Former NBA center Darko Milicic made his kickboxing debut Thursday night in Serbia. The 7-footer, who was the second overall draft pick in 2003, lost to Radovan Radojcic in the second round of their exhibition fight via doctor’s stoppage after suffering a cut on his left leg.
“The next time, it will be better,” Milicic said [translated by The Detroit News]. “I’m invincible.”
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On episode three of the Monday Morning Analyst, we review UFC on FOX 13, The Ultimate Fighter 20 Finale and WSOF 16. We also briefly discuss the big boxing weekend including Ishe Smith vs. Erislandy Lara, Amir Khan vs. Devon Alexander and Timothy Bradley vs. Diego Chaves.
Editor’s note: Portions of the video and audio lag due to poor Internet connectivity while recording. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
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PHOENIX, Ariz. — It did not take long for that old, goofy smile to creep back across Junior dos Santos’ face.
Fourteen months after Cain Velasquez ground him into an unrecognizable and bloody paste, seven months after his superhuman framework did not make its Brazilian homecoming, the guy they used to call o campeao danced his fiendish dance over the blue canvas at Wednesday’s UFC on FOX 13 open work outs, showing once again that there is few more frightening to observe carton the shadows.
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In the most recent episode of ‘UFC 181 Embedded’, Anthony Pettis gets fixed before his Wheaties carton show, Gilbert Melendez works out, Johny Hendricks and Urijah Faber meet a expert, Travis Browne trains with Frank Mir, Matt Hughes hangs out with Robbie Lawler, and a lot more.
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UFC lightweight winner Anthony Pettis won a lover-vote this previous summer to formally became the primary mixed martial arts to ever grace the cover of a Wheaties box, and at Thursday’s UFC 181 media day in vegas, Pettis’ cover was shown.
The winner is here. pic.twitter.com/wmsevy9ds4
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Expert lightweight Anthony Njokuani has verbally agreed to some multi-fight deal with Legacy FC following his recent release in the UFC, Legacy FC owner Mick Maynard supported to MMAFighting.com on Wednesday.
A 34-year old former kickboxer, Njokuani (16-9, 1 NC) had been a mainstay in the WEC/UFC 155-pound division ever since his 2009 introduction, fighting 15 times and scoring memorable KO/TKO triumphs over Chris Horodecki, Edward Faaloloto and Roger Bowling, amongst others.
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Russell Peters understands his combat sports. He was an amateur fighter for nine years, is a longtime supporter of the UFC as well as a detailed buddy of many combatants, like Cung Le.
So the well known comic comes with an educated view regarding the state of MMA. And his take is not overly favorable. In a interview with Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour, Peters took the UFC to job for oversaturation, being a monopoly and underpaying combatants.
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Observe Gilbert Melendez grapple with Ronda Rousey and train some boxing with Rousey’s trainer Edmond Tarverdyan in this video from Fight Heart. Melendez seems quite sleek in the floor at Glendale Fighting Club in Los Angeles ahead of his huge UFC lightweight title chance against Anthony Pettis at UFC 181 on Dec. 6 in Las Vegas.
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Wayne Boyd is more passionate about wrestling than almost anyone, and his latest goal is to succeed at something that everyone else that has tried and failed: the idea of running a promotion doing professional amateur wrestling.
Boyd’s new venture, The Global Wrestling Championships, debuts with a Saturday afternoon show with three main event matches, featuring six of the country’s top wrestlers. The event brings four-time NCAA champion Kyle Dake back to Cornell University. It will be a combination of prelim matches streaming for free at 2 p.m. Eastern time on GoFightLive.tv and the championship matches as a $6.95 Internet pay-per-view if ordered in advance, at 3 p.m. ET.
Boyd’s goals are ambitious. He wants to present real wrestling, with the country’s best wrestlers, in a professional sports league team format. He wants to present the shows like MMA, with interviews, storylines and grudge matches. The idea is for the teams to be from the ten to 20 best wrestling clubs in the country, doing dual meets. The goal is to generate enough revenue that 88 of the best wrestlers in the country would be able to earn $50,000 per year with the hope it will help sustain them so they won’t have to work a full-time job while preparing for international competitions. They also want the U.S. team to surpass Iran and Russia for the top spot in the world. It would also gives those so inclined the experience of competing in a sports league and learning to promote matches before moving into MMA.
