MMA News and Discussion Thread

[ACCBiggz]

People acted like the corner man used a whole thing of vaseline on GSP in that fight. There are gifs going around clearly showing his cut man pretty much patting him on the back and thats about it. I doubt that little bit of vasaline had that much of an effect on Penn sucking.

Apprently you don't realise how vaseline can effect grappling.

For 1 Round. It happened was spotted and then the they fixed the problem and checked it out afterwards, even after that point and before BJ was still getting owned.

And apprently you don't know how tough it actually is to get off, especially when it comes in contact with sweat.

[I Love Pokemon]

Actually i do, but the fact is that very little was spread on him, and although it had an effect, after being rinsed off and wiped down with the minimal amount that was on there in the first place it wouldn't have as big as an effect as BJ Penn and his fans would like people to think.

I've wrestled people that have greased it's a real bitch, but not that much was on him in the first place and they got most of/ all of it off. BJ got owned, and wants an excuse for it.

[Maxx]

People acted like the corner man used a whole thing of vaseline on GSP in that fight. There are gifs going around clearly showing his cut man pretty much patting him on the back and thats about it. I doubt that little bit of vasaline had that much of an effect on Penn sucking.

Apprently you don't realise how vaseline can effect grappling.

For 1 Round. It happened was spotted and then the they fixed the problem and checked it out afterwards, even after that point and before BJ was still getting owned.

And apprently you don't know how tough it actually is to get off, especially when it comes in contact with sweat.

That second one is a shocking accusation Biggz

[Tits McGee]

I wrestled in high school and some in college, I would know a few differences.

Not to mention when I was young and learning to masturbate, I used vasaline a few times. Nothing a dry towel couldn't take off.

[Fitzy]

The May Strikeforce event will see a main event of Jake Shields moving up to middleweight to face Robbie Lawler.

For some reason Shields' fight with Joe Riggs is off the April show. This should be a good fight.

Riggs is going to face Phil Baroni. But it might not be on the April 11 show as either this or Brett Rogers vs. ??? will be on the card.

And Stephan Bonnar vs. Mark Coleman looks to be set for UFC 100.

Edited March 12, 2009 by Fitzy

[gunnar hendershow]

I wrestled in high school and some in college, I would know a few differences.

Not to mention when I was young and learning to masturbate, I used vasaline a few times. Nothing a dry towel couldn't take off.

Someone had to say it.

I don't see much of the controversy, yeah it puts the fight into question but it's not like it was a decision or really all that close. Penn lost, and even without the grease would have lost.

[ZJ Penn]

So apparently Lashley has agreed to fight either Don Frye or Hassim Rahman. Rahman is obviously (at least to me) the easier fight, but it could do a fair bit for him to beat Frye.

[I Love Pokemon]

I'd take the Rahman fight personally. I mean if you beat a former world boxing champion people are going to notice. Of course Frye would be a good win too, but i think the Rahman fight is better for Lashley.

[I Love Pokemon]

Alternately it looks more likely that Jason Guida will be replacing Shamrock. Guida is a journeyman who had a huge shot at the UFC for the TUF Show then fucked it up by not making weight.

MMANews.com has just learned through a source that asked to remain annonymous that Jason Guida could fill in as a replacement for Ken Shamrock on March 21st against Bobby Lashley at Roy Jones Jr's MMA/Boxng hybrid show, 'March Badness'.

Shamrock will be unable to compete in the bout after testing positive for banned substances following his last bout in February. The CSAC suspended Shamrock for one year and fined him $2,500 for the positive test.

The Guida and Lashley pairing has not been signed yet but it is on the table and likely to replace the original match.

Guida is a journeyman fighter with a 17-19 record. He has lost his last three fights and at one points, pissed away the best chance he had as a fighter when he couldn't make weight during the 8th season of The Ultimate Fighter.

http://www.mmanews.com/other/Jason-Guida-C...March-21st.html

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

Yikes. Presumably that means neither Rahman nor Frye wants the fight, because Lashley could beat either of those guys and it would give him more credibility.

