Dana White’s hilarious commentary on the media
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
Thank you for giving me such a laugh tonight:
“Everything that’s happened throughout the years, all the [expletive] that I’ve gone through, my biggest beef with a lot of these MMA websites is that these guys are for-profit websites. They’re not [expletive] news sites. They’re for-profit websites.”
And as to why UFC doesn’t do their own rankings (besides the fact that it would give fighters and agents insight as to how the company slots talent):
“We don’t even rank our own fighters. Do you see any ranking system on our website?”
“But we don’t make our own rankings. It wouldn’t be right.”
Let me clarify this for you. All news outlets are for-profit, and I’m not just talking about the MMA media, so let’s not pretend like that’s anything new. It seems to me the real issue here is that Dana can’t land Fedor and it’s frustrating the hell out of him.
Wait until he sees the EA Sports MMA video game cover with Fedor & Randy Couture on it.
When Dana finds the money trees growing to finance MMA web sites, he should give me a call.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 17 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Ken Shamrock: Steroids should be absolutely legal
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
KENNY RICE: “Now we start off with the four letter word in the sport it’s spelled a little longer than that but it’s that s-word, steroids, or any kind of performance-enhancing drug. One of the major sports that it still has put over a shadow over is baseball, of course. Well, what about the world of MMA? Recently on Fighting Words with Mike Straka, one of the legends of the sport, he’s in the UFC Hall of Fame, this probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone, after all he has tested for it, but Ken Shamrock talks about his steroid use.”
MIKE STRAKA: “You know, there’s a cliché in fighting if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
KEN SHAMROCK: “That’s right.”
MIKE STRAKA: “Let’s talk about it. Have you done steroids?”
KEN SHAMROCK: “Absolutely.”
MIKE STRAKA: “Do you still do steroids?”
KEN SHAMROCK: “Nope.”
MIKE STRAKA: “No?”
KEN SHAMROCK: “Nope.”
MIKE STRAKA: “How easy is it to get steroids?”
KEN SHAMROCK: (laughs) “It’s like going to the grocery store. It’s that easy. It’s that simple.
“But when start trying to make things bigger and better, you’re going to get yourself hurt.”
MIKE STRAKA: “What did the fans want, though? They want bigger and better.”
KEN SHAMROCK: “They want homeruns, baby. They want people jacking them out of the park but then when they find out about it they want to stick their hand in the sand, ‘oh how bad, that was stupid, why’d you do that? You’re crazy. Don’t let them in the Hall of Fame!’ It’s like, let’s point the finger because if we don’t point the finger at somebody else, we have to point it at ourselves because… we knew. So, nobody wants to takes responsibility, but everybody wants to see it. And that’s the way it’s always going to be and it always will be. Someone is going to take the fall, period.”
MIKE STRAKA: “You think steroids should be legal?”
KEN SHAMROCK: “Absolutely. Absolutely.”
KENNY RICE: “All right, interesting words from Ken Shamrock, using a little bit of baseball analogy there because when those guys were hitting homeruns nobody was too upset. After the fact now, 10 years or more later, they look back and go, ‘you were using steroids, we didn’t like that.’ You’re hitting homeruns out of the ball park. You know, Ken’s tested for this when he fought the guy, the real big guy (Ross Clifton), but you know when I what would be curious and we’ll certainly ask him when he comes on, did he ever use it at the peak of his career when he was a UFC champion, when he fought YOU or anybody else, that’s what I’m curious about. The guy that talk to admit to using it, when did they use it?”
BAS RUTTEN: “Well, you can tell by the body weight, right? I mean, when I fought him he was 245 and if he’s 205 now, well, that’s the thing. Maybe also he cuts down a lot to 205, but just his whole body looks bigger. You can look at the guys, it’s the small wrists, the pumped-up forearms, more like roundish sort of say, most of the time those guys have it and you can recognize them really fast. Most of the time it’s in the fight, they go hard hard hard hard, and then they go from all the way hard to all the way down and if they make a big drop like that, a lot of times steroids are at fault.”
Topics: Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 11 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Another Sumo scandal, this time for gambling on baseball and other sports
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
The name of the Sumo wrestler is 34-year old ozeki Kotomitsuki, who admitted that he had a problem gambling on baseball games and got into trouble with the yakuza. Wire reports suggest that the gambling problem extends to dozen of Sumo wrestlers. Involuntary retirements may be coming soon.