It’s something that is the reverse of two decades ago, when people like Randy Couture, Dan Henderson, Matt Lindland, Mark Coleman and Tom Erikson originally started fighting in MMA as a way to earn money to support their Olympic wrestling dreams.
For Saturday’s event, the prize money will be $7,500 to the winner and $2,500 to the loser, for three championship bouts.
In marketing, Boyd wants to change terminology. He doesn’t like the term amateur wrestling. And he wants to use boxing and MMA terms for weight classes.
When Sam Hazewinkel, a member of the 2012 Olympic team, faces Tony Ramos, who won the NCAA title last year for Iowa, they’ll be battling for the GWC flyweight championship, complete with a title belt. The actual weight of the competitors isn’t even decided, but it will be something in the neighborhood of 126 or 127 pounds.
Dake, the only man in history to win NCAA titles in four different weight classes and the best U.S. college wrestler in recent years, will battle Andrew Howe, a former NCAA champion from Wisconsin, for the welterweight title, which will be at around 163 pounds. The two went into triple overtime last year when they were in a tournament for a spot on the U.S. team in the world championships.
The heavyweight championship will be decided with Tervel Diagnev, who placed fifth at the last Olympics, facing Tyrell Fortune, a former Division II national champion who lost to Diagnev in the finals of the tournament in 2013 to make the U.S. team for the world championships. Both men will be about 285 pounds, and Boyd wants to go back to the past the make the heavyweight division an unlimited weight class, bringing back the days of the behemoth 400-pound heavyweights.
Boyd, 68, won an NCAA title in 1969 while going undefeated in dual meets during his college career at Temple University. He’s finishing his 57th year in the sport, and still trains twice a week. He notes that in 1981, he became the only man to ever pin Victor the Wrestling Bear. After the age of 45, he won seven age group national championships, the most recent being in 2009. He’s also produced movies about wrestling, most notably the 1996 movie, “One More Shot.”
The idea of a professional league for amateur wrestlers isn’t new. A number have sprung up in the last 40 years, usually lasting very little time. The AGON promotion tried it in recent years.
The most visibility any of these projects got was nearly a decade ago, when Real Pro Wrestling had a run on national television. RPW was on both PAX TV (now Ion) and Fox Sports Net, but folded after one season, with minimal ratings and an inability to get sponsors. But that league featured some of the best wrestlers in the country at the time, who a decade later are now names in MMA, including 184-pound champion Muhammad Lawal (King Mo) of the Oklahoma Slam, teammate Daniel Cormier, who won the 211-pound championship, and 264-pound champion Patrick Cummins. Also in the promotion was current Bellator bantamweight champion Joe Warren.
“It’s a real challenge,” said Boyd, about the promotion. “I’m really hoping we can do what UFC accomplished. We’re looking to give wrestling a bigger audience, more entertainment value and get more media interest. That’s what we are looking for. For years, we’ve called ourselves amateur wrestling. If you call yourself amateur, how do you expect to get any attention?”
The amateur wrestling community has constantly been trying to figure out a way for its top stars to be able to earn a sustainable living while full-time training for national and international competitions. And it’s come full circle, because Boyd is in discussion about putting on a second show in conjunction with the annual amateur wrestling spectacular held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, on Dec. 21. He talked about getting Lawal and Warren to wrestle on the show, and wants to get in touch with Tito Ortiz.
Ultimately, he’s talking about major arenas and pay-per-view, and hoping to be a circuit where guys can make some money, make a name, and then some would then transition into the UFC or another MMA promotion.
They are experimenting with rules. On the first show, each match is a series of a best-of-five series of three-minute rounds, calling them rounds and not periods. The rounds will be scored both separately and together. If there is a pin, the match is over. If not, the first person to win three rounds takes it. However, if the loser wins his rounds stronger, enough to where after four or five rounds, he has more cumulative points than the winner, they go into a three round overtime to decide the championship. If that fails, they stand up and have a sudden death, first person to score round. If neither man scores after three minutes, there will be three judges who decide the champion.
