UFC

(11-03-2012 18:08 )Paul Ducky Wrote:  I've been real busy, lately, and only gotten as far as watching the Andy Ogle fight on TUF Live, after I finished teaching a friend, a private MMA lesson at my home, yesterday morning.

... Is that what people are calling it nowadays.

(11-03-2012 21:39 )groundnpound Wrote:  Not seen TUF yet. Catch up on Wed, if Mitchell's post's right.

Mitchell's post is wrong it's on ESPN at midnight tomorrow so you can watch it when you get back from watching us smash Everton in the derby!!!

I can see the Bisping v Boetsch fight happening as he's the kind of fighter the UFC always give Bisping eventhough Tim Boetsch isn't a top 10 fighter it'll make a good fight & also keep Bisping away from the 3 fighters above him.

Tim Boetsch is a dangerous opponent having lost 1 of his last 9 to Phil Davis.

Anthony Johnson Signs with Titan Fighting
Anthony “Rumble” Johnson will begin the next phase of his post-UFC career in 2012 with Titan Fighting Championships.

The former UFC welterweight and middleweight hopeful has signed with the promotion and will debut there later this year. Sources close to the promotion confirmed the signing on Monday. The fighter first revealed the news on “The MMA Hour.”

Johnson was a mainstay in the UFC for several years, picking up more than a few key wins including victories over Dan Hardy and Charlie Brenneman, but it was not without a few hiccups along the way.

Johnson struggled to keep his weight in check when he was making the cut down to 170 pounds, and because of his massive frame he missed weight on more than one occasion.

The UFC believed they found the answer for Johnson’s weight cutting woes by placing him in a middleweight bout against Vitor Belfort at UFC 140, but that backfired as well.

Johnson missed the 186-pound cutoff for the middleweight division as well, and following a loss to Belfort at the event, he was released from the promotion.

Now the fighter who trains with the Blackzilians will make his first appearance for the Kansas City based promotion, whose shows air on HDNet.

There’s been no official word on which weight class Johnson will compete in at this time.

The Death and Rebirth of Dan Hardy – Part 1

There was a time not too long when UFC welterweight Dan Hardy knew inside his heart that he should take a break from fighting to refocus on his training and career to get things back on track.

Now what you might be thinking is the time off that Hardy has taken over the last several months following his fourth loss in a row in the UFC is what he was talking about, but you’d be wrong.

Looking back, Hardy points at his 2010 loss to welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre as the first major bump in the road that should have caused him to step away from the sport, and get back to his roots as a fighter.

He didn’t listen. Three more losses followed and Hardy ended up in a very dark place.

“I should have done this a long time ago to be honest. If I could take my time again, I would have done it after the GSP fight. I really think things would have been different for me. The title fight was what it was. I could have fought it 100 times and it probably wouldn’t have been any different. GSP was the better fighter and it showed why he was the champion and I respect him for that. I enjoyed the fight. It was an honor to fight him, but after that I went into the (Carlos) Condit fight with a little bit too much ego,” Hardy said when speaking to MMAWeekly Radio.

“Because I lost that fight, I was two down and really I should have stepped away then. I mean I should have stepped away before the Condit fight. But in hindsight, stepping away after the Condit fight and really assessing what was going wrong would have been the wise thing to do, but coming off two losses I was so keen to get back in there and get another win and get back on track.”

Momentum

The first of Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion states that “the velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.” In this case for Dan Hardy, he had no one around him that told him to stop after the Condit fight, so things just continued to spiral downward.

Hardy forced himself back into training camp because the loss left a bad taste in his mouth, and he desperately wanted to wash it out. What better way to do that than to get in another fight as soon as possible.

Obviously, it was the wrong move. It didn’t work when he fought Anthony Johnson, nor in the following fight against Chris Lytle.

“I just pushed too hard. I was over-trained for the Anthony Johnson fight and I was massively over-trained for the (Chris) Lytle fight, as well, because I was up against it. I was two down and the general rule is three (losses) and you’re out. That was the last thing I wanted, so I put everything into my training camp and I didn’t have anybody really managing me and anybody that was holding me back and telling me you need to take a session off and just chill out a little bit,” Hardy stated.

