As we all wait breathlessly for Dana White to fulfill his promise of a Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva superfight, there’s a lot of buzz around tomorrow night’s UFC on Fox 5 event. Fans and analysts believe that we’re in store for one of the best non-PPV events in the history of free viewing. I say that’s a tall order to fill, seeing as I still think that the recent UFC on Fuel 6 event was still one of the best free fight cards I’ve ever watched twice in one day. How great was it? I didn’t even need to start drinking at 9 AM to enjoy. I just drank at 9 AM because.

So who will be providing tomorrow night’s action? Well for starters, we get three hours of preliminary fights on FX. That means we’re starting at 5 PM ET, before we switch over to Fox at 8 PM ET to watch the main card bouts. Just so I don’t have to get up at any point, I went to Costco this morning and bought six buckets of beef jerky. That way, when I’m done with a bucket, I can use it as a bathroom. That’s gross. I’m sorry.

Headlining the event at the Key Arena in lovely Seattle, of course, features Ben Henderson defending his Lightweight Championship against Nate Diaz, and that should be a hell of a fight. Some people have gone as far as to call it a skinnier version of the fight we just watched between St-Pierre and Carlos Condit, but again, that’s a really tall order for these two fighters to live up to.

Nevertheless, I expect the main event to be fantastic, and the rest of the official fight card looks pretty great as well. In fact, you can read our own Lobster Mobster’s pre-fight primer to prepare yourself. In the meantime, I thought it would be nice to let Brittney Palmer and Arianny Celeste walk us through tomorrow night’s matchups.

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Fuel’s Ultimate Answers segment (which I’ll pretend is entirely written and organized by Brittney Palmer) asked a bunch of UFC fighters which superhero they would be. Some of the answers are surprisingly nerdy — Rashad Evans earns endless cool points from me for wanting to be Nightcrawler, and Demetrious Johnson has a pretty solid understanding of how the Green Lantern’s ring works — but some are just straight-up meathead terrible, like Donald Cerrone saying he wants to be “The Invisible Man” (direct quote: “OM BE VISIBLE MAN”).

The funniest offense is from Brodus Clay Tito ORTIZ, who says he wants to be “Beastman” from the X-Men because of his intelligence. As YouTube user Kevin Hall points out, “he’s actually called Beast, so there goes your intelligence.” I like to think that Tito got the name right and instead got the TEAM wrong, and really just wants to be Beastman from ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’. “I wanna be a big orange guy who looks kinda scary, but sucks and never accomplishes anything, and is less effective a henchman than the guy with a robot mouth and a mer-man in a breastplate!” Jenna Jameson could be either of those two.

Oh, and before I forget, f**k BJ Penn for wanting to be Superman because he’s “better than all the other superheroes”. If I get to pick, I’m being Captain Marvel, so I can kick BJ Penn’s ass.

[h/t to Jessica @ Leg Kick TKO]

As UFC 118 approaches, the headlining rematch between BJ Penn and Frankie Edgar for the Lightweight Championship has taken a back seat to the intriguing debut of former heavyweight boxer James Toney. In what UFC President Dana White has called a “circus act,” Toney will take on UFC Hall-of-Famer Randy Couture, showcasing a clash of styles between Toney’s powerful punches and Couture’s atrocious acting.

But Toney’s style may be a bit more technical than casual MMA fans like myself are expecting, as he’s brought in Trevor Sherman to teach him how to fight against and break “Brazilian locks.” Who is Trevor Sherman, you ask? He’s the man who teaches FBI agents how to fight with their bare hands. He’s also the man who has never trained a MMA fighter before, but he says that he’s impressed with how quickly Toney has picked up his teaching. Well I’m sold, now if only there was a video of Sherman’s teaching styles after the jump…

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Here’s a clip from UFC 107 over the weekend where B.J. Penn opens up a can of whoop-ass (and an amazingly large gash) onto the face of Diego Sanchez. That high kick happened in the fifth round of their main event bout, and you can see the referee beginning to step in at the end of the clip, whereafter Sanchez was put in front of a doctor. That doctor gave the easiest diagnosis of his life and determined that Diego could not continue. Sure you don’t want to test for lupus anyway, doc? Just to be safe? –Fightlinker. Thanks, Vince.

Tomorrow’s UFC 94 ticket offers the most anticipated MMA fight since Randy Couture returned to the UFC to fight Brock Lesnar, as lightweight champ B.J. Penn will attempt to become the first fighter to hold belts in two weight classes when he takes on welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre.

Eagerly anticipating the event, I conversed with Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim, author of Blood in the Cage, a book that details the parallel stories of the UFC — which went from freakshow curiosity to worldwide phenomenon — and Pat Miletich, the legendary MMA fighter who started out as a hard-luck drunken brawler in Iowa.

The following Q&A happened over email, and has been edited for clarity.

With Leather: Regarding the early days of the UFC, you wrote, “With a minimum spent on promotion, 80,000 households — culled from a 12-million household universe — paid $14.95 apiece to watch this strange curiosity.  Given that the first-place prize was only $50,000, the total purse barely $100,00, the production budget roughly $500,000… well, you do the math.”  Actually, how about this: YOU do the math.  I’m here to read about fighting, not do story problems.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

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