This comes on the heels of one Sumo coach admitting his ties to the yakuza as recent as three years ago. More on that story can be found here.
Mainichi notes that Kotomitsuki’s debt in terms of paying off the gangs is 100 million yen, which is about a million dollars.
If you’re wondering if gambling is rampant in other sectors of the fight game in Japan, the answer is without question — yes.
Topics: Japan, Media, Zach Arnold | 2 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Talk Radio: Is Chuck Liddell the best Light Heavyweight ever in Mixed Martial Arts?
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
In the UFC 115 ads leading up to the Vancouver event to sell the PPV, UFC marketed Chuck Liddell as the best Light Heavyweight ever in the sport. Hyperbolic talk or legitimate fact? The Sherdog radio crew says Liddell’s the best right ever (right now) in history:
TJ DE SANTIS: “We’re talking about how Chuck (Liddell) changing his training camp, was more you know serious and focused on Mixed Martial Arts. Do you think that’s something that Chuck never really did throughout his career and if he didn’t, I mean how good could Chuck Liddell have been when he was at his prime? I mean he was still pretty much unstoppable but I mean are we talking the best 205-pound fighter of all-time if he was you know really you know taking the sport seriously like apparently he did for this fight?”
JORDAN BREEN: “At this moment in time, I would still call him the best Light Heavyweight ever.”
TJ DE SANTIS: “Sure.”
JORDAN BREEN: “He has the greatest bulk of Top 10 wins and impressive performances against notable guys from his era that we’ve seen. I do think that will change, I mean the UFC just has so many top Light Heavyweights at this point in time that if we get a guy now, if you know Shogun put together a reign like Liddell his resume would just look insane so I mean that’s another argument.”
TJ DE SANTIS: “But still I don’t think Chuck was ever almost as good as he could have been.”
JORDAN BREEN: “Yeah, well I mean, I think that’s not even something generalizable to Chuck. If we knew all of the kind of things we know about Mixed Martial Arts now, you know how the game’s changed, what it really means to, I mean think about this for a second… I think an e-mailer brought this up to me recently. Think about the kind of work we see guys like Georges St. Pierre and Kenny Florian do with John Chaimberg for instance, you know in terms of like strength & fitness. Do you remember when Billy Rush was considered like cutting edge for MMA fitness?”
TJ DE SANTIS: “I mean Billy Rush was the first sort of Genghis Khan of MMA like they call Greg Jackson. I mean, everyone looked at Billy Rush as this you know sort of Godsend about you know athletic performance and conditioning and dieting and nutrition. I mean, he was looked at as the first real you know guy that everyone heralded as the first sort of sports scientist guy.”
JORDAN BREEN: “And let’s be realistic about Billy Rush — he was a failed fighter who basically just kept guys on a stringent diet and had them do some plyometrics.”
TJ DE SANTIS: “And made his guys cut a tremendous amount of weight as well, I mean the way he had guys cut water weight to make weight was almost sickening.”
JORDAN BREEN: “So, basically, we’ve come, that’s like 2005. In five years, we’ve come an enormous amount of way when it comes to the knowledge and preparation that these guys have on a technical, you know right down to the mechanical minutia of how to perform moves down to sort of more broad spectrum, how to run a training camp, how you conduct yourself with training partners, how you peak for a fight, what you’re doing in terms of strength & conditioning, what’s kind of exercises, so… I don’t have a doubt if Chuck Liddell was 25, 26 years old now or we just took the sort of knowledge we have of Mixed Martial Arts now and brought it back to 2000, 2001, I definitely think Chuck Liddell would be a better fighter. But at the same time, so would virtually anyone in his era, we know that much more about Mixed Martial Arts now.”
TJ DE SANTIS: “That’s a good call.”
Even with the brutal knockout on Saturday night, I noticed something very curious amongst casual and semi-hardcore fans, both online and offline for this show. It’s something Jordan Breen noticed as well when he was moderating the ESPN web site chat for UFC 115 — there’s a large amount of people that still want to see Chuck Liddell fight and it doesn’t even have to be a ‘big’ fight, but there strangely seems to be a demand to see him still fight guys like Tito Ortiz. Now that UFC has all but closed the door on Chuck Liddell’s active fighting career for that organization, will we see Chuck put off retirement and perhaps fight elsewhere?
