I suppose this was inevitable. Here’s Anderson Silva’s manager Ed Soares talking down a title fight with Chael Sonnen:
“We are fine if this is what the UFC wants, but if you look at this logistically, Sonnen should fight Demian Maia first. Demian beat up easily, by submission, so why not make them fight first, to determine who gets a shot at the title?”
This is getting pretty fucking annoying. Guess what, Ed: the UFC already has a matchmaker and his name is Joe Silva. Do you hear anyone else in the UFC regularly saying shit like “I think this person should fight that person before they fight me?” No. Because it’s fucking lame.
I still blame Dan Miller for taking a stanky shit at UFC 109 that lingered for the remainder of the event, but that doesn’t make this killer guillotine he pulled off in the IFL any less awesome. How his opponent’s head didn’t pop off is beyond me.
While the WEC is busy trying to build a PPV platform with Urijah Faber as a major load bearing pillar, it sounds like Faber is still more interested in chasing big money fights than sticking specifically with his current promotion:
“I’ll probably go down to 135 (pounds) [then] go up to 155,” he said. “I don’t want to fight any of my buddies at [135 pounds]. I’ll just fight people I don’t like, and fights the fans want to see.
“(It’s the) same with going up in weight. I’m not trying to mow through the weight class; I’m trying to fight superfights that fans want to see. At this point for me, I’ve had 26 fights, and I just want to do big, exciting fights. Go up? Go down? It’s all good.”
The guys he talked about at 155? Tyson Griffin and BJ Penn. Jeez, you’d think the WEC didn’t have a lightweight division for Faber to fight in. Of course, it’s not like any of this is immediate. Faber still has to get past Aldo and then he might want to consider finally beating Mike Brown too. By then we’ll know whether the WEC can tread water on pay per view and who knows? At that point everyone might be making the jump to the UFC.
After beating Satoshi Ishii at this year’s Dynamite show, elderly judo statesman Hidehiko Yoshida said he had one more fight left in him. Many figured he’d save this fight up for next year’s Dynamite and perhaps a giant payday against retiring Yokozuna Asashoryu or something else similarly large. But it turns out that he’s decided to say “Fuck those clownshoe promotions” and basically throw his own retirement party in the form of an event called ~ASTRA~:
The newly-formed promotion, ASTRA, will promote Hidehiko Yoshida’s retirement fight on April 25th at the Nippon Budokan, an arena that has been known to hold up to 15,000 fans. Yoshida, of course, knows how to go out in style in the great arena built for Judo. Over the course of the weekend there have been rumblings of J-ROCK starting their own Mixed Martial Arts promotion, so ASTRA comes with little shock value. Of course leading up to Dynamite!! 2009 Yoshida was quite outspoken with how displeased he was with Sengoku’s compromising of their values and working with FEG’s DREAM promotion. Of course the management changes in SRC and change of sponsor with less money on the table didn’t help, either. This at least confirms that Yoshida Dojo fighters will no longer be working with SRC or DREAM for the time being.
There’s no word yet on who Yoshida will face but one speculation is that he’ll ‘pass the torch’ with a fight against his student Kazuhiro Nakamura. Not something that makes much sense to me, but since when has anything that’s gone on in Japan made sense to us gaijin? As for whether or not Astra will become competition for DREAM and Sengoku, it is currently being talked about as a one off event. That’s probably for the best … Sengoku is still hanging tenuously onto existence and DREAM isn’t exactly killing it either. The last thing Japan needs is another promotion to further split the market … unless of course that other promotion actually runs things in an intelligent and capable manner, in which case it could be exactly what the country needs.
The last we heard from Carlos Condit, he had just been hit by the UFC gypsy curse in the form of a WTF-style sheet metal accident. Finally, someone got in touch with him and asked him exactly what the deal was with that:
“I was kind of moving some stuff around in my garage and I had some old junk. I had a broken dry erase board, like a bulletin board type thing, and I picked it up to kind of toss it over to my trash pile. I kind of Frisbee tossed it, and it had a sharp piece of metal, kind of the surface of the dry erase board, and it sliced me real good,” Condit told MMAWeekly.com in an exclusive interview.
“Initially what happened was I went down to urgent care, got some stitches, and they said that I should be cool in a couple days, so nothing really changed for me.
“I was back to training and everything, but the next day my hand started swelling up and hurting like a son of a bitch and that’s kind of when I decided I wasn’t going to be able to do the fight and then a couple days later I went to see a hand specialist and they admitted me to the hospital right away cause I had a real bad staph infection.”
The staph infection put Condit in the hospital for a six-night stay. When he was released, he was still not able to train full on due to an IV that had to be administered for six weeks for antibiotics to fully flush out the infection.
Goddamn super staph. We’re in a war with bacteria and this one isn’t going well. The more we use antibiotics, the more resistant the new strains become. Since evolution is a lie, the only explanation to this is that God is punishing us, probably because of all that ass sex and other licentious behavior.
