Filed under: UFC, NewsLess than a month after successfully defending his UFC featherweight belt, champion Jose Aldo has his next assignment.
The Brazilian will return home and attempt to extend his current run of dominance over the division in a stern…
Filed under: UFC, NewsThe UFC’s year-end show in Las Vegas continues to take shape.
Not long after announcing a lightweight battle between still-surging contender Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone and Nate Diaz – who combined have 15 fight night bonuses in the…
Primetime by JMMANow
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If your wife had you finishing up some shit on your honey-do list you had better things to do yesterday afternoon than sit inside and watch the UFC on Fox 1 Primetime show, don’t worry, homies. We got you covered.
Filed under: UFC, NewsLAS VEGAS – Ten fighters from Saturday’s UFC 137 card have been given medical suspensions by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, including one of up to six months for a winning fighter.
The NSAC on Monday released the suspensi…
Filed under: UFC, MMA Fighting Exclusive, News
Malki Kawa had a bad feeling when he heard his phone ring and looked at the caller ID. It was then that he realized UFC president Dana White was on the other line. UFC 137 had just ended 30 minutes earlier, and it was already after midnight on the east coast. It was not a time for mindless chit-chat. It was a time for serious business.
As is his style, White cut to the chase. Georges St-Pierre no longer wanted to fight Kawa’s client Carlos Condit next. Instead, the UFC welterweight champ wanted to fight Nick Diaz, the winner of UFC 137′s main event. We all now know the outcome. St-Pierre got the fight he wanted, and he’ll be fighting Diaz in early February. Condit? He wasn’t too happy, and he didn’t exactly “step aside” as White told the media at the post-fight press conference.
“I could understand them coming to us like that,” Kawa said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “The issue with the whole ‘he decided to step aside,’ obviously, that wasn’t the case. There was no just stepping aside. There was a little bit more than that. It’s going to take more than that. I think we’re way more upset with Georges and the way Georges handled it than we are with the way Dana presented it or anything like that.”
Everything changed in the moments after UFC 137. Diaz got the ball rolling by saying St-Pierre was scared and by questioning his injury just after his main event win. According to White, St-Pierre then “flipped out” and demanded that he bypass Condit and face Diaz next.
But as Kawa pointed out, Diaz had previously called out St-Pierre after he was originally replaced with Condit, and St-Pierre never responded. In addition to that, St-Pierre had gone on record saying that believed Condit presented the tougher challenge.
“I don’t know if the emotions of the moment got to him, and he just decided to do that,” Kawa said. “It’s kind of un-Georges-like.”
Kawa said that he and Condit didn’t step aside as graciously as it sounded, describing the ordeal as “gut-wrenching.”
“[Carlos'] words were, ‘My heart hurts,’” he said.
But ultimately, Kawa said that they are “company men” who made the move that the promotion wanted. He also suggested that there was some financial reward for bowing out.
“Dana always does the right thing and in this case, he’ll do the right thing again,” he said.
Kawa said he tried to keep things in perspective by noting that he originally got Condit moved into the title slot with some hustle of his own, and that sometimes, that sort of thing works against you. He even candidly admitted that if he was Diaz’s manager, he would have lobbied for the fight, too.
“Are we pissed off about it? Absolutely,” he said. “But it’s not like I’ve never been on other end of stick where I put one of my fighters ahead of someone else and another guy got shafted or screwed over. It’s just business, it’s not personal. It’s nothing personal with Georges. Are we upset with him? Absolutely.”
Meanwhile, Condit has every intention of fighting again instead of waiting to take on the St-Pierre vs. Diaz winner. Kawa said the UFC has thrown out some possibilities, but that nothing has been decided upon. The biggest factor is that it has to be someone that Condit can gain something from in fighting, mentioning Josh Koscheck and Jake Ellenberger as possibilities.
“It’s more about whoever brings the most to the table,” he said. “We want to make it a big-money fight. Whoever that is. Make it a big-money fight. A No. 1 contender, possibly make it a five-rounder if we could. And somebody who win, lose, or draw, we can take something from it.”