“We’re pushing scoring more points, wrestling longer and wrestling harder,” said Boyd. “Our guys, if they go to the world championships, when they wrestle the Russians and Iranians, they’ll have trained for 15-18 minute matches, so they’ll have a little edge in conditioning. We want the U.S. to dominate wrestling and dominate Russia and Iran.”
“I need to see what happens after ten minutes,” he said. “We need to see how it looks when they’re exhausted. I may find the magic number is 12 minutes, not 15, maybe nine, but I want the matches to be longer. Whose ever heard of an entertainment event that lasts six minutes?
He’s talking to NBA owners, with a goal to get exposure by putting on wrestling matches at halftime of games.
“People call me crazy, but without vision, you’ll just do the same things over and over,” he said. “We’ve never been able to pay our athletes. We’re looking at being a bridge to UFC. If I can sit down with Dana White, we can map something out.”
He looks back at the early 1900s, when Frank Gotch was one of the biggest sports heroes of the time, and battled George Hackenschmidt before 29,000 fans at Comiskey Park in Chicago, or when Joe Stecher battled Earl Caddock in Madison Square Garden in legitimate matches for the world championships.
“I’d like to do a match in Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, a big match where the lure is that the winner would get $1 million,” said Boyd. “If people knew two guys were fighting for that much money, they would get interested.”
He thinks that will lead to more participation in the sport.
“The characteristics of being great in any sport are common in wrestling,” he said. “Any ten year-old boy, or ten year-old girl should experience wrestling for at least one season. It’ll make him a better baseball player or a better football player. It builds character. It’s the world’s oldest sport, the original sport of the ancient Olympics, and it’s a natural teacher of life experiences.”
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MMA Fighting has Manny Pacquiao vs. Chris Algieri live blog for round-by-round updates for one of the top boxing fights of the year.
The main event will start a little after 11:30 p.m. ET. Check out our Pacquiao vs. Algieri results page to find out what happened on the undercard. Pacquaio will defend his WBO welterweight title at the event and try to hand Algieri the first loss of his pro career.
Check out the Pacquiao vs. Algieri main event live blog below.
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A new form of fighting as a television spectacle was announced at a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, with some major names in Japanese combat sports and entertainment behind it.
The new promotion is called “Ganryujima,” which is named after a small Japanese island best known as the site of a duel to the death in 1612 between legendary master swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (who the former kickboxer was named after) and Sasaki Kojiro. In more recent times, the island was used for televised pro wrestling spectacular grudge matches held without a ring or cage, known as Jungle Death matches.
Sadaharu Tanikawa, who ran the K-1 kickboxing promotion from 2003 until its closing in 2012, will be heading the promotion, which is being backed by the Fuji Network. The Fuji Network is one of the major networks in Japan. They ran prime time spectacles during the heyday of the Pride Fighting Championships, until canceling due to a scandal when it came out publicly that there was organized crime backing of the group. The Yakuza taint of Pride killed the promotion, as no other television network would touch the shows, even though ratings were still strong, and even after it was sold to Zuffa. It has not aired any fighting sports events for the past seven years.
Sports like kickboxing and MMA have continued to exist in Japan. UFC events at the Saitama Super Arena have drawn well, but to the general public, interest faded in both sports.
The rules explained at the press conference in Tokyo are that it will be a MMA fighting, but without submissions. The matches will be held in a flat circle, similar to sumo, with no ring or a cage. Punching will be allowed on the ground. Wrestling is allowed, but submissions are eliminated. There will be quick stand-ups from lack of punching on the ground, as the ground work will be allowed only if their is an attempt to finish the fight.
According to those close to the promotion, the mentality behind this is to attract a casual fan audience. Their belief is a cage is not general public friendly in Japan, and that extended ground work is boring to the public.
It’s more a spectacle, attempting to use people who already have names in Japan, and do celebrity fights and freak show fights, which worked for a period for ratings purposes. However, they were overdone and interest faded in them, but it has been years since they were done. The mentality was an attempt to produce a fighting surface and rules that sumos, the most famous combat sports athletes in Japan, can compete in. Attempts to use sumos in kickboxing and MMA worked for ratings purposes during Japan’s MMA boom, but they were unable to win many fights, so interest in them fighting faded over time.
