Category: mma

mma

The Ultimate Fighter 20, Episode 10: No talk, just fight

Posted on by Beau Dure

Previously on The Ultimate Fighter …

Hey! Do you remember Jessica Penne? Yes, she’s a pretty good fighter. MMARising puts her 12th in the global pound-for-pound rankings. She’s seeded fourth in the tournament on The Ultimate Fighter.

Oh, you didn’t remember she’s on the show? Well, she is. No, really. And she’s fighting fifth seed Aisling Daly, another fighter you might have known before the show but haven’t seen as much this season except to learn about her battle with depression and her love of her Irish training partners.

In other words, we have actual grown-ups fighting this week. People who aren’t fussing with each other over stupid things. That was last week.

This being a reality show, they have to drum up something. So we talk with Justine Kish, who rooms with Daly but is good friends with Penne. She interprets Daly’s lack of an outgoing personality as hatred. We hadn’t seen Kish in quite a while — she was injured and had to withdraw from the competition.

Penne isn’t drawn into anything. She wants to direct her energy toward the fight. You can almost hear the producers crying.

So let’s try some actual fight-related talk. Penne isn’t big on game-planning, but she’s concerned about Daly’s unorthodox style. Got that?

But first, it’s our product placement for Harley-Davidson. Coach Anthony Pettis gives a nice speech about the “Harley-Davidson lifestyle.” Felice Herrig tells us she frequently rides on the back of a Harley-Davidson and was enjoying a chance to actually go “vroom, vroom” herself. I cannot comment on that.

Just before Pettis says “lifestyle” for the 30th time, we see Kish trying to get Penne to lighten up and enjoy herself.

I’m glad I’m not on this show. My confessional would run something like this: “Yeah, how am I supposed to fit my kids on this? And all the gear for soccer practice? Where are the speakers? And why is it so freaking loud? Yeah, I’m going outside to wait for the van.”

As promised, we’re going to see the man Daly calls “the notorious Conor McGregor,” the Irishman who fights pretty well at featherweight and talks even better. He shows up in a dapper vest and tie, as if someone told him people dress up in Vegas. (He is at least going to a press event to sell his bout with Dustin Poirier.) He pulls off the surprise pretty well. Daly is just puttering around the dressing room and starting to walk toward the door when McGregor suddenly pops in. Daly nearly takes him down with a big hug, and they drool together over the UFC belt in the hall.

Daly brings McGregor in to meet the team. Most of them seem unimpressed. But Daly introduces her friends, including Alex the Never Seen on Camera. She admits it might be a bit childish not to introduce the ones who aren’t really her buddies — “Didn’t want anybody getting some love from Conor if they didn’t deserve it.”

We’ve just hit the point in the season where everyone has the thousand-yard stare. They’re physically and emotionally drained. It’s like watching people wait at an airport during a flight delay.

Penne wants her alone time, but Kish won’t have it. She wants to play ping-pong. Penne wants to keep doing her jigsaw puzzle. Kish wants to do something two people can do. She has never seen my family do jigsaw puzzles.

Legendary cutman Stitch Duran pops up for a cameo, wrapping Daly’s hands and asking if she’s primarily a boxer. She says she’s more well-rounded.

Pettis, who has been pretty good about not playing favorites, offers a quick analysis: The fight favors Jessica early, Aish later. Given that we’re only 26 minutes into this episode and already walking to the cage, we may be seeing the “Aish later” part of that assessment.

Tale of the tape: You wouldn’t guess it, but Penne is five years older (31 to 26). She’s also a couple of inches taller with a reach advantage.

After 40 seconds of tentative jabbing and stepping around, Penne gets an eye poke. Referee Herb Dean stops the action and consults with Penne, who’s blinking a lot but seems ready to resume quickly.

In the fight recap later, Anthony Pettis thinks the eye poke slowed down Penne, who kept going for a takedown but couldn’t get it. Daly wound up getting a couple of takedowns herself but opted not to take the fight to the ground. That may have been the difference in a first round with a few clinches and some fierce exchanges.

Round 2: Daly throws hard straight rights. Another clinch, but Daly gets the underhooks and again tosses Penne to the ground and lets her up. They clinch again, and the cageside microphones pick up some heavy breathing from both fighters. It’s an intense fight.

Penne finally gets her takedown late in the round, sneaking her leg past Daly’s to trip her. Daly defends well, but the round ends with Penne on Daly’s back, landing punches. That’s enough to win the round and force us to …

Round 3: And it’s all Penne. Daly goes for the clinch but gets tripped. Penne’s on top again with a lot of time to work. Daly shoes some creativity from the bottom, even going for a leg submission at one point, but Penne keeps top control and lands some punches. Penne, to her credit, remains aggressive and works her way to side control. She slides up and locks an arm around Daly’s neck, never really threatening the choke but leaving herself free to pound away.

Penne finally gives up the position, and they stand again. Realistically, Daly’s only chance at this point is a big KO, but she opts to clinch again. At the horn, they both raise their hands, but there’s no way this fight goes to Daly.

Fight recap: Pettis says it’s one of the best fights of the season. Melendez is impressed as well. The decision, of course, goes to Penne.

In Penne’s dressing room, the coaches hail Daly’s toughness. Penne jokingly complains that she’s not getting any praise.

Penne faces the winner of the Esparza-Torres fight. Gotta like Penne in that one.

The next episode promises both of the remaining quarterfinals, including Calderwood-Namajunas. That’s an impressive fight card.

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mma

The Ultimate Fighter 20, Episode 9: Mean girls

Posted on by Beau Dure

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? The last season of The Ultimate Fighter I recapped in full was Season 16. Remember Shane Carwin?