“So I was exhausted. I mean, three weeks before the Lytle fight I was ready to go, and by the time the fight came around I just wanted to be over with it.”

The end result for Hardy was two more losses. Staring down four defeats in a row it left him in a lonely place, searching the shadows of what was just a year earlier a very promising career.

With great power comes great responsibility…

Prior to the fight with St-Pierre at UFC 111, Hardy became more famous than he ever imagined he would be when he decided to give this pro fighting thing a try. He was on magazine covers, doing interviews every day, and he was the headliner for one of the biggest UFC cards in history.

With that level of notoriety, however, also comes a world of pressure.

There was no way for Hardy to step back after the St-Pierre fight because the spotlight never dims. There’s really no way to escape it. Expectation is a mighty big thing. Hardy had the weight of the world on his shoulders and it almost brought him crumbling down.

“I changed a few things in my camp and they were not working for me, but everybody was aware of it, so I just couldn’t escape it. That made me push more to really try and fix it, but I was pushing in the same direction as when things weren’t working for me, so I was just pushing harder at the things that weren’t fitting for me. It was frustrating,” Hardy said.

“I was just very, very close from just walking away altogether.”

The Outlaw Torn

A nickname in MMA is something that can become synonymous with a fighter. Quinton Jackson is simply “Rampage” to most people, and more fans probably know the name “Mayhem” than they do Jason Miller.

For Dan Hardy, his nickname became his lifestyle and there were certain things he had to do to live up to it. People expected his Mohawk to be colored and raised at all times, and there was no off switch for him to just be Dan Hardy. He always had to be “The Outlaw.”

It got to the point where Hardy actually contemplated leaving the sport of MMA altogether because he was no longer the kid who wanted to be a fighter. Fighting became his job, and it stopped being fun for him.

He also points out that because of so many issues in the past with crooked managers, he didn’t have an adviser around that was looking out for his best interests. No one to pull him back off the ledge.

“I got into this sport because I love fighting, I love martial arts, I love the challenge of being in the gym every day and trying to improve myself. But the problem was the title fight, it changed things so much for me. There were so many things that altered after that because of the notoriety I got after the fight and obviously the added exposure through the media. A lot of the fun of it was taken out for me. I stopped enjoying myself in training because it wasn’t just about going in and improving anymore. It wasn’t about martial arts anymore,” said Hardy.

“It was about being The Outlaw, being the guy everyone wants to see on TV, and there was just so much demand on me and there was nobody filtering that for me because I’ve had a lot of problems with management in the past. I’ve been very resistant up to this point because there are a lot of bloodsuckers in this sport, in this industry, a lot of people want a piece of you and don’t want to give anything back. I was very resistant to management when really I needed it the most at any time in my career.”

There has been a lot of chatter about bad management in mixed martial arts of late, and Hardy is a case of a fighter who has been burned in the past. It left him jaded to even thinking about hiring a manager, but ultimately that came at his own detriment when there was nobody around to save Hardy from himself.

“There’s a lot of people that are just bad guys, a lot of bad people around this sport. People that are realizing there’s money coming into the sport and guys are making money, there are a lot of people that want a piece of it. They’re not qualified, they don’t care, they’re not interested in the struggles the athlete goes through, they’re just interested in getting their piece. I’ve had to deal with a lot of these people over the past couple of years. A lot of people coming up to me and trying to get a piece of me, and get a piece of what I’ve achieved,” said Hardy.

“It’s very, very difficult to tell the difference between the genuine people and the people that are just poison.”

Hardy came to realize that in MMA he became a stock. Something that people wanted to buy and sell, not really invest in, and he lost his identity.

To be completely honest, Hardy actually missed the days of working a regular day job because at least in those moments he didn’t have to be The Outlaw.