Among those involved with the promotion are Hiroshi Hase, its Chief Director, a current senator in Japan whose background included wrestling in the 1984 Olympics and being a Hall of Fame pro wrestler; Masato, Japan’s best-known kickboxer whose retirement coincided with the ending of K-1 as he was its last native superstar; and Shinichi Shinohara, a silver medalist in the 2000 Olympics in judo.
The first show will be Feb. 28, which will air on Fuji’s satellite station, which is not that significant because satellite penetration in Japan is limited. But the top executives of Fuji are looking at building the group up to where they have a major network spectacular on Dec. 31, 2015. Fighting on New Year’s Eve was a tradition on the network for many years, until Fuji got out of the fighting business over the scandal.
The past few years, the Fuji Network brought in fighting celebrities like Bob Sapp, Fedor Emelianenko, Mark Hunt, Alistair Overeem, Kazushi Sakuraba and many others for arm-wrestling and tug-of-war tournaments that aired on New Years Eve. In Japan, New Years Eve is the biggest television night of the year and the feeling is that gimmick has run its course and fights on network television are new again.
The initial reaction of the Japanese fighting sports media was strongly negative, particularly when Hase tied in the Ganryujima name with his pro wrestling death match on the island..
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It’s now been a year since Georges St-Pierre stepped into the Octagon, but the former UFC welterweight champion says he isn’t much closer to deciding his future involvement in the sport.
“I don’t know if I will go back to competition,” St-Pierre told MMA Canada this weekend in Toronto. “That’s why I didn’t call it ‘a retirement,’ I called it ‘a break’ because I don’t know. [Light heavyweight boxer] Bernard Hopkins has a good analogy. He says, ‘You can’t ask a woman who just gave birth and suffered for many hours if she will have another baby again.’ Same thing for me when I got out of competition.”
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The Scott Coker-era Bellator gets its soft launch on Saturday with one of their ‘tent pole’ events. This card is headlined by a pair of aging UFC Hall of Famers, but one with a high degree of visibility for Spike TV audiences. The card also features a lightweight title fight, two kickboxers battling in a MMA context and more.
What: Bellator 131: Tito vs. Bonnar
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Hans Nijman, a kickboxer and pro wrestler in Japan who fought in the now-infamous Pride Open Weight Grand Prix tournament in 2000, was shot to death on Wednesday while in his automobile before a fitness center he partly possessed in Beverwijk, Holland, according to multiple Dutch media reports.
Nijman was 55.
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UBERLANDIA, Brazil — Thomas Almeida proved to be worth the hoopla in his UFC debut.
The Chute Boxe possibility, who entered the UFC using a 17-0 record with 17 ends, went the distance for the very first time in his professional career, commanding Tim Gorman to win via unanimous decision at UFC Fight Night 56 in Uberlandia, Brazil, on Nov. 8.
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with this week’s episode of “The MMA Beat,” the panel will discuss Nevada eventually drug examining Vitor Belfort, whether MMA needs the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, the state of Invicta FC, another two jam-packed weekends in MMA, and even more.
Watch “The MMA Beat” reside today at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT / 6 p.m. GMT.
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By definition, at least according to the commission, Matt Betzold exists as a downed opponent. That means no knees to the head or high kicks from whatever enemy stands across from him. Years back, the Arizona Boxing Commission attempted to pass that idle detail off as evidence to refuse Betzold his permit to fight professionally, since if you did not understand, having one leg can seemingly be a fairly huge edge in a cage fight.
The whole thing ended up being naturally and comically criminal.
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American Kickboxing Academy head coach Javier Mendez talks about Cain Velasquez’s knee injury and also other forthcoming AKA-associated fights.
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The MMA Hour is back in your lifetime on Tuesday. Below is a rundown of the week’s show:
1:00 p.m. ET — American Kickboxing Academy head coach Javier Mendez will talk about Cain Velasquez’s knee injury and other forthcoming AKA-associated fights.
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RIO DE JANEIRO — UFC lightweight Gilbert Burns talks about his triumph over Christos Giagos to the preliminary card of UFC 179, transitioning from sport jiu jitsu to MMA, competing in his home country of Brazil and much more. Top kickboxer Tyrone Spong, Burns’ teammate, adds his view on Burns and his triumph.
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