the talent pools start to merge and the top guys start fighting each other. You may even get a real small guy on there soon, if the winner of Mamoru-Urushitani can knock off BJ Kojima in a rematch.
The case began April 25 when investigators conducting a drug search at a massive home Vick built in Surry County found 66 dogs, some of them injured, and items typically used in dogfighting. They included a “rape stand” that holds aggressive dogs in place for mating and a “breakstick” used to pry open a dog’s mouth.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-vick-plea&prov=ap&type=lgns
“The only good that can come from this case is that the American people dedicate themselves to the task of rooting out dogfighting in every infected area where it thrives,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.
I’ve done some investigating and IFL will in all likelihood not be on the terrestrial TV4 but instead on the much smaller TV4 Sport that they’re re-launching September 1st. So this isn’t as big news as I first thought, but it’s still quite surprising.
Speaking of Sweden and MMA, when is Bobby Danger coming back?
Bobby “Danger” Rehman made a total ass of himself in a Swedish 60 minutes-esque program about nightclub security guards (which Bobby isn’t even licensed to work as) that beat up a teenage girl for no reason other than their own enjoyment, and even had the nerve to get her arrested by the police and subsequently convicted of assault in court. I won’t sum up the details here, but he came across as the most disgusting kind of person imaginable – When faced with the details dug up by the journalists (which proved beyond any doubt that he was the attacker and she was the victim) he lied openly and showed zero empathy for his victim(s?), etc… So my guess is that no Swedish promoters will want to deal with him, since the sport, just like in the US, is struggling to establish an image of legitimacy. The media would be all over them if they booked someone as shady as Bobby.
There’s an article, in Swedish, about the whole thing here:
http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=57059&a=665940
Hey, ukiro. Way to break my fucking heart.
The only thing that could make me happy now is if FinnFight came back, and another Lithuanian KO’d a guy with a throat punch.
There’s plenty of last minute replacement lithuanians and russians in finnish shows like Fight Festival and The Cage, but I’m afraid the SVOL-rules made throat punches illegal. Nothing like a good punch in the throat.
I really dig the Finnish MMA scene. Hopefully Rupponen impresses the Zuffa brass against Byrnes, and then Jerry Kvartstrom can come back and wreck shop in The Cage.
Cage Rage need to sort out these cards. Julius Francis. An old washed up out of shape HW boxer. Americans may remember him fighting Tyson and getting destroyed.
He comes in the same barber shop as me. I’m due a trim this week. Hopefully he will be in there and I can ask him what kind of training he has been doing to prepare himself for MMA. I know he used to do some sparring with Lee Murray but that was Murray trying to improve his boxing skills.
masato is a different fighter to what we’ve seen lately
i think we could see a surprise
Cage Rage is back in business with a decent card this time, after a few lacklustre ones. Still a freak main event though. I’m sure the money could be better spent elsewhere though I’m also sure they will get a good amount of shoddy regular media coverage over Francis’ debut.
Jerry Kvartström is currently working on to set up a fight night of his own in Turku in a month or so. He’ll probably make his comeback there.
Pontus said it pretty good above, and it’s pin accurate on what i was trying to get zach, jeff and erin to discuss on the latest radio show (haven’t had the time to listen to the second half of it yet so don’t know if they did mention it, been working eight days straight).
How will the ufc handle that the rest of the world doesn’t know of it? If Europe follows the american trend, mma will grow even more popular here as well, and if the ufc doesn’t provide the mma, the pontus scenario (almost as depicted in this fightlinker comic) could be plausible.
http://fightlinker.com/?p=134
And btw, i don’t believe they’re putting it on the terrestrial channel either. They have their asses full of stinking Beck-movies and loads of other crap that stupid Swedes wanna watch.
Man there are a lot of swedes showing up here. I thought I was the only one…
While Sweden is pretty small (9 million people), the market here is going crazy with the start of the fall training season – there are posters for martial arts gyms EVERYWHERE in Stockholm right now. On a single public announcement board (where anyone can post lost and found notes, etc) in the area where I live there are currently posters for aikido, karate, jiu-jutsu, brazilian jiu-jutsu, judo, muay thai, and an MMA gym. I reiterate, all these are in one single place, and this is just in the little area where I live, which isn’t even downtown or next to any of these gyms.