More on that angle from the Sherdog team…
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 49 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
THQ prepares for the worst and confirms UFC Undisputed video game sales ‘were not up to expectations’
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
Any time you see the headline THQ drastically lowers sales guidance, you know that it’s not great news. The company said that last year’s UFC video game sales were higher. A projection of 20-30 cents lost per share. Type in UFC into any search engine for the major Wall Street sites this morning and it’s not pretty. UFC 2010 upset forces THQ guidance update. Low UFC sales cause financial rethink.
Kelvin Hunt notes the obvious in talking about Chuck Liddell proving that taking time off can’t help a fighter regain his chin.
George Sotiropoulos gets some love this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald.
In a where are they now moment, Muhsin Corbbrey is now fighting in Singapore.
PC World has a new article on the Supremacy MMA video game coming out.
I was curious how the UFC 115 event would play out in the largely politically-correct newspapers in British Columbia. Here’s a taste of some of the headlines:
- Iain Macintyre (Vancouver Sun): Fight was like an execution, except it took longer (an “end-of-the-world” type article written in long prose)
- The Vancouver Sun: Caged combatants’ show of might thrills well-behaved fans (read the article and catch the great line about BJ Penn)
- Canwest News Service (Ed Willes): Can’t deny the thrill of the fight
- CANOE (SLAM! Sports): Rory MacDonald accepts his fate
Topics: Canada, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 21 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Round two: Political web site Huffington Post goes after Chael Sonnen
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
Update (6/14): The same Huffington Post columnist is after Chael Sonnen again, this time nailing Sonnen for the claims that he supposedly doesn’t have a Twitter account.
—
A lefty political site going after a conservative politician (and vice versa) is nothing new. So, it should be no surprise that Chael Sonnen is drawing heat for his Tweets about Anderson Silva. It’s the political season, which means hyperbole all the way around, and now Sonnen is being labeled for his ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’ remarks.
Chael’s online messages — great for selling fights, but not great for winning elections. (Not that he has a great shot of winning his election, anyways, in the deep blue Portland area.)
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 10 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Anecdotal talk that UFC 115 bombed at the bars and movie theaters
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
From Observer radio show on Sunday night:
DAVE MELTZER: “Oh, by the way, from everything that I can gather, the UFC closed circuit bombed [Saturday] night.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Ooh, that’s not good.”
DAVE MELTZER: “I mean just a lot of reports of 20 people, 16 people, 35 people in theaters.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Well, it’s just not a marquee show really.”
DAVE MELTZER: “It wasn’t the show for it.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “No.”
DAVE MELTZER: “You know, I mean the bar stuff I’ve heard you know people say that there was 1/5th as many people as [UFC 114] and… again, I mean, you know you can’t come, it’s two weeks, it’s real quick to come back and I mean for any show and this was I mean you know they ended up having a good show but it was just too quick and you know in between two monster main events you got a match that really, you know, they booked a match that people really didn’t want to see. I mean, it’s not you had a better suggestion because you know I mean I think it would have done better if it was Tito (Ortiz). You know what if it had actually been Tito it probably would have done reasonably well even though people really don’t want Tito I think they’d would want to see Tito knock Chuck (Liddell) out [does he mean the opposite?] With Liddell and Rich Franklin, you really don’t have that dynamic because you know most people really don’t want to see Rich Franklin get knocked out, he’s actually a really you know he’s kind of a nice guy, you know, and Chuck everyone loves Chuck you know they don’t want to see Chuck get knocked out so you know that was actually sad when he got knocked out.”
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 10 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Talk Radio: UFC’s obsession with pushing hairless, young boys with six-packs and why fans not interested in UFC 115 had an agenda
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
With Luke Thomas being in Las Vegas, Chad Dukes took over the reigns this week on MMA Nation and he made a couple of arguments that I wanted to point out to you.
The first argument is a bad one, let’s make that clear. It’s an argument about how people who weren’t interested in UFC 115 somehow had an agenda. It’s like the “you’re not a real fan of the sport” argument in essence. He makes a comparison to football, since he’s a football fan, and logically it’s an argument with gaping holes.
I can tell you what the level of fan interest was going into the show and what it has been coming out of it, since MMA coverage is something I spend a lot of time on. Our best day this past week for traffic was yesterday (Sunday). The other six days of the week, which lead into the UFC 115 show, absolutely fell off a cliff. When you have this kind of data, it points to one conclusion — people were interested in the results but had zero interest in buying or watching the UFC 115 show. Simple as that. It didn’t matter if you were a casual fan, a semi-hardcore fan, or a hardcore MMA fan, your interest wasn’t piqued very much by the prospects of this show featuring Chuck Liddell’s last fight.