“I was really up against it in those three fights and it was just a bad run. I wasn’t at my best. It was just a really bad phase that I was going through in my career, and a lot of the times in this sport, you feel like a product, you don’t feel like a person anymore. You feel like you’re a commodity to be traded and that’s a very depressing feeling. Because a lot of people don’t get to know you as a person, they just see you as you are on TV and think you’re a product,” Hardy stated.

“Sometimes I think it would be kind of nice to work nine to five cause then I know when it’s Friday I’ve got a couple of days to just chill out and be me, do my thing, but you don’t have that luxury in this sport.”

Hardy got into MMA because at the heart of it all he wanted to be a fighter and he loved martial arts. When it stopped being fun, when he stopped enjoying himself on daily basis, the Dan Hardy that grew up pretending he was one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles died. What was left was a shell of the man who beat guys like Mike Swick and Marcus Davis in the UFC.

“Martial arts for me, it’s been my core focus since I was a kid,” said Hardy. “And to find myself in this situation where I was doing what I thought I was going to love as an adult, just being able to train full time, to becoming frustrated and not wanting to be anywhere near it, it was upsetting for me because obviously martial arts is very important to me. I’ve made a lot of good friends and I’ve had a lot of good experiences through martial arts, but there’s a lot of negativity that comes with it as well when it becomes a business.”

The business was sinking and Dan Hardy was going down with the ship.

Come back for Part two of The Death and Rebirth of Dan Hardy when he tells what pulled him up from the mire, and why he’s happy to be back fighting again.

I don't know where part 2 is or when it will be available.

James Thompson V Bob Sapp At the inaugural Super Fight League in Mumbai, India.
Check out the crowd noise, elecritc!



Mirko Cro Cop's final K-1 fight against Rey Sefo.

Boss post.

Mauricio Rua vs. Quinton Jackson is official, no date/location yet. Fuck Rampage. Hope Rampage gets KTFO by Rua.

UFC 146 main card complete, ALL HEAVYWEIGHT:

UFC Heavyweight Championship: Junior Dos Santos vs Alistair Overeem
Cain Velasquez vs Frank Mir
Antonio Silva vs Roy Nelson
Mark Hunt vs Stefan Struve
Gabriel Gonzaga vs Shane del Rosario

Wonder how that shall turn out in the Octagon and PPV orders.

The Death and Rebirth of Dan Hardy – Part 2

The past two years have been nothing if not forgettable for Dan Hardy.

After starting his UFC career in rousing fashion with four straight wins, 2010 and 2011 brought him four consecutive losses, leaving him on the brink of walking away from the sport of MMA altogether.

Hardy got into MMA for one reason and one reason only: He loved fighting.

But those losses and subsequent problems in training led to him losing that passion for the first time in his 29 years, and he wasn’t sure where to turn to find his love of fighting again.

A lot of that changed for Hardy after his loss to Chris Lytle in August 2010 when UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta took to his Twitter account and proclaimed that the British slugger was going nowhere except back into the Octagon.

“Will not cut Dan Hardy,” wrote Fertitta. “I like guys that war.”

That message from Fertitta gave Hardy something to fight for again, because someone believed in him and it wasn’t about the paycheck and it wasn’t about the money they were going to earn off of “The Outlaw.” Someone was a genuine enthusiast and cared about his career, and Hardy knew he couldn’t let Fertitta down.

“When I read that tweet after the fight, I didn’t really know what to do with myself,” Hardy admitted on MMAWeekly Radio. “Cause four in a row, I had never been down three losses in a row, so the fourth was a real big hit.

“I kind of felt like I was drifting a little bit after that, but reading that tweet it really changed things for me because now I’m not fighting to get myself back on track because I know how much the UFC got and Lorenzo got for keeping me around. Because there are some fans out there that demand if you lose three fights then you’re out.”

Finding a Mentor

It wasn’t an overnight change for Hardy, however, because he still had a lot of problems he had to solve before he could get back in the cage and compete for the UFC again.

Hardy had relocated to Las Vegas part-time in 2011 and worked alongside UFC heavyweight Roy Nelson, but eventually the Brit knew there was something still missing from his daily routine. So Hardy picked up and moved lock, stock, and barrel to Las Vegas to live and train full time.