But I’m inspired. Season 20 — all women, all contenders, a title belt on the line — is terrific. The fights are more intriguing that what you’ll see on some UFC pay-per-views these days. I can’t wait to see Rose Namajunas take on Joanne Calderwood. Not because of their staredown. Because they’re great fighters with good personalities.

Even the reality aspects of Season 20 have been better than many past seasons. Sure, the house has divided into cliques — as it always does. (So please don’t assume this is some female trait on display in the TUF house for the first time.) The producers have given us a bit of misdirection on the supposed house villain, Heather Clark. After a couple of episodes of teammates ganging up on her, the careful viewer started to notice that she wasn’t actually doing anything worthy of such scorn. By the time we learned she was definitely not faking her knee injury, Angela Magana and other Clark tormenters had become the villains.

Luke Thomas and Kid Nate are a little down on the lack of coaches’ interaction in this season. I have no problem with the lack of a coaching rivalry. My respect for both coaches has grown. Anthony Pettis is thoughtful and empathetic. Gilbert Melendez is doing his best to mediate intrateam disputes.

So here we go — back in the recappers’ chair. It’s Episode 9.

(Have I mentioned that I love the new theme song? I do. Good subtle touches like the ride cymbal building up to the final guitar riff. Quality.)

Rose Namajunas laments that she’s the only fighter left from Team Melendez. That’s actually a good situation in some ways.

And, hey — there’s alcohol! I had just been thinking that we hadn’t seen much drinking this season. That leads to Bec Rawlings, drowning her sorrows after elimination, having a slumber party with Magana and a couple of the other Rude Girls. Tecia Torres, awakened in her upper bunk, decided to take her pillow elsewhere. And … that’s it? In a lot of seasons, that sort of thing ends with furniture being destroyed. This time, it ends with Torres and Magana agreeing to switch bunks and rooms without incident.

Over to Team Pettis, which has seven quarterfinalists. Lots of teammate vs. teammate situations, and Pettis follows TUF precedent by backing out of cornering against someone he has been coaching.

But this is where the conflict shifts …

We’ve heard very little from Randa Markos since she upset Tecia Torres (who wound up reinstated to the tournament and winning) in Week 1. She’s fighting Felice Herrig, who always finds the camera.

The team decides to split into mini-teams, each only taking one session per day, so fighters aren’t training with their next opponents. Torres is a little reluctant to drop the two-a-days, but at this stage, it seems like it’s just as well.

And now, Dana White’s favorite part of the season, the Coaches’ Challenge. As we’ve seen in all the ads, it’s a trivia competition hosted by the golden-voiced Bruce Buffer. White explains that they moved away from a physical challenge to rest Pettis’ knee.

Round 1: 10 fighters have coached and competed. Name two. Melendez buzzes in — Rashad Evans and Forrest Griffin.

Next: Which fighter won a championship title but did not win his season of TUF? Pettis guesses wrong.

Felice Herrig has little faith in Pettis, but he redeems himself a bit by coming up with the year of the first UFC event (1993). He ends up with 900 points to Melendez’s 1,800.

The “sudden victory” round is like Final Jeopardy — wager, then answer. The question: How many successful title defenses does Anderson Silva have? Each coach answers “9.” It’s 10. They bet wisely — Pettis bet it all, as he had to, and Melendez bet nothing. Melendez wins. Pettis finally gives the producer-friendly “Well, that’s all Gilbert’s going to win” spiel.

We’re abruptly back to the next fight, where Markos talks about her underrated striking. But Aisling Daly thinks she needs to take this fight to the ground. Then it’s cliche time — Markos really wants it, she works hard, this is her chance, etc.

But Markos wants to go back to two-a-day training. She doesn’t care if Herrig is watching her. Conflict time!

The Pettis coaching staff asks Herrig, No. 1 seed Carla Esparza and whoever else is in the room if they would reconsider the split training sessions. Herrig is so livid that her hair suddenly sprouts a few more colors as she gives her confessional about how the team voted but the other girls went “behind their backs” to the coaches to complain. The “behind the back” talk would’ve been when the other fighters were in the session that the Herrig crew didn’t attend. That’s kind of like saying the Sales team went behind the backs of the Marketing team by discussing something in the Sales meeting.

The Pettis coach who was trying to sort things out is identified. He’s Scott Cushman, one of the focal points of an investigative report about the death of a fighter he was coaching. Not the best timing, though I’d have a few more pointed questions for the referee and doctors than I would for the coach.

Another coach tries to sell the “they don’t want to watch you train; they just want to cut weight and work out” angle. Esparza calls them cowards for talking with coaches in … again, in their training session. Does this mean Esparza is a coward for calling the other fighters cowards when they were cowardly not there to be accused of being cowards?

Herrig continues that line of thought in the sauna with a very frustrated assistant coach who looks a little like Jake Shields but clearly isn’t. Shields is helping Melendez, though I’m not sure he has been identified once.

Back at the house, a few fighters are in the hot tub talking about the situation. Herrig, her hair pulled so tightly into twin buns that it now qualifies as Kevlar, struts out to complain that they didn’t mention it at the team meeting. She calls them “cowards” … then quickly races back into the house. That’s called “undercutting your point.”

Markos, in confessional, laughs it off as extra motivation.

The next day, the Pettis van is crowded. Esparza and Herrig gang up on Markos, who wants no part of the discussion. Esparza and Herrig conclude that Markos is the rudest person they’ve ever met. She’s Canadian! She can’t be rude! Back from commercial break, Herrig does a mean impression of Markos for Esparza’s amusement.