With that setup, here’s the first passage from the radio show:
CHAD DUKES: “I love BloodyElbow.com. I think it’s a great web site. But I get pissed off sometimes when I read it because I went over there and to be fair it wasn’t just their web site, I saw this on a lot of different sites. They’re like, ‘this card sucks and there’s no relevant fights on this card.’ I don’t understand like I watch football, I’m a football guy, I watch the NFL and sometimes the Bengals play the Browns and that game never means anything, it never means dick. But it’s two NFL teams and sometimes they get together and they put on good shows.”
CO-HOST: “You’re still watching football.”
CHAD DUKES: “Watching good football and sometimes it happens. I don’t like this mentality where it’s got to be young freak phenom vs. young freak phenom for a title shot for the fight to mean anything. If you can’t get up for Chuck Liddell fighting, for Mirko Cro Cop fighting, I question your agenda. I question what it is you’re saying, that’s all I’m going to say. There’s a lot of people that know a lot more about MMA than I do, but I don’t think knowledge necessarily makes their opinion right sometimes because a lot of people were criticizing that card last night and I saw a lot of people get right online and say it was a great card after it happened and that’s why I wait, that’s why I always wait. Sometimes the UFC will put on a snoozer. The card that came here to Fairfax (Virginia) was a snoozer. This one was not. This had some great fights in it.”
CO-HOST: “Well, that’s I guess, that goes into the whole quantity over quality thing. I mean a lot of people are complaining, I mean this sounds ridiculous, but a lot of people were saying to me last night that the UFC is putting on way too many cards.”
CHAD DUKES: “C.K., our program director, said that.”
CO-HOST: “But I mean it’s like you know would you rather… I don’t consider myself an MMA elitist, you know, if you are an [OK] fighter like Ben Rothwell now or if you can guess really quickly like Gilbert Yvel did, I still want to see those guys fight.”
CHAD DUKES: “That was a great fight with two guys that had everything to gain.”
CO-HOST: “It’s obviously they’re not going to get a title shot any time in the near future.”
CHAD DUKES: “No, but it ended up being a damn entertaining fight and you just saw two monsters putting it on the line.”
CO-HOST: “Exactly, exactly.”
Let me explain the gaping logic holes in this argument…
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 9 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
What would happen if Urijah Faber had to fight his protégé Joseph Benavidez?
By Zach Arnold | June 13, 2010
This question arises from a recent interview that Dave Farra did with Reed Harris last Friday to promote the upcoming WEC event on August 18th at The Palms in Las Vegas.
With Urijah Faber dropping down to Bantamweight (135 pounds), it opens the door for sure to either a re-match against Dominick Cruz or a fresh match-up against Joseph Benavidez. There are several reasons that a Faber/Benavidez match-up would be intriguing to watch, but the biggest one obviously has to do with the fact that Joe is Faber’s top understudy and we know what Zuffa thinks about teammates fighting each other. Would Faber fight Benavidez (I say yes) or would he go back up to Featherweight in order to prevent the fight from happening?
I have a full transcript of the radio conversation here for your review.
As for Dave Farra, he does a really good job with his RawVegas.tv and radio show interviews. When you have so many egos at work in Mixed Martial Arts, the art form of being able to get good interviews and insightful answers out of guys who constantly want their asses kissed is not easy. Try it yourself and see how it goes. I did it for several years and it’s not as easy as it looks. Some people may say that Dave’s interviews are largely ‘non-offensive,’ but if you listen to how he interviews guests he does a good job of bobbing in and out as far as getting an in-depth answer and then pulling back to give his guest enough room to talk. He’s slick at what he does and it usually produces really good interview results.
