Written by James Lees
Saturday, 04 February 2012 00:09
The UFC 143: Diaz vs. Condit weigh-ins took place today at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.
Full results are as follows:
MAIN CARD (Pay-per-view / ESPN UK)
Carlos Condit (169) vs. Nick Diaz (169) Roy Nelson (246) vs. Fabricio Werdum (246) Josh Koscheck (170) vs. Mike Pierce (170) Renan Barao (136) vs. Scott Jorgensen (135) Ed Herman (185) vs. Clifford Starks (185)
PRELIMINARY CARD (FX / UFC.TV)
Max Holloway (144) vs. Dustin Poirier (146) Alex Caceres (136) vs. Edwin Figueroa (135) Matt Brown (171) vs. Chris Cope (171) Jorge Lopez (169) vs. Matt Riddle (170)
PRELIMINARY CARD (Facebook)
Rafael Natal (186) vs. Michael Kuiper (183) Dan Stittgen (170) vs. Stephen Thompson (171)
Written by James Lees
Friday, 03 February 2012 23:37
Strikeforce: 'Tate vs. Rousey' takes place March 3rd from the Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Today, the promotion announced the full prelim and main card lineup, headlined by the highly anticipated lineup between current bantamweight women's champion Miesha Tate and fast rising star Ronda Rousey.
Check out the rest of the main card below:
Main Event:
135 lbs.: Miesha Tate vs. Ronda Rousey
Main card (Showtime):
205 lbs.: Mike Kyle vs. Gegard Mousasi 155 lbs.: K.J. Noons vs. Josh Thomson 170 lbs.: Paul Daley vs. Kazuo Misaki 185 lbs.: Ronaldo Souza vs. Derek Brunson
Preliminary card (Showtime Extreme):
135 lbs.: Sarah Kaufman vs. Alexis Davis 155 lbs.: Caros Fodor vs. Pat Healy 185 lbs.: Scott Smith vs. Lumumba Sayers 155 lbs.: Ryan Couture vs. Conor Heun
There is currently no word on where or if this event will air in the United Kingdom.
Written by James Lees
Friday, 03 February 2012 18:20
As previously reported by Full Mount MMA, the UFC have axed the historic gladiator intro that has graced it's pay-per-view and television events for many years.
Today, the UFC released the first details of it's new opener, which has been dubbed 'Evolution'. Here is all of the information we know thus far:
- Here is a list of all of the fights featured in the video (via MMAFighting.com): Royce Gracie vs. Ken Shamrock (UFC 1), Tito Ortiz vs. Evan Tanner (UFC 30), Matt Hughes vs. Frank Trigg (UFC 52), Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz (UFC 47), BJ Penn vs. Sean Sherk (UFC 84), Georges St-Pierre vs. Matt Hughes (UFC 65), Randy Couture vs. Tim Sylvia (UFC 68), Quinton Jackson vs. Wanderlei Silva (UFC 92), Brock Lesnar vs. Heath Herring (UFC 87), Rich Franklin vs. Nate Quarry (UFC 56), Junior dos Santos vs. Gilbert Yvel (UFC 108), Dominick Cruz vs. Demetrious Johnson (UFC on VS 6), Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar (TUF 1 Finale), Cain Velasquez vs. Brock Lesnar (UFC 121), Frankie Edgar vs. Gray Maynard (UFC 125), Jose Aldo vs. Mark Hominick (UFC 129), Jon Jones vs. Stephan Bonnar (UFC 94), Anderson Silva vs. Vitor Belfort (UFC 126).
- Dana White stated that the intro cost the UFC an "obscene" amount of money and was originally scheduled to debut at UFC 142 in Brazil. However, at the last minute the UFC realised that Rich Franklin had not been included, thus the video was delayed.
- The video was produced by Digital Domain, a company founded by James Cameron. Digital Domain has worked on movies such as Titanic, Armageddon, and Transformers.