At this point, it seems only fair to get Herrig’s postshow thoughts on this whole mess, even though I’ve accidentally spoiled the outcome of the fight. Here’s what she says about Markos:

Back to game-planning — Herrig thinks Markos will get tired after missing a couple of takedowns. Jessica Penne, another fighter who hasn’t gotten a ton of screen time, thinks Herrig will win — oh, we’re suddenly back to Herrig. Earlier, she said she prefers to fight when she’s not mad at her opponent, but now she says she fights better when she’s mad.

And back to the house, where Herrig and Esparza do a patty-cake game repeating Markos’ “Don’t talk to me” line. Markos, stretching by herself in the house, mutters “(bleep) bitches.”

At long last, 44 minutes into the episode, we have the weigh-in. Esparza says the fight will be easy because Markos hasn’t been nice, which is impressive logic.

Now we get the Scottish voice of reason, Joanne Calderwood. In her lilting Celtic voice, with subtitles, she says Randa’s mentally stronger than Felice and more focused. “Randa’s going to take it to the ground, and I think that’ll be it.”

The staredown is entertaining. Herrig again trots out the “Don’t talk to me” line. Then she blows a bubble, which Markos impressively swats away. That’s accurate striking.

Back in the house, Calderwood looks very comfortable on her bunk bed as she chats with Markos. They strip away the subtitles as Calderwood says Herrig looks like a (bleep) clown. Markos goes to confessional and says it just shows Herrig is weak.

Let’s get a word from Calderwood:

Herrig says Markos was quivering and cowering. I don’t think those words mean what she thinks they mean. Markos looked quite intense.

One last reminder that Herrig doesn’t like Markos before they finally walk to the cage. “The anger that I bring into the cage does help me a lot,” Herrig says before listing all the nasty things she’s going to do.

We get back from the ad break at the 53-minute mark, so we know this’ll be a short fight. Herrig has a three-inch reach advantage even though they’re the same height. Dana White isn’t there, so we once again have the ref giving the “two five-minute rounds” speech.

Herrig throws a few punches from distance, but she can’t stop Markos from coming in and clinching 20 seconds in. Herrig gets Markos against the cage, but Markos reverses it and starts going for the trip. At 1:15, she gets it, but Herrig manages to end up on top of her. They stand again, and Markos throws a knee against the cage. That’s a rare strike attempt from Markos. The grappler then gets her arms around Herrig’s head and throws her to the mat, landing on top in side control. Markos pulls a slick armbar. Herrig taps.

They don’t shake hands. Markos says she should’ve pulled harder to break her arm.

“That should shut her up, right?” Markos says to a couple of people in the Team Pettis bleachers. Esparza: “Maybe if you weren’t such a bitch, she’d shut up.” Markos: “Don’t worry, you’re next.” Esparza: “Oh my god, I wish you were my next fight. I can’t wait to fight you.”

They’re on opposite sides of the draw, and I don’t see Markos beating the Namajunas-Calderwood winner. At this point, with Esparza’s head somewhere other than fighting and training, I don’t see her getting past Tecia Torres, much less the Aisling Daly-Jessica Penne winner.

Herrig and Esparza didn’t come across well in that episode, to put it mildly. But in fairness, remember what Rich Franklin called “The Edit Monster.” Six weeks get distilled down to a few hours of footage. Maybe Markos secretly switched the coffee in the house to decaf. Maybe she forced Herrig and Esparza to listen to Caress of Steel, by far the worst Rush album. We don’t know.

Scenes from the next: It’s Harley-Davidson plug time. And Conor McGregor visits his pal Daly. The fighters don’t appear to have anything nasty to say to each other. “I’m looking forward to the challenge of facing her,” Penne says. I think I’ll watch anyway.

Update: The fighters went on TUF Talk, and Esparza, unfortunately, doubled down. Markos pointed out that it’s all there on the show for people to see. Esparza could’ve claimed that the editing made her seem worse that she was. But Esparza seems to think the episode made her look OK. Oops.

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mma

Unsolicited advice for the UFC

Posted on by Beau Dure

When a UFC fight card coincides with a Bellator fight card, the choice should be obvious. And yet it’s not.

The UFC has the talent — by my quick count, 83 of the 90 top-10 fighters in the Sherdog rankings. At USA TODAY/MMA Junkie, which ranks 15 per class but only ranks men (come on, guys!), it’s 101 out of 120, and no non-UFC fighter ranks higher than seventh.

But Bellator, now under the leadership of Strikeforce founder Scott Coker, is going in a new direction that cleverly stakes out a couple of niches. If you don’t believe me, listen to Kid Nate and Luke Thomas in the return of their Tete-A-Tete segment.

This weekend’s Bellator card drew an average of 1.2 million viewers, peaking at 2 million (probably not coincidentally after the UFC pay-per-view card ended). UFC 180’s prelims drew an average of 624,000, peaking at 771,000. World Series of Fighting should have picked another weekend. (I haven’t seen estimates for the UFC PPV audience — it’s not an apples to apples comparison, anyway, because a PPV “buy” usually represents multiple viewers, and you have to figure in people who went out to see it at a local viewing spot. Plus, you know, you have to pay for it.)

It was a strange UFC pay-per-view card. For one thing, the prelims were mostly fighters from The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America, plus one women’s fight that promised (and delivered) a lot of action. The TUF season had generated very little buzz — the foreign installments aren’t really promoted in the USA.

The main card opened with a battle of sheer journeymen, Edgar Garcia and Hector Urbina. Then came Augusto Montano, a Mexican prospect making his UFC debut, for a predictable demolition of Chris Heatherly, who somehow managed to lose his only prior UFC fight by omoplata.