He then started work at a new training camp and found a new mentor along the way.

“I’ve always been a huge fan of Frank (Mir),” said Hardy. “My first real encounter with Frank is when he fought Ian Freeman in London, and I know he came out with a loss in that fight, but he showed so much heart in that fight. At the time Ian Freeman was a beast, he was one of the best fighters in Europe, and I trained with him. I knew how good Ian Freeman was. So my respect for Frank shot up massively after that fight.

“Now I’m around him all the time. He’s just such a genuine, honest guy. He really cares about helping people, and that’s something that’s very rare in this sport. There are a lot of people, a lot of pretenders, a lot of people who say things and mean something else. Frank’s as genuine as they come.”

Hardy has been working alongside Mir and his trio of coaches including Jimmy Gifford, Shawn Yarbrough, and Ricky Lundell, as well as traveling to famed jiu-jitsu instructor Robert Drysdale’s gym in Las Vegas.

As corny as it sounds, Hardy is having fun training again. It’s no longer a chore to walk into the gym and force himself through another work out. He’s enjoying every minute of it, and can’t wait to get back in there and do it again.

“I was in the gym this morning and I was hitting pads and I feel like I’m being studious again. I feel like I’m learning again. I’m exploring my potential as far as a striker goes, and then sparring. I’m already excited, I can’t wait to get back in the gym and get working. That’s not something I’ve felt for a long time,” Hardy expressed.

The Need to Win

Despite being an eight fight veteran of the UFC, Hardy feels like a newborn about to step foot in the Octagon for the first time when he returns at UFC 146 in May to face Duane “Bang” Ludwig.

“I feel like I’m in that stage where I just joined the UFC again, and I’ve kind of made it, and I can show people what I’m capable of,” Hardy said. “That slipped a little bit in the last few fights, and like I said, I stopped enjoying myself. You’re going to see improvements in this next fight, without a doubt. People are going to be like how has this guy improved this much between August and now? I really feel like people are going to see a massive difference.”

Now just being happy doesn’t erase the fact that Hardy has lost four fights in a row, and his fight with Ludwig has to be viewed as do or die as far as his UFC career goes.

Hardy doesn’t brush off that notion, but he embraces the knowledge that any fight in the UFC can be your last. Losing one fight or losing five, the UFC can always decide to make a change and so he can’t approach the fight with impending doom hanging overhead.

Hardy just wants to go out and fight his fight, and if he’s having fun, the result will turn out the way it’s supposed to.

“The thing I’ve realized about fighting in the UFC is it’s always a need to win basis. Even if you’re on a roll and you’ve won five fights in a row, you need to win the next fight because there’s so many things that come with a loss at this level that every fight’s a need to win,” said Hardy.

So often fighters say things like “it’s UFC or bust” or “there is no bigger place to fight than the UFC” and often times they are correct. For the new and improved Dan Hardy, he loves being a UFC fighter and he hopes to be a UFC fighter for many years to come, but being a fighter doesn’t define Dan Hardy.

“I’m fortunate enough. I know there’s a lot of fighters out there that fight because they don’t have as many options as me, but there’s so many other things I want to do with my life. That’s really taken a lot of pressure off me thinking that way. If this fight doesn’t go my way, there are so many other things I can go on and do after. It’s not like I’m stuck in this line of work. There’s a lot of things I want to do and a lot of things I want to experience,” Hardy explained.

“My mindset right now is I’m going to give this everything I’ve got and I’m just going to enjoy myself while I’m doing it. That’s kind of taken a lot of pressure off of me. This was never meant to be a job. This is me chasing that dream of being a professional fighter I wanted to be when I was six years old running around as a ninja turtle.”

Rebirth

With a renewed vigor and love of the sport, Hardy is attacking his training camp like he did in his early days in England. He’s the first to the gym and the last to leave, and he’s loving every second of it.

Hardy now realizes what it means to go from love to hate and back to love again, because that’s been his torrid affair with MMA over these past few years. Is that to say he’ll never fall down again?

