October, 2016
Archive

By In Mixed Martial Arts

UFC Fright Night and Other Spooky Musings

“It’s Halloween, the day for celebrating all things spooky, as well as the only day of the year when using the word “spooky” is acceptable. As such, it’s worth thinking about what makes something scary in the first place. Whether real or imagined, the stories that scare us tend to have common denominators: an element of mystery, the vulnerability of being alone, the possibility of danger.

In the ultimate tough guy sport of MMA, it’s weird to think that anything is scary, other than the freakish physical damage that can happen in any given fight. However, the elements of spooky manifest in their own unique ways in this sport, so in honor of Halloween, I’ll be your guide through the haunted house of current MMA issues. You can close your eyes if you need to; I won’t judge…”

 

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By In Social Media

Podcast: Fist Fight Fan Club

I hopped on the Fist Fight Fan Club with MMA Fighting’s lawyer/reporter extraordinaire Jed Meshew to talk all things fighting. Give it a listen.

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By In Mixed Martial Arts

Hendo: A Sherdog Retrospective

“It says something about a fighter when he or she is universally known by a single name. Indeed, there’s a lot to be said about “Hendo.” He is probably the most accomplished fighter ever, with wins over people who were or would eventually become UFC, Pride or Bellator MMA champions every two to three years for the entirety of his 19-year career. Let that sink in. I don’t think anyone else has as many signature wins as Henderson does, and he got them at several weight classes. It’s hard to pinpoint one moment that stands out in such a career. His 53-second demolition of former UFC middleweight champ Bustamante, for example, gets lost in the shuffle of his later wins over Silva, Bisping and Emelianenko. Each of those fights warrants its own write-up. Instead, I’ll go with his most recent win over Hector Lombard…”

 

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By In Mixed Martial Arts

Emerging Markets and World Domination

“It’s easy to assume that MMA always has something going on because it has no proper offseason. Most of the time, that’s basically correct; there are few weekends when the Ultimate Fighting Championship doesn’t have an event, and when those doldrums roll through, it’s a near-certainty that Bellator MMA, the World Series of Fighting or someone else will take advantage of the open space.

Maybe you watched Alexander Shlemenko wilt Kendall Grove at Bellator 162 this weekend, or maybe you watched Nieky Holzken record his 12th straight victory at Glory 34. If you were lucky, you caught some of the bizarre, awesome moat grappling at Ganryujima 5. Either way, the big news of the week was outside of cages, rings and circular moats. A major component of the headline news of the combat sports world was the ongoing layoffs of UFC executives and front office folk.

The layoffs have mostly affected the UFC’s international presence, which makes sense. Though the UFC has long clung to its description as “the fastest growing sport in the world,” it has never been the international phenomenon it has tried to be. In the history of the sport, there have been 67 different divisional champions. This includes interim champions but does not count the same people who have separate reigns — Matt Hughes, for example, only counts once, even though he had two different stints as the welterweight champion. Of those 67 champions, 48 have been American. The rest have come from Brazil (12), Canada (two), and various European countries (five). That’s hardly a picture of an internationally competitive sport…”

 

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By In Mixed Martial Arts

Lies, Damned Lies, and Everything Else

“My friend and I used to cruise at his grandparents’ house as teenagers. Mostly, it had a secluded garden next to a canal, making it an ideal place for smoking, drinking and hanging out. It also had his grandpa, though, the chairman of the physical sciences department at the university and a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University.

Although I only understood a fraction of what he told us — I would ask him ridiculous questions about who would win in a battle between quicksand and a black hole and he would answer with deep, legitimate knowledge on both — I will never forget the jokes he told. They weren’t funny, so much as eye-opening. Apparently, in the world of academia, the equivalent of “dumb blonde jokes” was “dumb social scientist jokes.” They started with something along the lines of “a physicist, a mathematician and an economist/psychologist/sociologist walk into a bar …” and end, invariably, with the punchline pointing out the stupidity of the social sciences.

The jokes were more goofy than mean, but the point still stood. Math, physics and chemistry, it was explained, are the real sciences, the math-based sciences. They were precise and concrete compared to the softness of the social sciences.

This type of thinking applies to fight analysis, too. There’s a tendency to view statistics as flatly superior analytical tools, especially compared to psychological assessment. One is observable and measurable and concrete, while the other is purely speculative; we can see what a fighter has done in the cage, but we can’t actually know what’s going on in his or her head. Good fight analysts will include both to varying degrees, but usually the latter is a footnote that qualifies the former in some way…”

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