Only the last three fights looked like typical pay-per-view fare. Top-1o featherweights Ricardo Lamas and Dennis Bermudez were a combined 12-2 in the UFC coming into this bout. Welterweight Kelvin Gastelum, a surprise winner on The Ultimate Fighter 19 months ago, continued his rapid rise with a first-round finish of former contender Jake Ellenberger. Then Fabricio Werdum won the UFC interim heavyweight belt in a thriller against Mark Hunt, a compelling substitute for champion Cain Velasquez.

It’s not that the UFC is just coasting on its brand name. This was supposed to be the UFC’s big breakthrough in Mexico, and despite losing Mexican-American Velasquez to injury, it probably did the trick. As is the case with a lot of UFC cards, several fighters had to pull out with injuries, including Velasquez, Mexican star Erik Perez and both sides of an appealing bout between veterans Diego Sanchez and Joe Lauzon. At one time, the card was solid: Velasquez-Werdum (title bout), Gastelum-Ellenberger, Lamas-Bermudez, Sanchez-Lauzon, Perez-Marcus Brimage.

This is all part of the UFC going global. In 2009, the year of UFC 100, the UFC did 15 cards in the USA, two in Britain, one in Ireland, one in Germany and one in Canada. The Germany card was the first held in a country that didn’t speak (mostly) English since 2000. In 2014, the UFC has been to Brazil six times, with a seventh scheduled. It’s been to Macau twice. Three ties to Canada. Also to Singapore, Britain, United Arab Emirates, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, Japan, Sweden, Australia, and now Mexico. These cards tend to have a bit of local flavor. And why not?

Bellator, despite a healthy dose of international talent on the roster, has only left the USA to go to Ontario. And Coker is putting together clever cards such as the one that drew a couple million viewers over the weekend.

The main event — Tito Ortiz vs. Stephan Bonnar — was a circus. Most fans surely watched out of morbid curiosity, and what they saw looked like this:

But if you tuned in ahead of the graybeards riding on the last few waves of their UFC glory days, you saw a few interesting bouts:

  • Interim lightweight champion Will Brooks outlasting former champion Michael Chandler
  • Joe Schilling knocking out Melvin Manhoef in a battle of kickboxers
  • Bellator veteran Mike Richman taking apart well-regarded UFC veteran Nam Phan
  • Light heavyweight motormouth, former Strikeforce champion and former college wrestling star King Mo (Muhammad Lawal) getting a TKO win over late fill-in Joe Vedepo

So Coker mixed a couple of “fun” bouts (Ortiz-Bonnar, Schilling-Manhoef) with a title fight and a couple of bouts with guys we’ve heard of.

Bellator isn’t out to take the No. 1 spot away from the UFC. But in its brief history, MMA has been better off with a solid No. 2. With Coker in charge, Bellator should have that position locked down for a while, at least in North America.

But even if Bellator isn’t a direct threat to the UFC, this weekend was a reminder that a lot of things aren’t quite right in UFC land. A couple of pay-per-view cards this year have drawn fewer than 200,000 buys. The Ultimate Fighter is no longer a ratings juggernaut. Standard & Poor’s says UFC parent Zuffa may see its profit drop 40 percent from 2013.

It’s not exactly time to panic. The UFC is going global, and that’s going to be costly and difficult. It’s still surely a good idea in the long run.

The U.S. audience, though, has the right to feel a little neglected when we’re seeing the likes of Heatherly, Hans Stringer and other fighters we don’t know on a pay-per-view card.

And the UFC quite rightly avoids “circus” bouts most of the time. Randy Couture’s demolition of boxer James Toney was a rare exception. The UFC is supposed to be about the best fighters gradually climbing the ladder to the top of the ranks. No reason it shouldn’t stick to its guns on that front.

My unsolicited advice goes back to the roots, a topic about which I wrote a book. Don’t look for it in bookstores. Or Amazon. Maybe in the cloud. I wrote about The Ultimate Fighter, and I think that’s where the UFC needs to get back to building its fighters.

The current season of The Ultimate Fighter is the best in years. That’s because the fighters already have a bit of a name, and they’re looking for a breakthrough.

The basic problem with The Ultimate Fighter is that the talent pool is tapped out. The UFC has so many good fighters under contract that it’s highly unlikely that a new fighter is going to have much of an impact. The days of Forrest Griffin winning the UFC belt a couple of years after winning the TUF title are gone. Gastelum may actually be the biggest success story of recent seasons …

… except when the UFC is building a new weight class. This season, they’re doing just that. And the winner won’t just be in the UFC — she’ll be the champion.

So fans like me can’t wait to see the next bouts. Aisling Daly vs. Jessica Penne? That’s quality. Rose Namajunas vs. Joanne Calderwood? That’s PPV-worthy.

TUF 14 had new weight classes — bantamweight and featherweight. TUF 18 had a few good fight veterans in the women’s bantamweight class, though Ronda Rousey’s diva attitude made it nearly unwatchable.

The problem is when TUF goes back to scouring the depths of the talent pool.  TUF 16 champion Colton Smith lost his next three fights. A couple of good fighters have come through — Gastelum has gone from the No. 13 draft pick on TUF 17 to a legit top-10 guy. But too many of the fighters are fleeting memories.

Back up to the basic problem: The UFC has too many fighters and not enough “names.” That’s where TUF comes in.

It’s time to put existing UFC fighters on TUF.

I’m not talking a replay of the “Comeback” season, in which guys who had been in the UFC got a second chance and fought for a title shot (which Matt Serra shockingly converted, beating Georges St. Pierre in an upset for the ages). But take some of the unknown guys who have had a couple of UFC fights and put them on the show. Offer up a headlining spot on a free Fight Night card as a reward.