(Video courtesy of YouTube/ProMMANow)
You would think that Nick Diaz’s camp would cool it with all of the accusations about Georges St-Pierre being scared or faking an injury to get out of fighting their boy now that they got the desired result, but that’s not how they do things in Stockton, evidently.
Dring a media scrum after the UFC 137 presser, Cesar Gracie was asked, in a somewhat baited way if he thought GSP’s injury was legit and he didn’t hold back, although he made about as much sense as his protegee.
“He ran past me earlier. I mean, he literally RAN past me, so… Look, he’s a great guy. He’s a black belt under [my cousin] Renzo Gracie. I don’t know the guy that well, personally, but I’m gonna tell you guys something right now… Nick Diaz missed a press conference and he’s here and [he] fought,” Gracie sort of explained. “The guy that went to the press conference didn’t fight. That’s all I gotta say about it. Nick…Yeah, he got kicked out, he’s this…he’s the bad guy… We didn’t go to what Nick called, ‘the beauty pageant,’ but come fight night you guys saw what he’s made of and he showed up and he did everything he had to and the guys that made the press conference, they weren’t here tonight, so you be the judge. You know what I mean?”
No, we don’t know what you mean since it makes no sense. So let us get this straight, somehow GSP faked an injury to get out of fighting Nick, even though he was scheduled to face Carlos Condit when the injury occurred. Wait, what?!
Filed under: UFCNow that he’s had a chance to think it over, maybe B.J. Penn isn’t “done” with MMA after all. In a short post on his website entitled “UFC 137: BJ Penn’s Message to the Fans,” the 32-year-old former UFC lightweight and welterweight cham…
Filed under: UFC, NewsJust last week, UFC president Dana White confirmed that Brazil would be the first country to produce an international edition of The Ultimate Fighter.
According to a new report, the show will bring with it a pair of top-level co…
Filed under: UFC, NewsLAS VEGAS – Someone must have told Donald Cerrone when Chris Lytle retired, the UFC had a job opening for its Bonus King position.
The “Cowboy” will go after his fourth bonus of 2011 and will tie the UFC’s record for most fights…
Filed under: UFC, News, salariesLAS VEGAS – The Nevada State Athletic Commission on Monday released the salary figures for UFC 137, which took place Saturday at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.
Former Strikeforce welterweight champion Nic…
Undefeated 2008 U.S. Olympian Demetrius “Boo Boo” Andrade believes his February 10 main-event fight against former USBA junior middleweight champion Derek “Pooh” Ennis, for the vacant North American Boxing Organization (“NABO”) junior middleweight title, is a continuation of a well designed plan, eventually landing him a world title fight later this year or in early 2013. With [...]
It has become clear as day that negotiations for the much anticipated superfight between WBO Welterweight champion and Ring magazine’s #1 pound for pound boxer Manny Pacquiao (54-3-2 with 38 KO’s) and WBC Welterweight champion and Ring magazine’s #2 pound for pound boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. (42-0 with 26 KO’s) have once again fallen apart. [...]
I can recall that many UFC fans told me ten years ago that it would be run so much more smoothly than boxing. Having one promoter and a numbered amount of regulated fight cards, it would even feature fewer divisions, and talent would be built up locally, then regionally, and nationally… rather than based on fame and [...]
It’s really hard to not be impressed with the forty seven year old WBC Light Heavyweight Champion Bernard Hopkins. They say records are made to be broken, but Hopkins’ record of being the oldest champion in boxing history will be very hard to break, and it looks like it will be secure for years to [...]
Riddick “Big Daddy” Bowe (43-1, 33 KOs) still has some fight left in him and is preparing to launch a comeback to the sport that made him famous. “Well, you know, I’ve been training, and I decided to make a comeback. So, I’m in the process of gettin’ myself on weight,” said Bowe this past [...]
(By Mike Dinovo, US Presswire) (PhatzRadio / MMA) — CHICAGO — Experience trumped previously unblemished youth Saturday in the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s return to Chicago. Former champion “Suga” Rashad Evans (22-1-1) dominated Phil “Mr. Wonderful” Davis (9-1) en route to a unanimous decision victory in the main event of UFC on Fox 2. In inflicting [...]
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