[Thrilla]

I'm still loving the fact that Ken 'steroids are for chumps' Shamrock got busted after a match with the world's biggest tomato can.

[I Love Pokemon]

Yikes. Presumably that means neither Rahman nor Frye wants the fight, because Lashley could beat either of those guys and it would give him more credibility.

Thats True. I understand Rahmans conflict i mean he just started and hasn't even fully started MMA yet it's a tough first fight. And Frye maybe it was to short of a notice for him?

I think Guida would be the toughest fight of all of them though for Lashley. I mean he is better then Guida at wrestling which is Guida's only real skill and he's bigger. But Guida is younger so his wrestling might pose a more serious threat then Frye's would. Of course Frye actually has some stand up.

I'll def be watching this event this fight excites me whoever he faces, but moreso for the Roy Nelson vs Jeff Monson fight. I'm a huge fan of both fighters.

[Ananas]

I just want to point out two things. One, to I Love Pokemon: Biggzy wasn't using "Sherdog logic", and wasn't saying you don't understand MMA. He was saying that most of the time, the people who fully understand Machida's specific style quite enjoy watching his fights because they're witnessing an artist at work. I happen to both agree with Biggzy on this point and that Machida is an artist. He wasn't saying that anyone who doesn't like Machida is ignorant, he's saying that followers of that style are more likely to enjoy Machida. MMA is a wide and varied sport, and its followers prefer a wide variety of disciplines. The reason Machida is such a lightning rod is that his discipline is so rarely practiced, which makes him a unique entity at the upper levels of the sport. I for one think a unique fighter with the ability to overcome the odds time and time again is the very definition of a fighter I enjoy watching.

The other is about BJ Penn. Penn has every right to file a complaint, and really he probably should. Where he loses any kind of goodwill and ventures into lunacy is the part of what Fitzy posted where he is asking the commission to suspend GSP and overturn the decision. This not only completely contradicts his prior statements (where he doesn't blame GSP personally and where he admits GSP was the better fighter that night), it absolutely reeks of bitterness and vindictiveness. The way he's dragged this whole thing out baffles me, as he has struck me in the past as someone who knew how to play the game and how to put fights and himself over. Really, the complaint should have been filed swiftly and asked for no more than to perhaps ask for a bit of GSP's win cut and the afforementioned rule changes. Instead he comes off as a petulant little child, asking for absurdly hyperbolic reactions to make up for getting pummeled by a better fighter. I just don't get it.

[ACCBiggz]

NewYorkTimes.com Article:

Blood Sport

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: March 11, 2009

My husband had flown to Las Vegas to see a fight. I couldn’t decide whether his recent interest in live bouts at the MGM Grand was better or worse than another guy’s passion for, say, the hilarious Americana of strip clubs. I noticed I didn’t exactly boast to friends about his new hobby.

The fights David likes are not the classy, literary kind — boxing — made richly symbolic in the prose of William Hazlitt, Norman Mailer and David Remnick. He doesn’t go for the romance of the sweet science. Instead, he likes the garish, sadistic jamboree called, always in caps, Ultimate Fighting.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship, which comes with much of the corny pageantry of professional wrestling, is the apex of mixed martial arts, a hybrid of (mostly) boxing, wrestling and jujitsu that is currently said to represent man’s highest achievement in hand-to-hand combat. To people I mention it to, mixed martial arts seems better known as “that thing where they actually kill each other.”

But they don’t kill each other. In these fights, which also incorporate kickboxing, muay Thai and judo, sometimes an opponent just “taps out.” He gets tired and kind of . . . lets go. (Seriously, they don’t die.) Tapping out is just one concept from the steroidal lexicon of mixed martial arts. It’s a fearsome network, this global fight club, filled with scary-looking veterans of the world’s armies. Fighters are tattooed, pierced and frequently bearded, and their goth uniform is unmistakable. Even if you don’t follow fighting, you have probably noticed someone — Bret Michaels on “Rock of Love,” anyone? — wearing an Affliction T-shirt. These shirts are a product of Affliction Clothing, whose Affliction Entertainment division (like the U.F.C.) promotes mixed martial arts. “Affliction entertainment” is a useful phrase that captures the hideous extremes of this sport. The affliction is as grueling as it can get. The entertainment is as carnivalesque.