We’ll get to know more fighters that actually have a chance of sticking around in the UFC. There’s no point in watching TUF if it’s pretty clear only a couple of the cast members are going to be around long enough to know their names.

That’s the simple fix. The other is to keep guys from getting hurt and wrecking PPV cards. That’s beyond a simple blogger’s ability to fix.

 

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mma

Art Davie, The Ultimate Fighter and the changing face of the UFC

Posted on by Beau Dure

Female fighters have taken the spotlight in the UFC. And I haven’t heard anyone complaining. (Please don’t dig up some misogynist troll on Twitter — I’m sure they’re out there, but they don’t deserve any attention.) The current season of The Ultimate Fighter is all-female, and the fights are the most compelling in years.

davieSo it’s a bit of a culture shock to read Is This Legal?: The Inside Story of the First UFC from the Man Who Created It, by UFC founder Art Davie with longtime MMA/soccer broadcaster (and therefore friend of SportsMyriad) Sean Wheelock.

Davie is a throwback in every sense. With a gun tucked in his waistband, a few Cuban cigars as currency and a predilection for hiring attractive women, it’s easy to picture him as a lead character in a film noir about a 50s nightclub owner.

You might like the guy, you might not. What you can’t deny is that he took a compelling idea and pushed it into existence. That wasn’t easy, even after he fell in with the Gracie family and earned the trust of people who were eager to prove the superiority of their martial art in a new arena.

Davie had long had the question in his head of who would win fights between different styles of fighters — boxers, wrestlers, various martial arts practitioners, etc. But previous efforts to make such matchups always bogged down on the rules, leading to farces like the Muhammad Ali-Antonio Inoki fight. (This Guardian story on that event weighs in at 4,000 words, and it’s worth it.) And TV programmers didn’t know what to make of it.

Each problem weighed on Davie’s shoulders until the last minute. Like Apollo 13, you know the ending, but you’re still left in suspense as Davie and his broadcast partners play hardball until a few hours before the event. Davie and Wheelock also describe the contentious fighters’ meeting in which the rules were fodder for a few good shouting matches until a sumo wrestler put his weight behind the proceedings:

Then Teila Tuli, in the most dramatic and theatrical of gestures, stood up and announced, “I just signed my paper. I don’t know about you guys, but I came here to party. If anyone else came here to party, I’ll see you tomorrow night at the arena.” He then slammed his signed paper down on the table. The sound reverberated throughout the room.

And so began the Ultimate Fighting Championship and, with all due respect to now-defunct Japanese organizations, mixed martial arts as we know it.

Fast-forward 21 years. With Dana White at the helm, the UFC still hires women for the ornamental position of Octagon Girl. But The Ultimate Fighter, the reality show that pushed the UFC over the tipping point into the mainstream, is relying on women in its pivotal 20th season.

It’s also the first season in which the winner will be named UFC champion. They can pull that off because it’s a new weight class — strawweight, or 115 pounds. (The only women’s division already in the UFC is Rouseyweight, er, bantamweight. They’ve skipped flyweight, 125 pounds. See all the top fighters per class at MMA Rising’s rankings page.)

Personally, I was so excited by the prospect of seeing notable fighters squaring off on TUF that I forgot to consider whether the show was … you know … any good.

At Fight Opinion, the always candid Zach Arnold says it’s not. Among his complaints:

  • No tactical or technical talk about what’s going on in practice or what the fighters are trying to do. (To be fair, they haven’t done this in a lot of seasons. That said, this season has been more emotional than past seasons. Which is saying a lot.)
  • Not enough background on the fighters, personally or professionally.
  • The fights should air in the middle of the show, making it tougher to guess how long it goes. (He’s right. Fight starts at 10:52? First-round finish coming up. 10:35? Three-rounder.) Also, they could use the time after the fight to dissect what just happened and tell more about what’s coming next.

The third idea is simplest to implement. Start each fight at the halfway point of the episode.

The first two ideas illustrate the challenge for TUF producers: How do you balance casual fans and hardcore fans? The petty stuff at the house (Zach posted before Wednesday’s episode, which featured a raunchy slam-book session, though they left out the winning entry) drives the hardcore fans crazy but amuses the casuals. A point-by-point breakdown of striking combinations will have the casuals reaching for the remote control.

This season’s fights, at least, are hardcore heaven. Instead of leaving matchups to the vagaries of coaches who might send their top fighter to face the other team’s top fighter in the first week, potentially leaving one of the show favorites sitting around idle for the rest of the show. This time, they felt they had enough information on the fighters to seed them, 1 through 16. The result is the most compelling MMA tournament since PRIDE threw heavyweights at each other.

UFC 1 was a tournament as well. Aside from that, the sport has evolved quite a bit since Art Davie’s vision of tough guys from various fighting disciplines seeing which is the best. Now we’re talking about well-rounded athletes, male and female. I doubt Dana White tucks a gun in the waistband of his worn-out jeans.

So it’s a bit jarring to read Davie’s book and then tune into women punching each other in The Ultimate Fighter. But they’ve all played their part in growing this sport. And for that, we should be thankful.

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mind games, mma, olympic sports, soccer

I’m back – what’d I miss?

Posted on by Beau Dure

My hand is out of a splint after three weeks, though my typing speed is still diminished by a bit of tape on my two still-aching fingers. I may need to put my goalkeeping career on hold for a while.