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, WEC, Zach Arnold | 3 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Dana White waves the white flag on Chuck Liddell’s career: “He went out the way Chuck Liddell would want to go out”
By Zach Arnold | June 13, 2010
“The one thing is this like, OK, if it’s the end of [Chuck Liddell’s] career, at least he went out with a great performance, even though he got knocked out. I mean, he looked good and that’s when he went down, I was really sad. It’s like, damn, you know like, I had no favorite on who would win or lose in the sense that you know Rich Franklin I knew trained really, really hard but it was just a shame. I guess in a sense it was a shame that either guy was going to have to lose because the loss was devastating for whoever lost this fight, you know what I mean, whoever lost… if Liddell lost, his career was over, if Franklin lost his days as a headliner are over. Yeah, I mean, it delivered, you got a knockout and it looks like the end of Liddell’s career.” — Dave Meltzer, 6/13/2010, Observer radio show
There will be no third fight between Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz, which I think is probably the best outcome for both fighters. I will say that the first thought in my mind after Rich Franklin beat Chuck Liddell was the prospects of Franklin vs. Ortiz with Franklin building on a “legend killer” persona (my apologies to Randy Orton and WWE). For Tito’s sake, he needed Chuck to win to get the third match. Now? His options were already limited and they became more limited after UFC 115 ended. A fight with Rich Franklin would be a bad outcome for him. Perhaps a rematch with Forrest Griffin? (Though not a lot of people cared the first time around.)
Check out what Rich Franklin had to say at the post-fight press conference:
QUESTIONER: “Rich, at the end of the fight when you got off and you kind of had this look on your face, what was going through your mind at the time?”
RICH FRANKLIN: “I was just happy the fight was over because I knew my arm was broken in the fight and I definitely wasn’t going to quit. I’ve broken bones before and continued fighting, but there was part of me that was wondering how I was going to be able to like what kind of strategy I was going to use to win the fight with a broken left arm in the second and third round.
“The arm break was actually earlier in the round, it was one of the high-kicks, I don’t know maybe… what time in the round did the fight stop? (5 seconds). Yeah, because I heard the 10 second call come out and I would say maybe like two minutes in or something like that, I’m guessing, is when that kick came because I was having trouble like when I was down on the ground getting back up and posting and all of that kind of stuff as well but you know Chuck caught me with a couple of punches and I kind of got stupid standing in front of him but it looked like he was making himself tired so I was just kind of letting him make himself tired. He was putting a lot of energy into punches that weren’t landing and then he caught me with a couple of combinations there but nothing that really rocked me. It kind of put me back and then he follows up big when he thinks he has you hurt and I just tried to stay tight and threw the lead hook and it caught him on the chin.”
QUESTIONER: “Any thought on potentially being his very last opponent, the last time The Iceman was in the Octagon?”
RICH FRANKLIN: “Uh, no, not really. I mean… (pained reaction) It’s kind of a bittersweet victory because Chuck and I are friends. I really like Chuck. I went to his locker room after the fight to check on him but he was with the doctors and I just spoke to John Hackleman for a few seconds and like I don’t want to be the guy labeled as the person that kind of put him out of the sport or whatever, I don’t like the thought of that.”
As for what Dana White had to say about the end of Chuck Liddell’s career and future with UFC…
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: All Topics, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 11 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
UFC President Dana White says he doesn’t know what to do about fixing bad referee work and bad judges
By Zach Arnold | June 13, 2010
The headline in this interview is about Dana White waiving the white flag on Chuck Liddell’s career (more on that later in a separate posting), but his remarks about judging deserve some attention given how the names Yves Lavigne and Tony Weeks will be discussed for several days online coming up.
ARIEL HELWANI: “The Matt Wiman fight, obviously ended controversially. How do you rectify the situation? Because you have said of course you thought was an early stoppage. Everyone would agree on that. But this seems to be the one sort of negative cloud that always hangs over the events when the refs stop the fights too early or the judges. How do you rectify this?”
DANA WHITE: “There’s always bad reffing, man, it sucks. You know, a referee should know when a guy’s choked out and a referee shouldn’t be sitting there listening, have to listen to a fighter, the fighter’s going ‘he’s out! he’s out’ The referee should know when a guy’s out. You don’t listen to a fighter. You know what I mean? You should know when the guy’s choked out and you should in and make a decision. It’s the same thing with clinching — you see these guys in a stalemate just standing there forever and a ref just standing there staring at them. Be a referee, get in there and make some decisions. Know what you’re talking about. Know the sport! Know when a guy’s in a certain submission and when he’s choked. It’s why, I’m telling you man, I wish they could clone Herb Dean, you know. And it’s not like I’m friends with Herb Dean, I’ve probably said five words to Herb Dean in my whole life but I respect him. I think this guy’s the greatest referee in the history of the sport and the commissions should have this guy putting on clinics and he needs to a choke a few of these other referees out so they know what it is and what it feels like and you know it’s just, it’s getting to the point now where it’s starting to get ridiculous and as we get more fights every year going on, you know, it’s just going to mean more problems if we don’t get good referees.”