- MMAweekly said "Evolution…starts in a small gym, the floor of which begins crumbling away as actual fight footage shows Shamrock’s hand smacking the floor, cracking it apart, as he taps out to Gracie. Liddell rushes forth, punishing Ortiz, blasting him through a wall that crumbles to the ground…all the while the Octagon starts to take shape, rising up through the rubble. As the fights wear on — St-Pierre, Hughes, Rampage, Velasquez, Jones — the building tumbles away, the Octagon emerges, and Silva’s face-crunching kick explodes into the 55,000-seat Rogers Centre in Toronto.”
- The UFC hired award-winning German film composer Hans Zimmer, who has produced scores for The Dark Knight and Inception to create the music for the intro.
Thus far, the intro has only been seen by small handful of journalists and Zuffa staff. However, tomorrow night the whole world will say goodbye to the Gladiator and welcome in a new era of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Written by Adil Qazi
Friday, 03 February 2012 16:23
DVD Review – UFC 134: Silva vs. Okami
Disc 1
The Main Card Countdown to UFC Rio The Weigh-ins
Disc 2
The Preliminary Card UFC Rio Recap Ultimate Insider: The Best of UFC Rio
The UFC made its triumphant return to Brazil for its first show since 1998; and the first under the Zuffa banner. Would it be a success? Had MMA enough of a following to make this event a success?
Given the Brazilian roots at the heart of the UFC and the involvement of the Gracie family in its conception, many consider Brazil to be the UFC’s spiritual home. It was important then, that the first show in the country in over 10 years delivered.
It definitely did that.
The crowd, the fights, the star performances and the fact that most of the Brazilians won their fights – everything contributed to an electric night that many people considered the fight card of the year.
The Fights
The prelims featured one significant performance – that of young Erick Silva, the mercurial debutante taking just forty seconds to knock out his opponent Luis Ramos. This performance was the standout in a preliminary card featuring decisions in all but one of the other fights.
The crowd maintained its noise throughout, with the arena sounding like a football game all night long. Dana White went so far as to say: “Brazil wins for the loudest crowd ever” in the post fight press conference.
The main card delivered on every level – excellent skills and knockouts throughout and a deserving Fight of the Night winner that went the distance.
First off was Luiz Cane vs. Stanislav Nedkov, and this fight threatened to put a damper on the whole night when Nedkov came out with a debut knockout over a man who Mike Goldberg stated had both a six inch reach advantage and the striking advantage.
Both men came out with a tentative opening minute before settling in and trading punches. At 4:13 of the first round Nedkov threw a left hand that caught Cane over the ear and sent him staggering over to the cage. As stand in commentator Kenny Florian noted, Cane’s downfall after superb early work was his poor punch defence. Even though the Brazilian lost, the fight was a great start to the night as both men were willingness to trade all round long. After an initial smattering of boos, applause broke out throughout the crowd and the singing resumed.
The next fight up on the card was the classical Legend vs. Rising Star bout between Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Brendan Schaub. All the signs pointed to a win for the younger man. He was faster, fresher and was on the rise after beating the likes of Gabriel Gonzaga and Mirko Cro Cop. Minotauro was plagued by injuries and surgeries in the lead up. The sensible thing would be to bet on Schaub if you had to.
Re-watching this fight was such a pleasure. Minotauro is easily one of my favourite fighters, and watching him weather the storm against Schaub to get the knockout after some big punches against the cage sent the young pretender face-planting on the Octagon floor, is one of my favourite moments ever in almost 15 years of watching fights. I don’t think the crowd was louder all night, and their appreciation of the legendary former Heavyweight Champion was an awesome moment.
The tone shifted and a technical stand up fight between Ross Pearson and Edson Barboza followed. A very close and competitive fight at Lightweight, showcasing that what the lighter weights lack in one-hit knockouts, they make up for in frenetic pacing and quality technique. This was the only main card fight to go the distance, and you won’t get a single complaint about that. The only down moment of the night was Kenny Florian’s over-zealous support of Barboza while commentating and he didn’t do much to hide his bias. Barboza took the split decision here and first time around I thought it went the other way. Watching it again didn’t make it any clearer as the rounds were close and decided by a few strikes each way.