I’m also relatively not sick. I have no idea how I’ve had waves of sinus and throat problems through the most mild summer of my lifetime, but a doctor has assured me she’ll figure it out. I got back from vacation to find Northern Virginia had become a sauna to start September, and after leading a couple of youth soccer practices in Venusian conditions last night and walking a couple of miles this morning, I actually feel better. Go figure.

Enough complaining. I’m back, and it’s time to give a quick update on the blog, my writing priorities over the next few months, and what happened in the sports world while I was healing.

The blog: Expect more links and fewer 1,000-word pieces. I want to keep sharing Olympic sports news, but I’m going to do that more efficiently. No more Monday Myriad (in part because my youth soccer practices are on Mondays), so this will be the last “roundup” post for a while. My analysis will more commonly be on …

The podcast: Hoping to do another one this week, depending on my guest’s schedule.

Medal projections: By next year, I hope Olympic sports news will be in the context of my medal projections. I’ll be working on that, along with …

Enduring Spirit epilogue: The tentative plan is to re-release the book (electronically only) with the epilogue added. I’ll also release the epilogue separately at a low, low price, so if you already bought the book, you won’t be shelling out another six bucks. I’m going to do a few postseason interviews, so don’t expect this right away.

Single-Digit Soccer: This project keeps gathering momentum. I’m planning to speak and gather input at the NSCAA convention in January, and I hope to finish it by next summer.

Other than that, I’ll still be writing at OZY, a site you should check out even if you never read anything I write. And you may still see an MMA book I finished a while back.

—

So what happened while I was out? In no particular order:

Badminton World Championships: South Korea wins men’s doubles, China won three other events, and the women’s singles went to … Spain? First time for everything, and this is a terrific photo:

Judo World Championships: Olympic champion Kayla Harrison was the only U.S. medalist, taking bronze.

Rowing World Championships: Britain won 10 medals, New Zealand won nine, Australia and Germany eight each, and the USA won seven. The World Championships include a lot of non-Olympic events, so don’t use this for medal projections. These championships included some para-rowing events, which accounted for one U.S. medal. The sole U.S. gold went to, as always, the mighty women’s eight.

World Equestrian Games: The sole U.S. medals so far are in the non-Olympic discipline of reining. Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are cleaning up. Olympic quota spots (earned by the country, not the athlete) are available in dressage, eventing and show jumping.

Also, Ollie Williams (the man behind Frontier Sports) looks at the Olympic prospects of horseball. Yes, horseball. They compare it to a mix of rugby and basketball, but I think it’s a mix of polo and quidditch.

Triathlon, World Series grand final: Gwen Jorgensen didn’t need a great finish to clinch the world championship. She did it anyway. Too early to declare her athlete of the year?

Swimming, Pan-Pacific Games: Phelps, Ledecky and company have it easy compared to Haley Anderson, who won open-water gold after a jellyfish sting, a race postponement and a race relocation. 

Track and field, Diamond League finals: Half of the events wrapped for the season at the Weltklasse Zurich over the weekend; the rest finish up Friday in Brussels. Check the Monday Morning Run for a recap that includes fellow Dukie Shannon Rowbury diving along with U.S. teammate Jenny Simpson as the latter took the women’s 1,500 title in style.

Today’s Frontier Sports wrap has a couple of track and field links (along with helpful links on badminton and much more), including “the often-told, never-dull tale of how (Brianne Theisen-Eaton) almost impaled (Ashton Eaton) with a javelin.”

Overall Diamond League winners include Simpson, Michael Tinsley (USA, 400 hurdles), Christian Taylor (USA, triple jump, took title away from teammate Will Claye at final), Lashawn Merritt (USA, 400 meters, Kirani James wasn’t at the final), Reese Hoffa (USA, shot put), Veronica Campbell-Brown (Jamaica, 100), Dawn Harper-Nelson (USA, 100 hurdles — Americans won every Diamond League race), Tiana Bartoletta (USA, long jump) and Valerie Evans (New Zealand, shot put, swept).

Women’s soccer, NWSL final: I got back from vacation to see this, and I’m glad I did. It was a compelling final, and while Seattle would’ve been a worthy champion in every sense, Kansas City deserved it. The Lauren Holiday-to-Amy Rodriguez combo is as potent as anything you’ll see in soccer.

Kansas City now holds the top-division U.S./Canada titles in men’s soccer (Sporting KC, MLS), women’s soccer (FCKC), and men’s indoor soccer (Missouri Comets, coached by FCKC’s Vlatko Andonovski). The latter won the last MISL title before most of that league leapt to the MASL.

The league also announced it would play a full schedule next summer with a break for the World Cup, which means international players will miss a considerable number of games. The big worry: The season will spill into September, bad news for those counting on international loans or fall coaching jobs to supplement the league’s small paychecks. But the league didn’t have a lot of good options, and now they’re poised to ride a World Cup wave if one materializes again.

Basketball World Cup: Senegal over Croatia is the big upset so far, while France, Brazil and Serbia have created a logjam for second behind Spain in Group A. The USA is cruising through an easy group.

Men’s volleyball World Championships: Many people are watching.

https://twitter.com/OllieW/status/505752806159319040

The USA won a thrilling five-setter and lost an epic to Iran in early group play.

Modern pentathlon World Championships: Underway with relays.

MMA: The UFC 177 pay-per-view card had already been hit by a rash of injuries. Then one of the UFC’s most heralded recent signings, Olympic wrestling gold medalist Henry Cejudo, had a “medical issue” while trying to make weight. Then former bantamweight champion Renan Barao, set for a rematch against new champ T.J. Dillashaw, also couldn’t make weight. Joe Soto got the Seth Petruzelli-style bump from the undercard to the main event. Unlike Petruzelli against Kimbo Slice, Soto couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity.