If this trend is similar across other european countries (I wouldn’t know), whoever gets properly established first will have a huge advantage, and it’s not entirely out of the question that the IFL can save themselves this way. Exciting times…
There are a ton of Lithuanians and Polish fighting up and down the UK every weekend, generally of a very low level. I do wonder where many of them are discovered
Nitpicking a bit here, but theres only three UK stories – does that really count as ‘lots of activity?’
my point exactly, ukiro. and imho, it’s not that bad that the ufc gets a bit of competition, the world is still big enough for all of them.
In regards to MMA in mainland Europe, apart from Holland, its totally unknown. Its illegal to broadcast the sport in France or hold events, and there is virtually no recognition for anyone in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. I tried to watch UFC 70 when I was in Germany, and since I couldn’t get to a US military base, it wasn’t gonna happen, because no one shows UFC anywhere at all.
D, MMA is not totally unknown in mainland Europe. There’s a thriving scene in Poland and other former communist countries, and it has a strong grassroots following in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. German sports station DSF had it’s own TUF-knockoff “MAX – Martial Arts Xtreme” earlier this year, and there are literally dozens of small events popping up all over the country. Sure, the sports not as big as in the US (Boxing is still THE top dog), but it’s not unknown. As for the UFC, it used to be carried by Premiere until early last year, but contract negotiations between them and Zuffa came to a standstill, and since then they haven’t been back on the air in Germany (But i’m sure they will be, eventually). But that doesn’t mean that you can’t watch the UFC over here, hey, we’re in europe, surrounded by dozens of other countries, some of which broadcast UFC programming, and it’s not that difficult to get these stations.
Oh, there’s MMA shows in Germany, but they’re playing to super small crowds in arenas that barely hold 2,000 people. The public interest in the sport is minimal at best, and trying to find anything about it when I was in Slovakia, Germany, and Austria earlier this year was near impossible. There wasn’t a flyer in sight in Cologne 4 days before a 4 man one night tournament was held there. The best luck I had was seeing some promotional materials for K-1 in Brno, but beyond that, scant is an understatement.
The point is that there isn’t some massive fanbase for the sport in any of those countries. Its an absolute fringe sport, like talking about pro lacrosse in the US.
Well, MMA on Swedish isn’t a new thing, but it ‘s certainly almost unknown to the general public. For a while there we had live UFC shows on Fight+ (which soon went bust) and Pride PPVs (which often failed to materialize after being paid for.) Also, Eurosport has shown some Japanese shows.
IFL is definitely going to be on the much smaller TV4 Sport. Here’s a very short press release: http://tv4.se/tv4sport/569463.html
I agree with you both, there ISN’T a huge fanbase at all, but it’s growing from under. We are mma-for-the-common-man-wise probably where the states was 10-15 years ago, before and in the early years of the UFC, but I believe that we will se a similar development here and in not as many years, but rather over say the coming five years, since companies like ufc now know how to handle athletics commissions and such. And what could happen is IFL or one of the japanese organisations steps in on the european market, pointing at the ufc and says “hey guys, look at what they’re doing in the US. Works great there. Give us a huge contract and we will put our shows on your network”. Do I make sense at all?
John> WTF, that’s not even a press release!
Too bad it’s tv4 sport… would have been a good way to showcase some mma to the bingolottoviewers of terrestrial tv4, haha!
and the first sentence wasn’t directed towards you john…
Swedish guy: Yeah, I know it’s not really a press release. I didn’t know what to call it. It’s more like “this extremely brief random text which seems to be mixed up with boxing news that I found on tv4.se”. 🙂
I don’t really think that a couple of IFL shows on TV4 Sport will make the general Swede know more about MMA. I mean, they used to show Pancrase on Eurosport, and it’s not like anyone here has any idea what that organisation is. The only fight show brand Swedes generally are familiar with is K-1.
And also, I agree: more MMA and less Bingolotto to the people!