As evidenced by my casual screw-ups of fighters’ names, I don’t follow mixed martial arts beyond watching most UFC cards and keeping track of Kimbo Slice’s chest hair patterns. But this clip from last weekend’s Bellator XI — whatever that is — reminds me that it doesn’t require intimate knowledge with Muay Thai terminology to appreciate a flying knee to a man’s face.
In case you’re looking for details, the owner of the knee here is Nick Pace, and the owner of the knee-print in his face is Collin Tebo. No relation to Tim Tebow, I presume, as we all know that no one man can knock Tebow off his feet.
Tim Sylvia, the former UFC heavyweight champion who was once considered one of the toughest fighters in the world (not many people choose a broken arm over tapping out), has been old and crappy for some time now, and he finally bottomed out this weekend at “Adrenaline III: Bragging Rights” in Birmingham this weekend, when he weigh in at a hefty 310 pounds and got knocked out less than 10 seconds into the first round. As you can see from the video, he’s clearly unconscious before he even hits the ground, which I haven’t seen since I drugged your mom’s drink. Not that I needed to. Because she’s easy.
In more important MMA news, UFC 99 was held on Saturday night, and for the most part it was a pretty entertaining card. The highlights:
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.
The romance novel market is capitalizing on the world of mixed martial arts, finally merging males aged 18-34 demographic with the ever-valuable “single middle-aged women with at least two cats.” An author named Lori Foster has written My Man, Michael, and it sounds a-maaaaaaa-ziiiiinnnngggg.
MY MAN, MICHAEL proves you can be both a lover and a fighter! Combining mixed martial arts, romance and time travel!
I think I speak for everyone when I say, “Finally, someone has written the book America has waited for.”
Michael thinks an injury will keep him from fighting again until a woman shows up and promises to heal him. But, he must travel with her and teach a community of woman warriors to fight in return. Imagine Michael’s surprise when she fulfills her end of the bargain and finds that, to fulfill his he must travel into the future!
Oh baby. I have gotten a glimpse of the future, and It. Looks. Sexy.
There were two big fights this weekend for fans of man-on-man violence: Shane Mosley upset Antonio Margarito with a ninth-round TKO to win the WBC welterweight title, and heavyweight Fedor Emelianenko knocked out Andrei Arlovski in the first round of the most-hyped MMA fight outside of UFC since Kimbo Slice fell to Seth Petruzelli.
Since I’m not an old Hispanic man, I watched Affliction’s MMA card, but you can read solid breakdowns on Mosley-Margarito from Large at The Sporting Blog and Kogod at Deadspin.
While 20,000-plus were packed into L.A.’s Staples Center to watch the pugilists, the Honda Center in Orange County was also filled with fight fans to watch Emelianenko build his mystique — the doughy 230-pound Russian hasn’t lost a fight since 2000. But the headliners disappointed. Arlovski, clearly in superior shape, controlled the tempo of the first round, then was done in by his famously weak chin when he jumped into a straight right. He immediately fell to the canvas, unconscious.
The rest of the card was similarly disappointing — a lot of fighters with some version of “former UFC” appended to their names, and it was obvious why. Although anyone who saw Matt Lindland get knocked out got their money’s worth. Not too often I get to see the balled-up velociraptor hands and leg spasms at the end of a fight. Usually I pay the girl to do that to me.
Here’s a sentence I never expected to write on a sports blog: The Balkan conflict is now being fought with chairs in Australia.
One girl sustained minor injuries in this barrage of chair-throwing between Serbian and Bosnian fans after Serbia’s Novak Djokovic’s defeated Amer Delic in four sets, and I’m gonna go ahead and assume Delic is Bosnian. And this incident happened just two days after Serbs clashed with Croatian fans in and around Melbourne Park.
The whole notion of people fighting at a tennis match is a little much for me to grasp. Any sport where the P.A. announcer has to ask for quiet doesn’t deserve hooligans.