So the most noteworthy things about the card, apart from Cejudo and Barao’s weight-cutting issues, were:

1. Bethe Correia taking out another of Ronda Rousey’s buddies, veteran Shayna Baszler. Now Rousey wants a piece of Correia, who’ll be happy to oblige.

2. Dana White launching an unholy rip of the media. Some days, I miss covering this sport — this would’ve been fun.

Overseas in ONE FC — I’m absolutely biased toward Kamal Shalorus, who works in our wonderful local dojo and is as nice as he could be. Glad to see him get a title shot, but Shinya Aoki was always going to be a tough matchup, and Aoki indeed kept the belt.

Chess: World champ Magnus Carlsen and top U.S. player Hikaru Nakamura are at the Sinquefield Cup, but Italy’s Fabiano Caruana has left them in the dust, beating Carlsen, Nakamura and the other three to go a perfect 5-for-5 halfway through the double round-robin.

And we’re a month away from Millionaire Chess. Ignore the monetary losses and enjoy.

Cycling: Vuelta a Espana in brief — Nairo Quintana fell, Alberto Contador took the lead.

Video games: A terrific glitch in Madden ’15 — a 14-inch-tall linebacker:

Coming up: Bloody Elbow is looking at the upcoming wrestling World Championships.

Glad to be back!

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mma

MMA’s new Dark Ages

Posted on by Beau Dure

Why limit five-on-five to basketball? Why limit fighting to one-on-one?

Most people could come up with a whole list of reasons, but that hasn’t stopped Team Fighting Championship from lining up five-man teams to do battle in the … well, it’s not a cage. It’s sort of a ring, but it’s basically a mat with some loose ropes and tires.

The first question: Is it safe? In the interview linked above, the founder says yes. They have one ref for each pair of fighters, which certainly separates this from pro wrestling. The downside: It’s a format that encourages fighters to jump opponents from behind. That leaves fighters defenseless. In every other fighting format, the fight is stopped when one fighter is defenseless. Maybe refs can be sure fighters aren’t “surprised,” but that didn’t seem to be the case in the footage they’ve posted so far.

The next question: Is it interesting? And it’s really not. The human eye can’t follow five fights at once. And then when one guy taps or is knocked out, it’s over — the other team can then double-team a guy to wipe him out, and so on.

The last question: Does it feed stereotypes of MMA fighters as bar-brawlers or soccer hooligans? Yeah, pretty much.

Simply put, the “why not?” answers are more compelling than the “why?”

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mind games, mma, olympic sports, winter sports

Monday Myriad, Aug. 4: Flip and fight

Posted on by Beau Dure

Starting with a few bits of news:

– Both U.S. teams won their first matches at the 2014 Chess Olympiad, then faltered today against high seeds. The U.S. open team lost 2.5-1.5 to the Netherlands, while the U.S. women lost 3-1 to China. Only eight rounds to go.

– The U.S. women’s volleyball team had a disappointing 1-2 start in the monthlong World Grand Prix, righting the ship against Japan.

– Nothing else happened.

Seriously. It’s a slow week. Thank goodness two UFC fighters decided to throw down … at the press conference. That’s actually kind of rare for the UFC.

The week in tweets and videos …

Top THIS, Vegas …

Wiping the floor: Simone Biles won the Secret Classic, thanks in part to this:

Close finish: You’d expect a margin of 0.27 seconds in a 100-meter race, but 10,000 meters?

https://twitter.com/Bonnie_D_Ford/status/495782069587685376

Weekly reminder of global press protocols (or lack thereof): 

Best prep for climate change: Hey, just make biathlon a summer sport.

Most dangerous PR position: UFC’s Dave Sholler had the unfortunate task of attempting to keep Jon Jones off Daniel Cormier.

One more reason to visit Barcelona …

You’rrrrre … um … out?: This isn’t supposed to happen in beach volleyball.

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cycling, mma, olympic sports, track and field

Monday Myriad, July 28: Sprinter’s paradise

Posted on by Beau Dure

We begin this week with a view of a cycling sprint finish from the winner’s perspective. Sounds like that would be “nothing,” but Marianne Vos didn’t take the lead until the last few meters:

And another point-of-view video from a winning cyclist, this time from BMX women’s world champion Mariana Pajon.

Nibali cares not for your dropped call: Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali is a model of focus as he plows right through a spectator’s calling arm. And the spectator also keeps her focus, ignoring the cyclists, the motorbikes, the oncoming car …

Things you don’t want to hear in cycling: “Midair collision”

More fast people: World Juniors track and field in Oregon.

But always remember …

Vertical jump matters, not age: Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross keep rolling.

https://twitter.com/ESPNOlympics/status/493505774182621184

And Phil Dalhausser and Sean Rosenthal made it a U.S. sweep on home sand …

The shots you don’t take: Compelling read on the need to take risks — pushing numbers up the field in soccer, swinging away in cricket — to get anywhere in sports.

On the other hand: Here’s a good strategy for getting out of an MMA fight without any blood or bruises: Tap out immediately.

Away win: U.S. wrestler Brent Metcalf came back from 6-0 down to beat Azerbaijan’s Magomed Muslimov at the FILA Golden Grand Prix in Azerbaijan. The key move, which earned four points to seal the tiebreaker for Metcalf, is at the 6:12 mark here:

USA Wrestling has the other U.S. results from that day and the next day, where the USA’s Elena Pirozhkova jumped out to a 7-0 lead in the final and held on with ease:

Comparisons: I think I’d rather be the Peyton Manning of bocce.