The co-main event featured a rejuvenated Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua vs. Forrest Griffin, and not much can be said about this fight other than Shogun quickly imposed his will and landed his punches cleanly on a sluggish Griffin, getting the TKO at 1:53 of round 1. The fight promised to be a good one between two former champions who had already endured a gruelling first fight with each other. The second was over almost before it began and even though Shogun looked like his old self (after a poor showing against Jon Jones), you have to say the fight could have been so much more had Forrest acquitted himself better.
The main event gave us Anderson Silva as we all want him – freak like reflexes, speed and ability to read his opponents and deliver devastating finishing blows. He was at his imperious best against an overmatched Yushin Okami. Taking a round to soak in the love and circle his prey, the Spider measured his opponent and seemed continuously dangerous even without throwing a strike for long periods. By halfway through the first round, it seemed clear that he had worked out Okami’s timing and looked totally relaxed even when pushed briefly against the fence.
The second round brought the end of the fight; a knockout flurry that sent Okami down and out, almost as if Anderson had finished toying with his prey and felt it was time that he went home.
Fans of Anderson should own this DVD for this performance if anything else. It showed us a mature, experienced Anderson Silva in full control of all his abilities and arguably at his peak.
Overall
The fights were entertaining, the atmosphere like nothing else before and the big names delivered. We had a sentimental victory for Nogueira, a switched on Shogun and Anderson Silva at his finest.
As a significant chapter in UFC history this DVD is worth the buy, especially if you watched the event live as it happened.
Special Features
Disc 1 features the pre-requisite Countdown and Weigh-in shows, which are standard material on UFC DVD’s by this stage. The surprise to me was that for such a landmark show there wasn’t really much else in the way of extras.
Disc 2 lists two featurettes but the Recap segment is a three minute highlight piece set to music of some backstage warm-ups and post fight comments from Dana White, mixed in with some fans. I question why this segment was even made as it serves no real purpose and doesn’t show us anything special.
The Insider show was slightly longer at six minutes, so at least it was longer than a music video. It featured a few more snippets from interviews with Royce Gracie, Dana White, Wanderlei Silva and Vitor Belfort. Most of these will have been seen in the Countdown show but some bits and pieces add to the overall picture, albeit not enough to justify splitting them off in a separate bonus feature. The meat of this featurette is a countdown of the UFC’s eight best Brazilian fighters at the moment, interspersed with random shots of bikini-clad Brazilian women on the beach (so at least they got that part right).
All in all, for an event such as this, the UFC disappointed me with the lack of special attention to the extras. Brazilian fighters of the UFC’s past besides Vitor and Royce weren’t mentioned, and you would at least expect an extra feature on Brazil’s rich history of fighting sports and combatants, let alone Brazilians that have fought in the UFC to great success (Murilo Bustamante, Marco Ruas, Pedro Rizzo and more).
It felt more like a bog-standard UFC DVD when it should have been a little bit more than that.
However I will say that UFC 134 is worth the money for any collector and hardcore fan of the UFC. It serves as one of those standout events that people will not soon forget and deserves pride of place in your fight collection. Buy this DVD and others like it at www.fightdvd.co.uk
Written by Craig Devlin
Thursday, 02 February 2012 21:52
From his Twitter
"Seems my year in jail wasnt enough. Just got sentenced to another year in Vegas for some old bullshit. Nevermind Im rehabilitated. Nevermind"
Never far from trouble former BAMMA fighter "War Machine" had seemed to have changed his ways and rededicated himself to MMA in recent times. It now seems that his past has caught up with him again.
Still, it seems he is remaining positive
"Cant stop me, all you can do is delay the inevitable. War Machine will always be back!"
Written by Craig Devlin
Thursday, 02 February 2012 21:23
WORLDS COLLIDE AS THE MMA SHOW LIVE JOINS
THE MARTIAL ARTS
SHOW LIVE AT THE NEC
IN BIRMINGHAM ON MAY 12th and 13th
KENNY FLORIAN, CHE MILLS, TOM WATSON
SOKOUDJOU, IAN FREEMAN
AND SIMEON THORESEN CONFIRMED
Friday February 3rd, Birmingham, UK
It was confirmed today that MA Inc will be presenting the first ever MMA Show Live at The NEC in Birmingham on May the 12th and 13th in a separate hall, alongside The Martial Arts Show Live, giving fans two shows for the price of one. Split Decision, the company founded by Liam Fisher (former Head of Business Development at BAMMA), has partnered with MA Inc to establish a new and very much needed event for the huge and very loyal MMA audience and fan base.
