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On January 10, 2019 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Lessons from The Real OC

If you have followed my column for the last few years, let me first applaud you for your excellent taste. Moving on, you may be familiar with one of the reasons why I gravitate to this sport. I’ve often said that my fascination with MMA — beyond its obvious and immediate thrills — is that fighting is a pure distillation of life. Sometimes the villains win. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Feel-good endings are rare.

Enter Sean O’Connell. Two nights after Penn was submitted, O’Connell became the first light heavyweight champion of the Professional Fighters League. It was by far the biggest accomplishment of his career in the cage, and it was also his final one; he retired after the fight…

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On December 7, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Age Is Much More Than A Number

It has been a busy time in the world of combat sports. A week after Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz tried to revive their dead rivalry, Tyson Fury came back from the grave in the 12th round of his heavyweight title fight against Deontay Wilder, setting a new world record for resurrection turnaround time. While Wilder-Fury is rightly being hailed as a classic, the Liddell-Ortiz trilogy fight was much-maligned — and for good reason. It was a ridiculous premise in the first place; it was only competitive by technical definition; and it was aesthetically gross. There were also negative sides to it.

The resounding conclusion of the farcical fracas seemed to be that age is more than just a number. Combat sports cannibalize the old, offering them as blood sacrifices to the gods of promotion and nostalgia, often in order to build faux hype for up-and-coming attractions. It was no surprise then that UFC President Dana White’s stern condemnation of the Liddell-Ortiz fight left MMA fans scratching their heads when a bout between Israel Adesanya and Anderson Silva was announced. Adesanya is an undefeated, 29-year-old kickboxing phenom; Silva is an aging G.O.A.T. who has one dubious win in six years. Don’t even get me started on the booking of another B.J. Penn fight.

At a point, it starts to become irresponsible to continue allowing older fighters to compete. Perhaps the only redeeming factor of the Liddell-Ortiz fight was that both men were old. The long-term and often delayed consequences of combat are serious, and those risks only compound after 40 years of living, especially when a significant portion of that time has been spent accruing brain trauma fighting professionally.

Life is never so simple, however. As is the case in most things, exceptions abound, and even though they are indeed exceptions, it’s only right to acknowledge them. Luckily, the last few weeks have given us plenty to acknowledge…

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On November 13, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Just A Moment

MMA is a sport of moments. Each one is permeated with a unique blend of emotions, a mixture of excitement, nervousness, anticipation and surprise. The moment a bout gets announced. The moment fighters stare each other down for the first time. The lightless silence right before the walkout music starts blaring. The moment the cage door closes. The moment you became a fan.

Or as Chan Sung Jung reminded us, the moment in a fight where everything can instantly change. Against Yair Rodriguez at UFC Fight Night 139 on Saturday in Denver, “The Korean Zombie” won more moments than he lost. At the end of four frames, two judges had given him three rounds, while the other had the fight tied at two rounds apiece. The final round was more of the same, which is to say action-packed back-and-forth brawling that could have gone either way. Jung was a lock to notch, at the very least, a split decision win. He was only moments away. That’s the thing about MMA, though. Moments matter…

 

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On October 31, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Eighty Pounds of Thinness

“My name is Anthony Smith, and I want a title shot.”

Thus spoke the unlikeliest of light heavyweight contenders, exhausted and battered, after the biggest win of his career at UFC Fight Night 138 on Saturday in Moncton, New Brunswick. After more than 10 years fighting professionally, including stints in Strikeforce and Bellator MMA on top of a respectable 7-3 record in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, “Lionheart” took the opportunity to call for a title shot and remind viewers what to call him.

If you didn’t know his name before, well, there’s a chance you still might not know it now. Despite a gutsy win over the UFC’s second-ranked light heavyweight in Volkan Oezdemir, there’s a reason why Smith had to clarify who he was: To most audiences, he’s still a faceless UFC fighter. In fairness, having a name as aggressively generic as “Anthony Smith” doesn’t help much, either. At least “Jon Jones” has the mnemonic touch of the double-J sound to distinguish itself, if his fighting alone hadn’t already stood out enough…

 

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On October 31, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Heavy Truths

Days before the back-to-back Bellator MMA bonanza went down, Matt Matrione said that if the heavyweight grand prix final ended up being between Ryan Bader and Chael Sonnen — neither of whom competed at heavyweight a single time before this tournament — it would discredit the promotion’s heavyweight division. Sonnen had some choice thoughts on the state of the heavyweights:

“Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it discredits all the heavyweights completely. The best thing to do with heavyweights is to keep them the hell away from any other weight class. They’re the worst athletes in the room, they’re the slowest guys in the room, they’re the laziest guys in the room, which is why they weigh so goddamn much, and if you want to keep the mystique going on to the public that size matters and the big guys are better just because they’re bigger, if you want to keep that false narrative out there, keep us real athletes away from the heavyweights. I think it was a risky move. They tried it on the other side of the tracks, and a light heavyweight now has that strap, too. Heavyweights suck. Mitrione is right.”

Let’s investigate the veracity of that statement, as much as it’s possible to objectively assess whether or not something “sucks…”

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