Of course not, Hardy is aware of the pitfalls and still may drop down a well, but he’s found a way to climb out at least once before, and he can do it again.

“I’m in a very fortunate place. A lot of people are in jobs that they hate. A lot of friends of mine don’t enjoy jobs that they’re doing. I’m fortunate enough to be in a situation where I can have control of my own life. If I need to take a day off then I can do it. I don’t have to answer to anybody. I’m very privileged in this situation, and sometimes you forget that when you have to deal with all the other things the sport has to throw at you,” said Hardy.

“I’m excited to show people what I can do now. I’m excited to show that I have been working. All those guys that tweet ‘oh you’ve got to work on your ground game, you’ve got to work on your wrestling,’ these guys don’t know what I’m doing every day. This is my opportunity to prove that I’m a whole new fighter.”

The end game for Dan Hardy isn’t UFC 146 in May. It’s not make or break, do or die, based on one fight with Duane Ludwig.

This is a new beginning for a kid who didn’t want to grow up to be President, or a firefighter or a policeman. Dan Hardy wanted to grow up to be a fighter and that’s exactly what he’s doing now.

He’s growing up.

(14-03-2012 11:33 )TDK2008 Wrote:  Mauricio Rua vs. Quinton Jackson is official, no date/location yet. Fuck Rampage. Hope Rampage gets KTFO by Rua.

The fight's been postponed due to Rampage needing surgery on both his knees, no date has been rescheduled.

"Mar 15, 2012 - The next time Roger Gracie fights, it will be in a new weight class, with new management by his side.
According to manager Ed Soares, Gracie has signed with Team Black House and has decided to move down to 185 pounds. Soares did not know when the Strikeforce fighter would make his middleweight debut.
Gracie joins the likes of Anderson Silva, Lyoto Machida and the Nogueira brothers in Team Black House, which is run by Soares and Jorge Guimaraes.
Tatame.com first reported the possibility of Gracie moving to 185 and signing with Black House last month.
The six-foot-four inch Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialist hasn't been seen since losing his first pro MMA bout to Muhammed Lawal via knockout in September. The loss dropped Gracie's record to 4-1. Prior to the loss, Gracie defeated Kevin Randleman and Trevor Prangley in Strikeforce.

i'll be quite surprised if he can make middleweight and not be emaciated and weak. He's 6'4 and fought at heavy but if he can and improve his striking a little he'll be a monster in that division.

On one of the forums who was the smartest fighter was being debated when Carwin showed up and chipped in with this:

Shane Carwin - I am actually a mechanical engineer and a pretty smart one at that. I am a double E with a degree from WSC and a degree from the top Engineering School in the country School of Mines. While I was WSC I was a three time "Academic" All-American. I did this while I was winning a National Title in Wrestling, starting on the football team, and earning All American status in Wrestling and Football. I was invited to the NFL combine and started in the Senior Bowl. After taking a year off from wrestling for the NFL tryouts I came back from injuries and won the National Title.

NONE of that would be possible without my education. If you are in school and you are reading this, make your dreams come true through your education. I have used what I have learned in school to make my town and other towns work better. You can do it too. It doesn't matter how badass you are if you are a dumbass. Stay in school.

starting to dis-like Shane. He's just so damn good at everything

*The Ultimate Fighter Live: Team Cruz vs. Team Faber episode two spoilers follow*








In the fighter pick, Dominick Cruz made Team Faber look terrible!

Was it on Live this weekend? It didn't say it was on the Sky tv guide & I wasn't in at 2am Fri/Sat.

Whats the deal with the live show from now on, is it a 2 hour thing or just the usual 1 hour? theres a 1 hour show at midnight Wednesday/Thursday.

(18-03-2012 14:16 )mitchell Wrote:  Was it on Live this weekend? It didn't say it was on the Sky tv guide & I wasn't in at 2am Fri/Sat.

Whats the deal with the live show from now on, is it a 2 hour thing or just the usual 1 hour? theres a 1 hour show at midnight Wednesday/Thursday.

Friday night going into Saturday morning,

The show is one hour. Not sure what the show is Wednesday/Thursday.