Just as there is no National Football League without broadcast television, there is no Ultimate Fighting without the singular type of TV distribution called pay-per-view. While pro football goes with expensive commercials, studio commentators and vast, mainstream audiences on Sundays and in prime time, Ultimate Fighting goes with deranged hypemen and exclusive, high-paying audiences late at night.

The televised versions of the two sports are equally distinctive. With the N.F.L., the task of TV producers is to humanize the sport: to make the travails and victories of masked men in heavy armor less abstract. With the U.F.C., the task of TV producers is, in some sense, to make the sport less human: to render less terrifying the manifest suffering of two gasping, bleeding, moaning, nearly naked mortals.

“Why don’t you watch the fights on pay-per-view for once?” David asked, on his way out of town. “Then you can see what I see.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

I thought about it and decided that taking in hours of brutal cage matches would be a nice, wifely way to show support. I knew I had been acting prudish and judgmental — and aren’t spouses supposed to take an interest in each other’s hobbies? After a call to Time Warner Cable, I discovered it would be easiest to wait for “event night” and sign on just as the show was starting.

Let me say, from the other side, I have now passed through some kind of spiritual realignment machine and I may never be the same. The night I watched a complete card of Ultimate Fighting — from the gruesome defeat of a fighter called The Viking to the comeback of the great Rampage Jackson — was one of the sickest, freakiest and most enlightening nights of television I have ever spent.

It also had to be the priciest: $44.95. Flushed with annoyance, I forked over the money to the cable company with a click of the remote. The show was about to start, and David was texting me from inside the MGM Grand arena to ask if I was “in” yet. The price was almost a knockout blow. Like everyone else, I have come to presume that TV — like all information — wants to be free. Meaning, I want it to be free. $44.95 is as far from free as it gets when we’re talking media. It’s nearly the cost of a four-year subscription to Vogue, for heaven’s sake, or a month of cable or three James Bond movies on Blu-Ray!

Protest was pointless, and submission was inevitable. Once I paid my door fee, I was swept into a new world pulsing with color — a kind of red-light district with weird geniuses for tour guides who made the whole experience seem culturally crucial. The commentators for the U.F.C. have a style of truculent harangue all their own. Joe Rogan, in particular — the comedian, TV actor and host of “Fear Factor” — is so intense, relentless and silver-tongued that he made me feel as if I had wasted my life among slow-moving hayseeds and listless moralists until I lucked into the white-hot center of existence here with him.

As the preshow hype continued, I noticed an uncannily bright fighter named Frank Mir, who mixed analysis and bombast as if they were the only true martial arts. In documentary-style interviews, he kept praising his opponent. I couldn’t believe, when I saw Mir handily win his fight, how brazen had been his pysch-out. I was also struck by the worldliness of the fighters. An early fight pitted Cheick Kongo (“fighting out of Paris, France”) against Mostapha Al Turk (“fighting out of London, England”).

The Octagon is the ring for the U.F.C. It has eight sides and is enclosed by a chain-link fence. The name “Octagon” really seems like a way to keep you from calling it what it is: a cage. In spite of this and other efforts to make Ultimate Fighting seem less thuggish — the immaculate pay-per-view display, the visibility of women in the audience and the intelligence of the spitfire commentary — you can’t miss the raw, back-alley character of the fights. Veins bulge and faces go blue as fighters seem intent on choking their opponents. Blood is shed; bones break; contusions develop before your eyes. Men are felled by “accidental” strikes to the groin (along with eye-gouging and biting, such strikes are prohibited, but I saw several). The commentators insist that everyone’s obeying regulations, but the fighters seem murderous nonetheless. Until, that is, each fight is over, and the fighters are typically praised for showing “class” in making sure an opponent is still breathing.