Along those lines …

Arf: Let’s see Rio 2016 top the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony:

Frame-by-frame defeat: Boxer Daniel Geale vs. Gennady Golovkin …

21 seconds in: “Hey, I just landed a punch! That felt really good!”

32 seconds in: “Hmmm, maybe I should’ve been in better position to take this-”

Guess the sport: An U.S. Olympian has finally completed the American Ninja Warrior qualifying course. We’ll give some hints: It wasn’t a gymnast (Paul Hamm and Morgan Hamm did pretty well on the Japanese precursor Sasuke), nor was it a medalist. Give up? Here’s the answer.

UPDATE: I missed Jarrod Shoemaker’s World Cup triathlon silver when I posted. Please forgive me.

If you like full recaps of U.S. athletes in action or track and field in general, try TeamUSA.org and Daily Relay later in the evening. If you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain … actually, I don’t like either of those things, so call someone else.

Catch the Monday Myriad again next week.

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mma

MMA has answered its fundamental question

Posted on by Beau Dure

UFC founding father Art Davis has written a book (with fellow soccer/MMA commentator Sean Wheelock) on the early days of the UFC — Is This Legal?: The Inside Story of The First UFC from the Man Who Created It.

Bloody Elbow, always interested in MMA history, took advantage of the opportunity for a long conversation with Davie in which he pins his interest in pioneering mixed martial arts as his attempt to answer a question that had always stuck in his mind …

Who would win a fight between a wrestler and a boxer?

Twenty years later, we have the answer. Wrestler.

(Actually, we probably had it 19 years ago. We certainly had it by the time Randy Couture choked out James Toney.)

 

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cycling, mma, olympic sports, track and field

Monday Myriad, July 7: Meb passed a lot of you

Posted on by Beau Dure

Best and worst in myriad sports this week:

BEST CHARITY RUN

Meb Keflezighi started at the back of the Peachtree Road Race. He couldn’t pass everyone — the top runners were had been done for more than an hour by the time he started — but he reached his goal of passing 25,000 runners.

WORST COMPETITION

We were used to the idea of Ronda Rousey being a better grappler than every woman in MMA. Once she got you in her grasp, you were likely to fall prey to the armbar she honed as an Olympic judo medalist.

In her last two fights, Rousey has faced two accomplished grapplers — Olympic wrestling medalist Sara McMann and jiu-jitsu black belt Alexis Davis. She knocked both of them out in a combined time of 1 minute, 22 seconds. McMann, at least, is a relatively inexperienced MMA fighter. But Davis should have the kickboxing experience to avoid being knocked out in 16 seconds. And really, it was over in about 12.

Unless everyone can quit making excuses and let Rousey face Cris Cyborg, the woman who demolished the game but overwhelmed Gina Carano in the biggest pre-Rousey women’s MMA bout, who’s left to face her?

MOST EXPERIENCED YOUTH OLYMPIAN

The USA is sending 94 people to the Youth Olympic Games. One, table tennis player Lily Zhang, is the first U.S. athlete to have been in the regular old Olympics before she was in the Youth Olympics.

WORST OLYMPIC BIDDING PROCESS

The three finalists for the 2022 Winter Olympics are the only cities still bidding — Beijing, Almaty and Oslo. And you can almost hear the IOC saying, “Please be Oslo, please be Oslo.”

BEST GIF

MOST LEAD-FOOTED SWIMMER

BEST SHOWDOWN

Justin Gatlin needed a world-leading time of 9.80 seconds to beat Tyson Gay (9.93), who was returning from a one-year doping suspension.

Gay got a win on Monday.

BEST RALLY (EXCLUDING WIMBLEDON)

Not “rally” in the sense of a comeback. World League volleyball, USA-Russia.

(Start at 1:25 if you’re not already taken there.)

BIGGEST RECLAMATION PROJECT

MOST DIVERSE COLLECTION OF CELEBRITIES

The World Series of Poker main event is underway.

https://twitter.com/pamelam35/status/486308526004772865

BEST RACE

Jenny Simpson got out in front and nearly stayed there in the 1,500 meters in Paris. The quick tempo wound up dragging five runners under the four-minute mark. The Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan posted the top time of the year, Simpson just missed the American record (Mary Slaney, 3:57.12), and fellow American Shannon Rowbury (DUKIE!) set a personal best.

BEST RIVALRY

Kirani James vs LaShawn Merritt, once again. This time in Lausanne. No spoilers. Just watch.

BIGGEST TIE

World League volleyball, Pool A: Brazil, Italy, Iran, Poland. Each team played 12 matches. Brazil’s record: 6-6. Italy’s record: 6-6. Iran’s record: 6-6. Poland’s record: Basic match tells you what it has to be. A four-way tie.

By tiebreakers, it’s Italy, Iran, Brazil, Poland. And that leaves Poland out of the next round. But their fans were still great.

Meanwhile, the USA traveled to Serbia, needing a win to clinch a spot in the final.

BEST ROUNDUPS

The Daily Relay’s Monday Morning Run rounds up the record chases in track and field this year, along with a Tim Howard save. Also in that roundup is the shocking revelation of a massive mistake — when Emma Coburn ran away from an elite field to win the steeplechase in Shanghai, a couple of runners assumed she was just a pacemaker. They didn’t even realize she finished the race, crossing the line and thinking they had finished first and second.

They’re not making that mistake again.

And as always, Ollie Williams’ Frontier Sports roundup is a must-read. The Monday wrap features a lot of cycling (including a third sport for Dutch short-track/long-track speedskater Jorien Ter Mors) and the odd story of a judo athlete who won her appeal against a positive test for cocaine, spurring a new investigation to find out who might have slipped her the powder.

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