MENU

Mixed Martial Arts
Category

On April 6, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Every Crazy Thing Leading Up to the Cursed UFC 223 Event

“UFC 223 was supposed to be simple: Khabib Nurmagomedov, the undefeated number one contender would finally square off against interim lightweight champion Tony Ferguson. They had been paired three times before, and each time the fight fell through due to alternating injuries – Khabib, then Tony, then Khabib again. The winner would become the undisputed lightweight champion, the title that Conor McGregor had gone 500 days without defending. With McGregor’s absence from the cage, Ronda Rousey’s disappearing act, and the PED problems of Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar, the UFC desperately needed to give fans something to be excited about. Anticipation for the main event and a comprehensively stacked card underneath it made UFC 223 the first quality mixed martial arts offering of 2018. And in a matter of days, it all went to shit…”

 

Read more at Vice Sports

Read more

On April 2, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

The Best of a Bad Situation

As the old saying goes: Man plans, the MMA gods laugh.

In theory, a bout between Tony Ferguson and Khabib Nurmagomedov is arguably the best fight that can be put together on the Ultimate Fighting Championship roster in any division. Ferguson is a flow chart of offensive dynamism, an unorthodox and multi-faceted striker with a venomous submission game. Nurmagomedov is as unpredictable as a wrecking ball — no real surprises when it comes to what he does and how he does it — and so far, he has been about as stoppable as one, too. Together they brought a total of 19 consecutive Octagon wins into the main event at UFC 223, an unprecedented number on its own but even more absurd considering all 19 of those wins took place in the most talent-rich division in the sport. The Ferguson-Nurmagomedov matchup is the best versus the best in the best weight-class. That’s rare.

Yet for all the stylistic and statistical intrigue, the fight is bewitched, cursed to remain indefinitely in the purgatory of “on paper…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

Read more

On March 26, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Demotivating Factors

“There can be no doubt that the Ultimate Fighting Championship has been a successful business venture. Its story of going from a $2 million company in 2001 — and one that wasn’t even profitable until 2005 — to a $4 billion company in 2017 is staggering enough, but consider the fact that this growth occurred in a marketplace where virtually every other competing organization struggled to stay in the black. The UFC’s rise has been a remarkable achievement on paper.

Yet in spite of the evidence of the business savvy working behind the curtains, the powers that be still continue a puzzling practice: incentivizing fighters through win bonuses. For most fighters, their purse consists of “show money,” which is then doubled if they win. In theory, this sounds reasonable, but reality paints a different picture…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

Read more

On March 19, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

More Than A Fight

“Eight decades ago, former International Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage stated that politics is “a savage monster” bent on disrupting the purity of sport. Ten years ago, former European Union President Milan Zver stated that “[Sports] is too important to use it as a political instrument.” These are some of the most noteworthy instances of the “stick to sports” sentiment, a phrase that has recently come back into fashion as NFL players started taking knees during the national anthem.

It’s an understandable feeling. If you have played sports non-professionally — which is the vast majority of people who have played sports — your experience of athletic participation is colored as an inherent good, a pastime that cultivates life lessons like sportsmanship, the importance of practice and physical well-being. Thus, it’s only natural for us to think of sports as apolitical; we never had an opportunity to politicize them, even if we wanted to.

Yet sports are undeniably political, if for no other reason than the fact that money is involved…”

Read more at Sherdog

Read more

On March 13, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Making Sense of McGregor

“If you’ve been a fan of this sport long enough, you’ve no doubt tried to spread the gospel of violence to friends and family. You convince them to watch a fight with you, show them highlight videos on YouTube to get them excited for it and hope for the magic of the sport to reveal itself come fight time. If you can’t make them diehard fans, at least you can turn them into casual appreciators of an otherwise off-putting sport. When it works, it’s great. When it flops, it’s a specific kind of shame, an embarrassment that feels less like bad luck than an indictment of your character.

The worst time that happened to me was when Mirko Filipovic fought Gabriel Gonzaga for the at UFC 70. After hyping “Cro Cop” to my friends for weeks and subjecting them to dozens of head-kick compilation videos, he went out and got demolished in ironic and ignominious fashion, suffering the same fate he had dished out countless times prior. For my friends, that was their introduction to “Cro Cop,” and it stuck. No matter how many old fights I showed them, it couldn’t supplant the experience of watching him become irrelevant in real time.

I’ve thought of that moment a lot lately as I’ve watched Conor McGregor — the first simultaneous two-division titleholder in Ultimate Fighting Championship history — gradually devolve into a Twitter troll…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

Read more