One way the violence of the fights is muted is quite literal: the sound feels dialed down. If “Braveheart” and other war movies have shown that the audio mix is what allows an audience to experience violence viscerally, then these U.F.C. telecasts, which don’t amplify the sounds in the Octogon, suggest that a quiet fight comes across as a cleaner fight. No crunch of bones, no crack of noses, no squish of damaged soft tissue. From David’s texts, I could tell he was “feeling” the fights much more than I was.

Too much has been made of John McCain’s campaign to ban Ultimate Fighting as “human cockfighting,” but some of the illicit adventure of a cockfight did attend the U.F.C. telecast I saw. I felt myself transported and included among people of high spirits, strong nerves and a clear-eyed sense of man’s depravity. (Joe Rogan called our violent urges “weird, chimpanzee D.N.A. stuff.”) I’m not in this company often, and it was heady. We were seeing it all at once, all together. David’s texts grew more rapid. “I just saw Rampage!” he said, referring to his favorite fighter, Quentin (Rampage) Jackson.

I had seen him, too, entering the Octagon. By the time Rampage was landing his blows, I was cheering alone in my living room. As I swore off Ultimate Fighting for the rest of my life — it’s horrifying — I let myself whoop with joy when Rampage won. I told myself I was just trying to fit in.

[gunnar hendershow]

I stopped reading at "boxing".

EDIT - But upon actually reading more of it, I think that's what has happened to quite a few people in regards to their openness to MMA. Once they watch it, and get past the trashy marketing (seriously, the way they market MMA plays right into the stereotype of "human cockfighting") many people become fans of the sport.

Edited March 17, 2009 by damshow

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

Quick notes from today's Observer, which has an excellent biography of Ken Shamrock...

-Jon Fitch vs. Paulo Thiago and Jake O'Brien vs. JON BONES JONES are both official for UFC 100.

-Dale Hartt vs. Dennis Siver has been added to UFC 99, along with Paul Kelly vs. Roli Delgado

-Mirko Cro Cop has signed a new three-fight deal with DREAM

-Jake Shields/Joe Riggs is off the 4/11 Strikeforce show. Shields will instead get his ass kicked by Robbie Lawler in May, while Brett Rogers will be fed a tomato can in the open April slot.

-Kim Couture will be fighting for Strikeforce in May

[-A-]

Jake O'Brien vs. JON BONES JONES are both official for UFC 100.

w/ Richie Sambora?

[gunnar hendershow]

I hear the Jon Jones match is going to be on the preliminary card. That's a shame, but he doesn't have the name value yet. In any case, UFC 100 looks to have perhaps the best card ever.

[Fitzy]

Quick notes from today's Observer, which has an excellent biography of Ken Shamrock...

-Jon Fitch vs. Paulo Thiago and Jake O'Brien vs. JON BONES JONES are both official for UFC 100.

-Dale Hartt vs. Dennis Siver has been added to UFC 99, along with Paul Kelly vs. Roli Delgado

-Mirko Cro Cop has signed a new three-fight deal with DREAM

-Jake Shields/Joe Riggs is off the 4/11 Strikeforce show. Shields will instead get his ass kicked by Robbie Lawler in May, while Brett Rogers will be fed a tomato can in the open April slot.

-Kim Couture will be fighting for Strikeforce in May

I already posted that Shields info a week ago. So far behind, MPH.

Edited March 18, 2009 by Fitzy

[I Love Pokemon]

The Jon Jones hype is going to get derailed, Jake O'Brien is going to put a hurting on him. Jones best talent is his Wrestling which is not in the league as O'Briens, plus Jake is stronger and his boxing has greatly improved.

The fight should be good but O'Brien should win.

And it's hard to call a guy like Humphries a can, he hasn't fought enough yet for anyone to know. The guy is undefeated, i'm not saying he is going to beat Rogers but it's dumb to count him out, just because you haven't heard of him.