The first six fighters confirmed to attend are UFC fighters Kenny Florian, Che Mills and Simeon Thoresen, BAMMA Middleweight Champion Tom ‘Kong’ Watson, UK MMA legend Ian “The Machine” Freeman and UFC, PRIDE and DREAM veteran Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou.
The MMA Show Live will be an interactive fan experience dedicated to mixed martial arts from around the World. Populating a second hall at the NEC in Birmingham alongside The Martial Arts Show Live, The MMA Show Live will consist of five training areas where some of the biggest names in the business will host special group training sessions, a huge stage & screen for Q&A sessions, an autograph zone where fans can meet their favourite fighters and exhibition stands where some of the biggest brands in MMA will be selling merchandise and much, much more.
Liam Fisher, CEO at Split Decision said “Split Decision is a company made up of huge MMA fans so this is the perfect opportunity for us to help create a show that we all believe every MMA fan would want to go to. There’s going to be over 40 fighters and MMA personalities from all over the World attending, including some A-list superstars, MMA legends and some of the most exciting up and coming talent around today. I’m immensely excited that my company can be a part of this.”
Training sessions with fighters are available for Platinum ticket holders only and are limited to 500 people across the whole weekend. For a limited period only the Platinum tickets are priced at £90 instead of £100 and for this fans will get 1 training session per day, all the benefits of VIP access to both The Martial Arts Show Live and The MMA Show Live across the weekend, exclusive access to the Platinum Room in the MMA hall where fans can sit down and talk with the A-list fighters & celebrities, entrance to the VIP party held on the Saturday evening in Birmingham city centre, a souvenir event program, access to the fast-track line at the autograph zone and premium platinum seating at the Q&A stage.
Every Platinum ticket holder is guaranteed a place at 1 training session per day and there will be 20 different training sessions hosted by 20 different fighters each day. Platinum ticket holders can book their preferred session on a first come first serve basis by registering each day at the registration desk open from 8am each morning although by buying your Platinum ticket now, you will secure your place as one of the limited 500 places available.
More fighters and personalities confirmed to attend will be released in the coming weeks.
Strictly limited reduced price “Early Bird Tickets” are available from 9am on Friday February 3rd at www.theticketfactory.com and are priced as follows
Written by James Lees
Thursday, 02 February 2012 17:30
A five round fight between top lightweights Nate Diaz (15-7) and Jim Miller (21-3) will serve as the main event of UFC on FOX 3, which takes place May 5th at the IZOD Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
It is expected that this bout will determine the number one contender for the UFC Lightweight title, and that the winner will face either Frankie Edgar or Ben Henderson for the title later in the year.
Nate Diaz is coming off dominating wins over Takanori Gomi and Donald Cerrone. Diaz has five 'Fight of the Night' bonuses to his name and if fans were left feeling underwhelmed after the last FOX main event, they can guarantee that Miller vs. Diaz will provide fireworks on May 5th. Jim Miller was last seen in the Octagon just a few short weeks ago, with a quick submission victory over Melvin Guillard and will be looking to put on another impressive performance that would catapult him to a title shot.
The fight was originally announced to take place at UFC on FOX 3 last month, however UFC officials announced earlier today that it would now be the five round main event.
Also announced for UFC on FOX 3 today, heavyweight Pat Barry (7-4) will take on Lavar Johnson (16-5). The fight will take place on the main card live on FOX.
Stay with the Full Mount Mixed Martial Arts Network for all of the latest news on UFC on FOX 3.
What do you think? Are you happy with Diaz/Miller as a main event? What else do you want to see added to the card? Let us know on our forums or via Twitter @FullMountMMA using #UFConFOX3.
DVD Review – UFC 134: Silva vs. Okami
A five round fight between top lightweights Nate Diaz (15-7) and Jim Miller (21-3) will serve as the main event of UFC on FOX 3, which takes place May 5th at the IZOD Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Full Mount MMA News