Here’s Compustrike’s data for UFC 109 … three fights are featured: Couture / Coleman, Marquardt / Sonnen, and Serra / Trigg. I fucking hate stats like this (this is MMA not tag), but I figured some of you data pigs might get a kick out of it.
Here’s the payouts for UFC 109, arranged from highest paid to least paid just because it’s more fun that way:
Randy Couture: $250,000 (no win bonus)
Matt Serra: $150,000 ($75k + $75k)
Chael Sonnen: $64,000 ($32k + $32k win bonus)
Demian Maia: $62,000 ($31k + $31k)
Mark Coleman: $60,000
Nate Marquardt: $45,000
Mike Swick: $43,000
Mac Danzig: $40,000 ($20k + $20k)
Frank Trigg: $30,000
Paulo Thiago: $30,000 ($15k + $15k)
Melvin Guillard: $28,000 ($14k + $14k)
Rob Emerson: $24,000 ($12k + $12k)
Chris Tuchscherer: $20,000 ($10k + $10k)
Brian Stann: $17,000
Dan Miller: $15,000
Rolles Gracie: $15,000
Joey Beltran: $12,000 ($6k + $6k)
Phillipe Nover: $10,000
Phil Davis: $10,000 ($5k + $5k)
Justin Buchholz: $8,000
Tim Hague: $7000
Ronys Torres: $4,000
Note that Randy Couture was making some pretty decent money off a cut of the PPV even before that last contract dispute he was in, so I’m sure he’s making even more now. Props to Matt Serra for making the big bucks – I guess that’s what happens when you’re a team player and agree to rematch Georges St Pierre right away.
Down on the lower end of things you have Phil Davis making a miserable 5k/5k, which seems pretty damn low considering his pimp wrestling credentials. Then again, his manager’s idea of a good sponsor was a trash removal company, so that might explain a few things. It’s interesting to see so many new guys coming in under the standard 7k/7k pay … here I was hoping that bottom rung pay would go up, not down.
EA has been slowly leaking out roster info about their MMA video game over the past few weeks and it kinda looked like they were getting a leg up on game promotion over THQ thus far. But this weekend THQ finally lifted up Undisputed 2010’s skirt and showed us it’s improved genitalia … MMA Convert was nice enough to create a very long bullet list of the changes. While that list does include some improvements to the submission system, an interview with game developer Omar Kendall reveals that the dreaded knob polisher submission system will still be in place:
GS: There was some criticism of the submission system in UFC 2009–the button mashing/stick rolling wasn’t a particular favorite and there seemed to be a lack of flash submits. How has the submit system changed this time around? Is submission success still tied to your opponent’s stamina level?
OK: While we’ve done quite a bit of tinkering with the submission system, the stick rolling method of submission execution and escape (known semiofficially as The Shine) will return. It’s something that’s steadily become a signature element of the game, and we’re pretty fond of it. What we did want to change was the button mashing/brute force escape we utilized last year. This enabled fighters with high strength to be just as good at getting out of submissions as fighters with high submission defense.
Now all fighters will utilize The Shine, but the parameters that govern the success of getting out of a submission have changed. For UFC Undisputed 2010, the submission calculations will use either a fighter’s submission defense or his current energy level expressed as a percentage–whichever is higher. For example, let’s say a fighter has a submission defense skill of 50. If the fighter has 100 stamina and full (100 percent) energy, the game will look at this energy level, and the fighter will have a great chance of getting out of a submission. If the fighter has 100 stamina and has used the majority of his energy reserves, the game will look at the fighter’s submission defense skill; in this case, shine hard! We feel this system is fairer to players and more representative of how an actual submission struggle would go down.
As for flash submissions, all we can say is stay tuned! We’ve overhauled much more of the submission system, and we can’t wait to show it off.
Fingers crossed. I gave up on UFC 2009 based on the shallow ass sub system. And the Shine. The motherfucking Shine.
On another UFC 2010 note, I found it amusing that Paulo Thiago basically begged to be in the video game after beating Mike Swick. Did he not realize that he was already in the thing? In fact, a lot of the press pictures floating around featured him beating the tar out of Swick and submitting him (as seen above). I suppose you can’t blame him for not knowing … he probably thought he’d have to sign some kinda release papers or something. Little did he realize you can’t get into the UFC anymore without signing your video game rights away on arrival.
If you were checking out pictures from the itsy bitsy WEC presser of Jose Aldo and Urijah Faber (okay, you probably weren’t, but just play along, okay?), you might have noticed that giant scar on Jose Aldo’s face. What’s that from, you might ask? (Remember: you’re playing along!) Attempted fratricide!!!!!!
WEC: Forgive my forwardness, but the scar on the left side of your face, how did you acquire it?
Aldo: I don’t mind explaining where I got the scar. I was just a baby and my mom wasn’t paying attention for a moment when my sisters rolled me onto the barbecue pit being used for a 1986 World Cup party.