ARIEL HELWANI: “Here’s the thing, though. I know you always say it’s up to the commission, right? And ultimately it is up to the commission. You get new media and new fans they just point the finger at you and the UFC and they say, look at these refs, they don’t know what they’re doing, so in some ways like it’s this cloud hanging over your events. So what can you do, if anything, to rectify it?”
DANA WHITE: “It’s true and it’s weird that it’s happening to us because in boxing everybody knew the referees had nothing to do with them. You still get that stuff like Don King paid the ref. Let me tell you what — the refs and the athletic commissions [couldn’t] give a [expletive] what I think. They don’t care, you know, I try to give them my input all the time. I’m very public about how I feel about fights and how I feel about referees but it does not good, man, I don’t know what else to do.”
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 12 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Trying to figure out how well UFC 115 did business-wise
By Zach Arnold | June 13, 2010
I’ll have a passage at the bottom of this post from the Observer radio show on Saturday night about UFC giving out $85,000 (USD) bonuses to fighters on the card.
FWIW, my take on the bonus system is the same as Eddie Alvarez’s — pay the fighters what you think they’re worth up front. No backroom deals, no bonus system. I’m not a fan of the bonus system in regards to how it changes the fight styles of certain undercard fighters to basically engage in sloppy kickboxing battles to win KO of the night or best bout of the night bonuses. I’d rather see a fighter fight smart (that doesn’t automatically equal boring) and be consistent and feel like they can best utilize their skills as opposed to watching a Toughman-like display.
(I can already see the fans of the Leonard Garcia/Korean Zombie fight screaming at me and I liked the fight for what it was, but I don’t need to see multiple fighters on a card abandon their skill set simply to try to win a bonus.)
As for what the demand was for UFC 115, I don’t know but based on everything I know anecdotally-speaking it was not strong at all. I can tell you as far as site traffic is concerned on Fight Opinion, the interest in UFC 115 was lower than the interest in the Strikeforce card in St. Louis last May, but at least there was some energy online for that show because of the media throwing a fit over Alistair Overeem not answering their steroid questions. We had a great April and a fantastic May, but the traffic this past week for UFC 115 absolutely fell off a cliff.
We did well last Summer when Brock Lesnar fought Frank Mir and when BJ Penn fought Kenny Florian. Here’s hoping for a strong late June/early July and late August.
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 9 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Quick thoughts on the fallout from UFC 115 (the end of Chuck Liddell’s career)
By Zach Arnold | June 12, 2010
Not the way Chuck Liddell wanted to go out, but if you’re going to go out then go out against one of the toughest men in the history of Mixed Martial Arts in Rich Franklin. Seriously, Rich Franklin is insanely tough as a human being.
I have no clue what UFC will do next with Rich Franklin as far as matchmaking is concerned.
Martin Kampmann just took out the man who could have supplanted Jon Fitch for third in the UFC Welterweight division. I’m not sure how a fight between Kampmann and Fitch turns out.
Earlier this week, the Sherdog radio team debated whether or not Tyson Griffin is on the first level or second level of UFC Lightweights. He’s officially on the second level and will struggle to become championship material.
The judge who gave Tyson Griffin the 29-28 score in his fight against Evan Dunham was Tony Weeks (boxing background). Weeks has been a subject of debate, including on Jordan Breen’s radio show, where Jordan has talked about how Weeks does well with stand-up scoring but when it comes to everything else, he can be shaky. When Bruce Buffer read through the 29-28 Griffin score fast, the look on Dunham’s face was priceless. He seriously thought for a second he might lose that fight on the score cards.
Mirko Cro Cop made sure to turn babyface in time to get a new pay day. Amazing how things change with him. Well, at least he’ll fight in Germany in November.
I’m still not sure if Carlos Condit is Spike TV level or PPV level, even after his win over Rory MacDonald.
Mac Danzig should be thanking Yves Lavigne for perhaps giving him one more chance in the UFC based on the finish of his fight with Matt Wiman. Is the heat on Yves totally fair? Debatable. (And based on the comments so far, nobody wants to give him a break.)
Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get too worked up about awful judging and referee work because there’s been so many bad performances lately. I feel like using the phrase ‘death by a 1,000 paper cuts’ to describe what’s going on right now. I have no answer as to how the promotions or athletic commissions can immediately improve the performance of both judges and referees, other than perhaps suspending referees in one state and having those suspensions upheld by all the other athletic commissions but that seems unlikely.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 11 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |