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Sean Strickland world championship match. This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| No. |
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2 | 4.88% |
| gently caress you. |
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22 | 53.66% |
| I'm going to stop watching the UFC. |
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8 | 19.51% |
| I stopped watching the UFC years ago. |
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9 | 21.95% |
| Total: | 41 votes | ||
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Return to August and enjoy Chan Sung Jung one last time here. Congratulations on making it to September. After a long, busy summer, we're finally running out of steam on the year--the UFC's taking a week off, Bellator is limping to their three hundredth and possibly final event before a merger, PFL's playoffs are over so all they've got is a Europe event that may or may not even be airing in America. Add a Sean Strickland world championship fight to the pot and Grasso/Shevchenko 2 being demoted to a television card, and it's a baffling month altogether. Thread title is courtesy of our collective appreciation for The Korean Zombie. If this is your first time here you should stop and say hi so we know it's not just the same couple dozen of us cussing each other out all the time, but you may want to start with The General Q&A Thread for the basic gist of mixed martial arts. Yes, I'm still doing the new one. If you want to talk about MMA or combat sports events that aren't included in this breakdown: Please do. In a world of Road FC and Rizin events that don't actually air in America and the WBC threatening to rank Jake Paul, there's space for everything. And if there's an event you want to make a GDT for, go right ahead, just make sure to link it here so everyone sees it and basks in the joy of violence. THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS 
IS THERE ANY NEWS  Remember my news story a couple months back about the global reboot of K-1 Kickboxing? They announced a global broadcasting deal with DAZN towards the end of August, which, to be honest, is already considerably better than I expected them to do. Japanese martial arts have basically sucked at broadcasting outside of Japan for years. Rizin has almost been around longer than Pride, and they still vacillate constantly on international broadcasting rights. THE MATCH, the Tenshin Nasukawa vs Takeru superfight that was practically the series finale of Japanese kickboxing, was a massive clusterfuck of broadcasting rights. Hell, Bellator x Rizin is a literal copromotion with an American company, and its first card didn't even get broadcast live in America. DAZN isn't even the most stable of carriers, but it is a carrier, so brother, I'll take it. Here's hoping the K-1 revival actually works out after all.  Let's call this a pre-news story. A bunch of ex-UFC fighters have, for quite some time, been going through the exceptionally long process of suing the UFC for antitrust violations--namely using unfair practices to depress fighter worth, monopolize the market and generally make it impossible for promotions to compete with the UFC and fighters to have chances to compete for other promotions--and given that the first suit was filed by Cung Le all the way back in 2010, it had more than slipped off the radar for most of the world. It is suddenly very loving much back on the radar. Judge Richard Boulware, presiding over the suits, dealt several blows to the UFC's hopes of burying them forever, first granting class certification and thus turning the suit into a class-action suit open to an awful lot of ex-fighters, then preemptively agreeing that the UFC's "brutal, coercive tactics" were clearly egregious, and, most distressingly for the company, agreeing to push the case along at a fast enough clip that it will begin in earnest next year. So: Watch this space. It may be awhile before we have another real update, but this is suddenly a very, very real problem for the UFC, which could make it a very, very real boon for the sport. MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER  I'm not sure newer fans fully understand the way lower weight classes--the best weight classes in mixed martial arts--almost ceased to exist. We take them for granted now, but the UFC didn't even promote formal weight divisions below 170 pounds until fully reactivating Lightweight in 2007. Featherweight, Bantamweight and Flyweight were pipe dreams that existed only to wild-eyed degenerates who watched international fight streams at three in the morning. Unless, of course, you knew about World Extreme Cagefighting, the one American company with an actual TV deal that broadcast fights in the lighter weight classes. The UFC, eventually, purchased the WEC, and merged its bones into their own, and some of the best fights in the sport followed suit. But a lot of those early fighters have been forgotten. If you came to the UFC and flourished, you were fine, but a lot of the veterans that built those weight classes--your Cole Escovedos and Jeff Currans, your Chase Beebes and Miguel Torresi--either didn't make it to the top of the UFC or didn't make it to the UFC at all. I tell you this story so as to properly emphasize just how unusual Chan Sung Jung's success was, and just how much he deserves his place as a legend of the sport. He had a laundry list of career-killers working against him--the casual fanbase doesn't like smaller guys, the American fanbase doesn't like foreigners, the sport itself doesn't like it when people disappear for years--and he fought through it all to become one of the biggest, most enduring names in featherweight history. Some of those problems were solved with marketing. The issue of a predominantly American fanbase's trouble with Korean names let alone identities was sidestepped by way of aggressive branding. Chan Sung Jung very quickly distinguished himself as a preposterously tough, nigh-unstoppable fighter, and suddenly, he wasn't Chan Sung Jung, a name a bunch of westerners inexplicably have trouble with, he was The Korean Zombie. It actually actively bothered me to write about his fight cards and see a million posters that didn't have his actual goddamn name on them, but boy, it worked out just fine for him. He came to the ring to "Zombie" by The Cranberries, he tried to bludgeon someone to death with his hands, and the fans lost their poo poo every time. But he was more performance than posture. There's really only one bad loss on Jung's entire record, and it's getting his head kicked off by terrifying beef jerky man George Roop. Every other person was either a world champion or someone who would, or already had, fought for one. He beat Mark Hominick, he beat Dustin Poirier, he beat Frankie Edgar, and even when he lost, he made a fight of it. He came one second away from beating Yair Rodriguez, he went five rounds with Brian Ortega despite being essentially knocked out in the first, and he fought José Aldo so hard that his own arm came out of its socket. He was fast, and he was accurate, and more than anything, he was tough. But as I've said too many times, having a reputation for being tough means you're regularly eating enough punishment that it becomes conspicuous, and unfortunately, inevitably, that adds up. Between getting chinned by Roop, between having his body fall apart against Aldo, and between missing almost four years of his prime--half to the mandatory military service South Korea requires of its male citizens, half to injuries--the mileage packed onto Jung's career in an all-too-visible way. And it's a testament to how good he was that he still wound up fighting for the goddamn title anyway. He was never the best, and maybe it's fitting that his career ended with him getting slaughtered by the fighters who were the best, the same way it had happened in his prime, but it never once dimmed the affection his fans had for him, nor did it take away from his achievements. He's a featherweight legend, he's one of the UFC's first and biggest South Korean stars, and the audience singing his song back to him as he walked out of the cage for the last time is a greater testament to his being one of the sport's most beloved fighters than anything else I could say. Jung--gently caress it, Zombie--retires at 17-8, and at just 36 years old, I hope he gets to enjoy his health for a long time to come.  Carlos Candelario called it a career, and it feels almost disrespectful to him to write him up in the shadow of someone like Chan Sung Jung, but for one, that's the unfortunate reality of the sport, and for two, I think it's important to tell the stories of the folks that come and go, as a reminder that not only do most folks in this sport not actually make it, but that often, it's by no fault of their own. Because Carlos Candelario did everything right. He took to mixed martial arts as a teenager after a lifelong interest in competition, he cross-trained and gave himself time to develop, and by the time he made his professional debut he was a grappling tournament champion, a Golden Gloves champion, and a 5-0 amateur MMA champion. He didn't rush, he took his career responsibly, and he turned pro in his mid-twenties with a world of potential ahead of him. Carlos did his best to realize that potential. He fought through the CES MMA feeder league, he got noticed by the UFC, and he was one of the very first winners on the Contender Series, right alongside folks like Geoff Neal and Sean O'Malley. Unfortunately, he also tore his ACL, and right around the time it healed, the pandemic started, and for four years, that was it. But he came back, and earned another shot. Which he lost--but Dana liked him, so he signed him anyway. After seven long years, Carlos Candelario achieved his dream and made it to the UFC. And then he ran into Tatsuro Taira, one of Japan's best prospects, and he got destroyed. And then he ran into Jake Hadley, one of England's best prospects, and he got destroyed. And then the UFC pointed out that Candelario missed weight in both fights, and that was a real, real bad look, and gave him one more chance that he had to pull out of after getting hurt during training. And then Carlos Candelario announced his retirement at 32, because he just didn't have it in him anymore. Honestly: Good. The same way I constantly hope for corners, referees and doctors to be more judicious about the well-being of their fighters, I constantly hope for fighters to be more judicious about themselves. Too many fighters hang on and take unnecessary punishment and ruin their later years in pursuit of a dream that is quickly escaping them. If you're 32 and you realize your body, heart and brain aren't in this anymore, and you make the distressingly unusual choice of listening to them, you're already outperforming an awful lot of the fighters you're leaving behind. Carlos Candelario retires at 8-3. I hope he has a long, wonderful life to come, and I hope the fact that he made it to the UFC stays with him. WHERE ELSE CAN I TALK TO LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE ABOUT VIOLENCE? Any of the following hangouts:
DO WE HAVE OTHER COMMUNAL THREADS? So many.
WHERE ELSE DOES FIGHT CHAT EXIST? Our community output has grown enough that we've got a few other places things get posted:
 Disclaimer: These are unofficial offsites, somethingawful's rules and liability do not extend to them, and complaining about discord stuff is still offsite drama posting
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WHAT HAPPENED IN AUGUST The last stage of the PFL's playoffs kicked off the month with PFL 7: Pinedo vs Jenkins on August 4th. The undercard was a fun experiment in grappling repetition, as three of its five consecutive fights ended in rear naked chokes, with the most notable being Contender Series veteran Chelsea Hackett coming back from three years on the shelf to choke out Ky Bennett. The main card, aside from an exhibition where lightweight Elvin Espinoza beat Keoni Diggs, saw the final playoffs for Light-Heavyweight and Featherweight. In the former, Impa Kasanganay knocked out Marthin Hamlet and Josh Silveira took out Ty Flores with knees, both in under a round, penciling themselves in against each other for the finals. Down at 145 pounds, Gabriel Alves Braga took a split decision over Chris Wade and Jesus Pinedo knocked out Bubba Jenkins, giving PFL a thing they assuredly desperately wanted: A featherweight final where neither guy is big enough to have a Wikipedia page. ONE took the stage for their only event with mixed martial arts on it for the month--by which I mean there were ten fights on the card and three of them were MMA, and only two of them were at an actual weight class--with ONE Fight Night 13: Allazov vs Grigorian on August 5th. I really wish ONE would stop pretending they aren't a kickboxing organization. Either way, Tye Ruotolo choked out Dagi Arlanaliev in a grappling match, Elias Mahmoudi knocked out Edgar Tabares in Muay Thai, Supergirl continued her run as ONE's new poster child by taking a kickboxing decision over Lara Fernandez, and Tawanchai kicked David Kiria's arm into pieces in three rounds. Down in the MMA salt mines, Eknh-Orgil Baatarkhuu submitted Jhanlo Mark Sangiao, Oumar Kane--the man known as REUG REUG--took a decision over jiu-jitsu ace Marcus "Bucheca" Almeida in what was a canonical new entry in the annals of unintentional heavyweight comedy, and John Lineker managed to come in a full six pounds over the 145-pound weight limit, but knocked out Kim Jae-woong in the third round anyway. Your co-main event saw Flyweight Submission Grappling champion Mikey Musumeci submit Flyweight MMA Champion Jarred Brooks in a grappling match for the former's title, and in your main event, Featherweight Kickboxing Champion Chingiz Allazov successfully defended his belt against on-and-off rival Marat Grigorian. The UFC's month started later that day with UFC on ESPN: Sandhagen vs Font, which was, in many senses, kind of a shitshow. A half-dozen fights got scratched or replaced, some of them multiple times. My personal favorite: Sean Woodson was going to fight Steve Garcia, and then Garcia got injured and was replaced by Jesse Butler, and then the Nevada Athletic Commission legally scratched the fight from across the country because Butler had been knocked out two months ago and wasn't even off suspension yet, so six days before the fight he was replaced by Mairon Santos, who was then promptly scratched because he couldn't get a visa in time, for which he was then replaced with Dennis Buzukja, who promptly missed weight and lost anyway. Mixed martial arts, baby. The card wasn't bad, but it was mostly decisions, which makes fans deeply unhappy. Down on the prelims Assu Almabayev made a successful upset debut by choking out Ode' Osbourne, Cody Durden beat up Jake Hadley, Billy Quarantillo edged out Damon Jackson, Carlston choked Jeremiah Wells unconscious, and Kyler Phillips broke my heart by beating Raoni Barcelos. Up on the main card Ľudovít Klein took a call over Ignacio Bahamondes, Tanner Boser snapped his losing streak by being Aleksa Camur (after which Boser was cut anyway), Diego Lopes managed to submit Gavin Tucker, Dustin Jacoby knocked out Kennedy Nzechuwku in a minute and a half, and Tatiana Suarez dominated and choked out Jéssica Andrade. The main event, however, was...uh, bad. Cody Sandhagen was supposed to fight Umar Nurmagomedov, he instead wound up facing Rob Font on a few weeks' notice, and additionally it turns out Sandhagen was fighting through injuries and probably shouldn't have been there. But he's a much, much better wrestler than Font. The result was one of the lowest-action main events in UFC history, both in terms of subjective enjoyment and objective statistics, with almost twenty minutes of grappling control time and a final significant strike count, across 25 minutes, of 34 to 9. Despite being a company man, and despite doing his job while injured, Sandhagen probably cost himself cache with the company, because this sport is not real. There were no Fight of the Night bonuses. Not to be outside, Bellator made its appearance for the month on August 11th with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellator_298]Bellator 298: Storley vs Ward[/url], which was, somehow, even less eventful. As with all Bellator cards there were a dozen goddamn prelims and I'm not going to begin to tell you about all of them, but LFA champ and Bellator titlist Leandro Higo returned for his annual appearance to choke out Nikita Mikhailov, rising prospect Lucas Brennan knocked out Weber Almeida, Enrique Barzola outworked Jaylon Bates, and Justine Kish upset the undefeated Diana Avsaragova by decision. The main card, somehow, was less eventful. Four out of five top-card bouts went to decision: Sidney Outlaw managed to outwrestle Islam Mamedov, Irish Conor McGregor impersonator #814 James Gallagher outwrestled James Gonzalez only to cut a promo as though he'd just knocked out Francis Ngannou, middleweight Aaron Jeffery also outwrestled Dalton Rosta, and in your co-main event, former heavyweight champion Valentin Moldavsky--try to maintain your composure--very, very slowly outwrestled Steve Mowry. And then in the main event, which saw grinding career wrestler Logan Storley face career brawler Brennan Ward--can you guess what's going to happen, here--Storley outwrestled Ward! Shockingly! But he at least ended the fight in two rounds after pounding Ward into the fetal position. There's a rumor going around that Bellator 300 in October is going to be the company's last event before going into hiatus as they merge with the PFL, and if that winds up being true, I blame this card. The UFC went up to bat again for UFC on ESPN: Luque vs Dos Anjos on August 12th, which was a significantly weird but ultimately fun night of fights. The prelims were an all-action, all-finishes affair: Luana Santos knocked out Ultimate Fighter champ Juliana Miller, Da'Mon Blackshear scored an insane Twister submission over Jose Johnson, Jaqueline Amorim ground-and-pounded out an overmatch Montserrat Ruiz, Martin Buday just ragdolled Josh Parisian and submitted him with a kimura in less than a round, Isaac Gulgarian pounded out Francis Marshall in just barely five minutes, Terrance McKinney clocked an overmatched Mike Breeden in ninety seconds, and in your prelim headliner, Marcus McGhee continued his Cinderella run by knocking out JP Buys in one. The main card was slower on the finishes, but most of the fights were still pretty decent. Josh Fremd outgrappled Jamie Pickett, A.J. Dobson won a real close fight with Tafon Nchukwi, Iasmin Lucindo continued her rise at Strawweight by choking out Polyana Viana, Khalil Rountree Jr. knocked out a confusingly-booked Chris Daukaus and possibly sent him into retirement, and in the co-main event, Cub Swanson won a somewhat iffy decision against Hakeem Dawodu that most of the world forgave anyway on account of his being Cub Swanson. The main event was, funnily enough, the least eventful fight of the night, as Vicente Luque just sort of big-brothered Rafael dos Anjos for five rounds en route to a unanimous decision, cementing the point that, while lightweight might be too much of a weight cut for RDA at this point in his career, welterweight just really isn't his size. PFL 8: Ferreira vs Greene came the next week on August 18th, and very few things I can say about PFL are as indicative of how well their season has gone than their penultimate playoff event only having seven fights on it. After multiple scratches--including one fight that had a weight miss so bad it was briefly rebooked as a superheavyweight contest before being removed altogether--you wound up with just two preliminary bouts, as Maira Mazar took a split decision over Kaytlin Neil and Danilo Marques outworked Satoshi Ishii, who, somehow, still exists. As always, there was one exhibition bout--in this case, Nathan Kelly getting a decision over Damion Nelson--and then it was playoffs, this time Women's Featherweight and Heavyweight. The women got their work done fast: Marina Mokhnatkina snagged an armbar on Amber Leibrock in a minute forty-five, and 2022 champion, who has been fighting and knocking out Olena Kolesnyk once a year for the past three years, successfully optimized her speedrun strats, as her 2021 Kolesnyk knockout took 4:48, her 2022 knockout took 2:09, and her 2023 knockout took just 14 seconds. The heavyweights didn't take much longer: Denis Goltsov scored an arm triangle on Jordan Heiderman in 4:16, and Renan Ferreira knocked out Maurice Greened in 4:46. To be clear, if you don't count the 15-minute exhibition bout no one watched, that means the actual playoffs for the event had a grant total of just under 11 minutes of fight time in a 2-hour block. And then it was August 19th's UFC 292: Sterling vs O'Malley, the day Dana White won. There was a lot of good stuff on the undercard--women's flyweight prospects Karine Silva and Natalia Silva both announced their permanent presence in the division by taking out Maryna Moroz and Andre Lee, Brad Katona and Kurt Holobaugh became the champions of The Ultimate Fighter 31 (jesus christ), Gregory Rodrigues elbowed Denis Tiuliulin out cold in one round and Chris Weidman returned from his two-year leg injury layoff only to immediately get kicked in the leg a bunch by Brad Tavares, lose a 30-27 decision, and quite possibly go right back into rehab for leg injuries. The main card was a mixed fuckin' bag. Marlon "Chito" Vera took a pretty shaky, questionable decision over Pedro Munhoz, Da'Mon Blackshear fought just a week after his previous fight like a good company man and got controlled and decisioned by Mario Bautista, thus ending his momentum, Ian Machado Garry laid a hellacious beating on Neil Magny but couldn't actually put him away, which Garry swears was an intentional attempt to show off how great he is, and your co-main event, a statistically lopsided bout where Zhang Weili defended her Women's Strawweight Championship against Amanda Lemos, was, shockingly, statistically lopsided, with Weili dominating Lemos, handing her multiple 10-8 rounds, and ultimately outstriking her 296-29. But everyone was there for the main event, and it worked out exactly the way management wanted: After a tight first round that was mostly leg kicks and probing jabs, Sean O'Malley did the thing, caught Aljamain Sterling lunging, and dropped him with a right hand in the second round. Sean O'Malley, unfortunately, is the new UFC Bantamweight Champion of the World. And they didn't even get out of the event before making it clear they're going to skip the rankings again and have O'Malley fight Marlon Vera instead of any of the actual top contenders. God bless America. PFL ended their playoffs with PFL 9: Collard vs Burgos. This time around--aside from our requisite exhibition bout, in this case yet another in their ongoing attempt to make a big deal out of Biaggio Ali Walsh, who, hey, did you know he's Muhammad Ali's grandson, as yet another amateur bout of his made it onto the main broadcast despite no one really giving a gently caress. The main card was there to finish out the welterweight and lightweight brackets, and the former went exactly as intended, with Magomed Magomedkerimov dominating Solomon Renfro en route to a lopsided decision victory and 2022 champion Sadibou Sy scoring a much closer split decision over Carlos Leal, leaving the two slated to face each other out in November. At lightweight, 2022 champ Olivier Aubin-Mercier overcame a close first round and knocked out Bruno Miranda in the second, leaving himself a chance for a repeat championship performance. And then there was the main event, which somewhat controversially had been reconfigured to And the month itself ended with UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs Jung on the 26th. AN awful lot of folks missed this one, being as it ran at 2 in the morning if you lived in the Pacific time zone, but it wasn't a bad card, even if it was a bit of a downer. JJ Aldrich recorded her first stoppage victory since 2016 by putting away Na Liang, Billy Goff knocked out Yusaku Kinoshita, Michał Oleksiejczuk counter-sniped Chidi Njokuani, Garrett Armfield put down Toshiomi Kazama, and your friend and mine, Waldo "Salsa Boy" Cortes-Acosta, took out Łukasz Brzeski in one round. Up on the main card, Junior Tafa knocked out Parker Porter just like his older brother had earlier this year but took twenty extra seconds to do it, Erin Blanchfield outgrappled Taila Santos, Rinya Nakamura dominated Fernie Garcia, Giga Chikadze took a wide decision from Alex Caceres, and Anthony Smith scraped a split decision away from Ryan Spann. But your main event was the bittersweet swan song for The Korean Zombie, Chan-sung Jung, as Max Holloway dutifully knocked him out in the third round to finally, officially, end his career. WHAT'S COMING IN SEPTEMBER We're kicking off September nice and early on the 2nd with UFC on ESPN: Gane vs Spivak. The second in what's becoming an annual tradition of Ciryl Gane-based September visits to Paris, this card isn't quite as strong as last year's, but it's still pretty decent. Farid Basharat vs Kleydson Rodrigues, Zarah Fairn Dos Santos vs Jacqueline Cavalcanti, Taylor Lapilus vs Muin Gafurov and Ange Loosa vs Rhys McKee should all be solid preliminary bangers, and while your main card has a couple weird ones like William Gomis vs Lucas Almeida, Yanis Ghemmouri vs Caolan Loughran and Volkan Oezdemir vs Bogdan Guskov, it also has a strong top three: Benoît Saint-Denis vs Thiago Moisés, Manon Fiorot vs Rose Namajunas in her first fight at 125 pounds, and of course, Ciryl Gane vs Sergey Spivak in what is basically a pass/fail test to see if Gane has learned to defend a takedown yet. Next week on September 9th, the UFC hits its pay-per-view for the month, and much to my chagrin, it's UFC 293: Adesanya vs Strickland. Not gonna mince words: This card, as of the end of August, is kind of weak. It's already been hit by several cancellations and reschedulings, but it is pretty loving dire. There are a few fights that should be real good scraps--Jamie Mullarkey vs John Makdessi and Jack Jenkins vs Chepe Mariscal stand out in particular--but it's real, real low on fights of consequence and is instead shooting for Australia/New Zealand locals. Blood Diamond is back to face Charlie Radtke, Shane Young meets Gabriel Miranda, Carlos Ulberg is fighting Da-un Jung, Tyson Pedro vs Anton Turkalj, Justin Tafa vs Austen Lane, Manel Kape is fighting a newcomer in Felipe dos Santos--it's pretty fuckin' dire. Your co-main event sees Tai Tuivasa trying to knock out Alexander Volkov, and in your main event, unfortunately, Israel Adesanya is defending the middleweight title against Sean loving Strickland. But not quite as dire as the following week. UFC Fight Night: Grasso vs Shevchenko 2 was booked for September 16th as an attempt to market itself around Mexican Independence Day--and just to be clear, this isn't one of my bits of tea leaf analysis, the UFC was very open about this being the plan, and stacked the entire card with all their top Mexican talent. And then half the fights fell apart. And now you have a card for Mexican independence day where Kevin Holland vs Jack Della Maddalena is co-main eventing. But you've still got Lupita Godinez and Daniel Zellhuber and, uh, Raul Rosas Jr.? So, y'know. Be happy! Alexa Grasso will be trying to justify her shock-the-world upset title victory back in March by beating flyweight GOAT Valentina Shevchenko one more time, and that's what most people are going to actually be there for. The UFC is, again, back the following week, for its fourth and final card of the month: UFC on ESPN: Fiziev vs Gamrot on September 23rd. The month is closing out with another big set of prospect showcases alongside a couple veteran battles. On one hand, you've got Mizuki Inoue vs Hannah Goldy, Ricardo Ramos vs Charles Jourdain, Miles Johns vs Dan Argueta, Bryan Battle vs AJ Fletcher, Montserrat Rendon vs Tamires Vidal and Javid Basharat vs Victory Henry; on the other, you've got Tim Means vs André Fialho, Mohammed Usman vs Jake Collier, and, well, you WERE going to have Jacob Malkoun and Aliaskhab Khizriev wrestle each other for fifteen minutes, but now Khizriev is out, so who knows what's going to happen. But Bryce Mitchell vs Dan Ige is a hell of a fight, and Marina Rodriguez vs Michelle Waterson-Gomez is a good fight with a high depression potential, and Rafael Fiziev vs Mateusz Gamrot will be very illuminating with regards to who has actual title prospects at 155 pounds. And then, it's Bellator. Bellator 299: Eblen vs Edwards comes our way also on September 23rd, and it's just sort of...a big potential sendoff for this company. It's an open secret that Bellator is in trouble and trying to get sold off, and a big rumor that Bellator 300 is going to be its last event as either an independent company or, possibly, a company, and boy, you just couldn't really ask for a fight that's a bigger symbol of the rut modern Bellator found itself in. We're back in Dublin, we're back doing Irish appeal cards, and we, once again, are currently scheduled to have 13 preliminary bouts and 4 main card bouts, because that's just how Bellator loving rolls. All the stars are here! Darragh Kelly! Chiara Penco! Przemysław Górny! Peter Queally! And then, on your main card, you've got Mads Burnell vs Daniel Weichel, Sinead Kavanagh vs Sara Collins, Aaron Pico vs Pedro Carvalho, and, in your main event, Johnny Eblen defending the Bellator Middleweight Championship against Fabian Edwards. The long-rear end MMA weekend continues into the long hours of the morning, depending on your time zone, with Rizin 44. The card, as of now, is one of Rizin's more restrained efforts with just 8 fights booked, but one of those is Tsuyoshi Sudario vs Todd god damned Duffee, and you cannot possibly miss that. Shoma Shibisai is also out to fight Janos Csukas, and Yoshiki Nakahara is facing Rikuto Shirakawa, which should be fun. But your top two fights are both about making the future concrete and kind-of sort-of exerting punishment. Kleber Koike Erbst, who lost the Rizin Featherweight Championship on the scale this past Spring, is NOT fighting for the title, and is instead battling twenty-year veteran Masanori Kanehara--in the co-main event. In the main event, Juntarou Ushiku, the man Erbst beat to win the title, is fighting...the 7-7 Kyohei Hagiwara, to determine who else might challenge for the belt. Rizin: It's not subtle. And, finally, the month ends with ONE Fight Night 14: Stamp vs Ham on September 29th. This is actually ONE's MMA-heaviest card in months, with six out of ten scheduled fights being contested under mixed martial arts rules, which, hey, that's almost novel at this point. You have three Muay Thai bouts--Rambolek Chor.Ajalaboon vs Asa Ten Pow, Sinsamut Klinmee vs Dmitry Menshikov, and Smilla Sundell defending the strawweight title against Allycia Rodrigues--and you have one submission grappling bout, as Danielle Kelly faces Jessa Khan to determine the first Women's Atomweight Submission Grappling Champion, which is a mouthful. In MMA, you've got Maurice Abévi vs Blake Cooper, Mauro Cerilli vs Paul Elliott, Eduard Folayang vs Amir Khan, John Lineker vs Stephen Loman--which is a bit weird to me since Lineker just fought at the start of August, but okay, I guess--and Xiong Jing Nan in a weird, semi-MMA semi-striking match that might actually just be small-gloves boxing. But your main event is Stamp Fairtex vs Seo-hee Ham in a match that, in all likelihood, will determine a new ONE Women's Atomweight MMA Champion, as Angela Lee is expected to announce her retirement from the sport at the start of the month.
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Sep 1, 2023 19:46
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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Jon Jones - 27-1 (1), 0 DefensesVery few things in combat sports reach the crossroads of awe-inspiring and unfathomably frustrating as Jon Jones. In 2020, Jon Jones notched the third defense of his second light-heavyweight championship reign after an exceedingly contentious decision against Dominick Reyes, only to abdicate the title because the UFC wasn't paying him enough, and he was bored of 205 pounds and wanted to move up to heavyweight like he'd been planning to for nearly a decade, and he needed more time to cement his place as not just one of the sport's greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but one of its biggest pound-for-pound pains in the rear end. On September 23, 2021, Jon Jones was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; on September 24, 2021, he was arrested (for the fifth time!) after his daughter called the police on him for beating her mother, during which he antagonized the police and, inexplicably, headbutted a police car. Because this is Jon Jones, of course, the primary charges were dropped, he paid $750 for the hood of the police cruiser, and got a stern warning to stay out of trouble, young man, because there is a money-powered reality-distorting field around Jon Jones whereby nothing matters. After a year of rumors, and after the unconscionable firing of heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, the UFC gleefully announced Jon Jones vs Ciryl Gane to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Did it matter to the matchmaking that there were more deserving candidates? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He deserves the spot for his earlier success. Did it matter to his public appearances that when last we saw him he was arrested for beating his fiancee? Of course not, because it's Jon Jones: He was, if anything, more up his own rear end with self-righteousness than ever before. Did it matter to the fight that he hadn't competed in more than three years and looked terrible at the time? Of course not, because it's Jon loving Jones. Ciryl Gane looked too nervous to use footwork let alone throw anything, and he should have been, as Jones effortlessly threw him to the canvas and choked him out in two minutes. The longest-running, most dominant and yet most persistently annoying show in mixed martial arts is back. Jon Jones is your heavyweight champion, and we are all damned. The UFC finally, formally announced his fight with Stipe Miocic on November 11th; I'll believe it when we get there. Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   VACANT - The gaping maw of eternityThat's right, baby. No one can stay away from Vacant, and Vacant sure can't stay away from you. Or the light-heavyweight division. Last year, 205 was thrown into chaos after brand-new champion Jiří Procházka was forced to give up the belt thanks to a shoulder injury. The UFC, for what it's worth, tried to fill the void with two of the rightful top contenders, but after Jan Błachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev fought to a draw they decided to just put their guy up instead. Jamahal Hill fulfilled the dread prophecy and became the first-ever world champion from Dana White's Contender Series, thus giving him everything he'd ever wanted to crow about. Sure, it took half of the division falling apart, and sure, they had to leapfrog everyone above him in the rankings, but hey: He beat Glover Teixeira, he got the belt, and nothing can take that away from him--except, as it turns out, the irrepressible need to ball. Midway through July, Hill announced that he'd torn his achilles tendon apart during a basketball game with Daniel Cormier. He's looking at, potentially, an entire year on the shelf. So once again, the belt has been lost, and once again, its future is uncertain. For the time being, all we know is what we already knew: No force on Earth can stop Vacant. Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs   Israel Adesanya - 24-2, 0 DefensesThe Last Stylebender has finally exorcised the ghosts of his past. Combat sports fans who considered themselves In The Know had long heralded Adesanya as a potential crossover superstar based on his extremely successful kickboxing career, which had seen him win multiple championships and lose only by decision, and it was an open secret that the UFC was already taking a good look at him as he prepared to leave his home sport behind and transition entirely into mixed martial arts--so it was a bit of a shock when, instead of his last kickboxing match being a victory lap, he was knocked out cold by one of the very few men to ever beat him, Alex Pereira. Izzy kept to his word, left kickboxing, joined the UFC and became a superstar nearly overnight, and a year after his UFC debut he was already the middleweight champion of the world. A misguided trip to the light-heavyweight division to chase the double-champ dream proved to be a step too far, but the only blemish on his record came from a separate weight class, and after three more title defenses he was still perfect at middleweight and, easily, the second-best middleweight champion of all time. And then the UFC brought in this one guy named Alex Pereira. The UFC desperately wanted an all-striking showdown between the two rivals, and after the easiest path to the title since Brock Lesnar, they got it, and on November 12, 2022, Alex Pereira etched his place in the history books by stopping Adesanya once again, this time taking his MMA championship home with him in the process. This being the UFC an instant rematch was, of course, inevitable, and the world looked on with considerably more worry this time--but the Israel Adesanya who showed up at UFC 287 on April 8, 2023 was a smarter, better fighter who'd learned from his mistakes. After baiting Pereira into throwing caution to the wind, Izzy flatlined him with a counterpunch in just two rounds. There will be no MMA rubber match--the UFC doesn't want it, Izzy doesn't want it, and Pereira is done with middleweight altogether. So Israel Adesanya is back on his throne, even if he has to start his defense counter from 0 again. His war of words with Dricus du Plessis over who is and is not truly African (sigh) bore fruit, as du Plessis inadvertently talked himself into a title eliminator against Robert Whittaker this July, with the winner facing Adesanya at the end of the year. And du Plessis won! And then he turned down the title fight to heal up. The word is Israel Adesanya vs Sean Strickland is most likely; I would rather eat a shoe. Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Leon Edwards - 21-3 (1), 1 DefensesIt took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. The rubber match was inevitable, and once again, Edwards opened as an underdog, and once again, he proved everyone wrong. Instead of a last-minute comeback Leon simply shut Usman down for the majority of the fight, stuffing eleven of his takedown attempts, outstriking him in four out of five rounds and landing an absolutely wild 75% of his strikes in the process. It was an incredible performance against one of the greatest welterweights of all time, marred only by Leon losing a point for fence grabs. The decision was unquestionably his, and now legitimized as the champion of the world, Leon's first move is...getting into a big, public spat with the UFC, because instead of any of the working contenders of the division Dana White is demanding he defend the belt against Colby Covington. Leon says he won't fight Colby, Colby and Dana seem convinced the championship fight is happening this summer with or without Leon. But it's September now, so, hey: It's a fuckin' mess. Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs   Islam Makhachev - 24-1, 1 DefenseDestiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the gently caress out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. His first defense was a different story. Islam faced featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 284 on February 12th in a rare best-of-the-best, champion vs champion match, and this time, his team's prediction of domination was thoroughly incorrect: It was a pitched battle that ended with Makhachev visibly exhausted and Volkanovski pounding on his face. Islam took an extremely close decision and the divisions will remain separate, but his aura of invulnerability has been thoroughly punctured. He'll be defending his title against a lightweight for the first time in exactly the way he got it: A matchup with Charles Oliveira in Abu Dhabi at UFC 294 on October 21st. Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Alexander Volkanovski - 26-2, 5 DefensesComing off of his cross-divisional bout against lightweight kingpin Islam Makhachev, Alexander Volkanovski found himself in both the highest esteem and one of the most complicated positions of his career. Volk put up a fantastic fight against Islam, took the champ to his limit and, in the opinion of some, even won their bout--but the judges didn't agree, meaning Volk not only lost the fight, but his undefeated streak in the UFC. To make matters worse, there were wolves at the door: While he experimented at lightweight, Yair Rodríguez had become the new interim champion after injuring Brian Ortega and kicking Josh Emmett's ribs apart. Volkanovski not only had to reunify his title, he had to drop back down to his home weight class, face the most versatile striking threat of his life, deal with his first-ever UFC bout coming off of a loss, and fight through the world's incredibly high expectations of him after his last championship performance. Many champions have fallen under the pressure. Alexander Volkanovski, somewhat unsurprisingly, was not one of them. He ran a clinic on Yair, wrestling him virtually at will, outstriking him 149-57, and ultimately finishing him off in the third round by outboxing him just to prove that he could. Alexander Volkanovski's throne is no longer disputed--but his next move is. The UFC has made it clear Volkanovski can have another crack at the lightweight belt if he wants it, but Islam Makhachev is defending his title against Charles Oliveira in October. On one hand, Volkanovski could put a quarter down on the arcade cabinet, wait to see who emerges victorious, and claim the next shot. On the other, Ilia Topuria has emerged as a serious contender at featherweight, and has been relentlessly calling Volkanovski out and preemptively accusing him of fleeing a real fight. I'm not sure you can accuse someone of cowardice when they're lining up to fight Islam Makhachev or Charles Oliveira, exactly, but I do know Volkanovski/Topuria would be a hell of a fight too. Whatever Alex's next move is, it's going to be interesting. Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sean O'Malley - 17-1 (1), 0 DefensesThe house always wins. I have spent years being mad about Sean O'Malley. Very few people get the red carpet rolled out for them without having some other previous success to draw on, but Dana White seemingly hand-selected Sean O'Malley as The Guy back in 2017 when he won a contract on the second-ever episode of the Contender Series, and from the second he first stepped into the octagon, he was treated like a Big loving Deal. His matchmaking was favorable, his marketing was endless, and even when he hosed up--getting his leg broken against Andre Soukhamthath, pissing hot for ostarine and missing a year, getting knocked out by Marlon Vera--the UFC was there to pick him up and keep pushing him up the ladder. He went from fighting regional fighters and flyweights to a top ten matchup, and when that match ended with him poking out Pedro Munhoz's eye, he was catapulted into a title eliminator against the #1-ranked Petr Yan, and when he got one of the year's worst decisions against Yan, he was allowed to sit on his hands for almost a year to wait for a title shot against a champion who was given three months and no injury recovery time to prepare. Is it fair for me to dislike Sean O'Malley for decisions the UFC made? Absolutely not, and I don't blame him for them whatsoever. Fortunately for me, Sean O'Malley also has a great love of making public hot takes like "here's my power ranking of my female coworkers by how fuckable I think they are" and "publicly avowed rapist Andrew Tate is a great guy I want to co-promote and advertise with" and "convicted child molester Tekashi69 is my homeboy" and "I have an open relationship with my wife where I get to bang other people but she doesn't because I'm the man" that make me feel deeply, thoroughly at peace with disliking him for other reasons. But none of that means he isn't a hell of a fighter or he didn't absolutely loving flatten Aljamain Sterling with a picture-perfect counterpunch in their title fight. Did he deserve the shot? Not even a little. Did he prove he belongs at the top? Undeniably. However much of a shithead he may be, he's the champion of the goddamn world. Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs   Alexandre Pantoja - 26-5, 0 DefensesSometimes, you just have someone's number. Brandon Moreno spent years fighting through a quadrilogy with Deiveson Figueiredo, and unfortunately for him, he had another trilogy waiting for him the second it was over. Alexandre "The Cannibal" Pantoja was Moreno's personal bogeyman, a man who'd fought and beaten him twice. But one of those fights was an exhibition on The Ultimate Fighter, and the other was against a Moreno with five less years of evolution and growth. Surely, a third fight in 2023 would be different. And it was--unlike the previous, one-sided dominations it was a fight-of-the-year candidate that took both men to their limit and led to a split decision--but its ending was not. Alexander Pantoja scored a third victory over Moreno, and with it, after sixteen years of competition, he finally became the clear, unequivocal best in the god damned world. Which was made even more poignant when he used his post-fight interview to ask if his absentee father was proud of him--and was made even more irritating when he also revealed that despite having eleven fights in the UFC at the time, he was paid so little that he'd been part-timing as a Doordash driver just to make ends meet right up up until 2022. The idea that one of the absolute best fighters on the planet, after years and nearly a dozen fights in the world's biggest, most profitable fighting organization, would need to take on a gig-economy job to make money is outright offensive, and in a better world, it would have launched a furor. In this one, all we can do is be happy he's got the belt and will, hopefully, make some actual loving money. His next bout is up in the air--there's an argument that the split decision should give Moreno a rematch, but his 0-3 record against Pantoja would seemingly say otherwise, and with Deiveson Figueiredo uncertain which weight class he's even at anymore, who knows where we go from here. Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs  VACANT - The quiet of the landWomen's Bantamweight, 135 lbs  VACANT - The last seat at musical chairsJune was a banner month for Vacant, as they claimed three belts in four weeks. Amanda Nunes spent seven years--minus about six really, really weird months last year--as not just the undisputed best women's mixed martial artist on the planet, but the undisputed best women's mixed martial artist of all time. While there are plenty of arguments to be had about the legitimacy of Women's Featherweight in the UFC, factually, she's the only UFC fighter to actually hold and defend championships in two weight classes at once, and she did it for years, and she made all of her opponents look like absolute poo poo. On June 10th she did it one last time, absolutely crushing Irene Aldana for five straight rounds, before officially retiring and passing into legend. This leaves two championships in the shadow-grip of Vacant, but their futures, respectively, are uncertain. Women's Bantamweight remains one of the UFC's more visible divisions, and you can almost certainly pencil in some sort of Julianna Peña vs Question Mark fight to fill the vacancy later this year. But the UFC has already acknowledged Women's Featherweight will, in all likelihood, simply cease to be. They're still promoting a couple fights in the division, but the belt has been taken off the website and it's entirely likely that, before the summer is over, we'll see the first shuttering of a weight class since the UFC gave up on the lightweight division back in 2004. Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs   Alexa Grasso - 16-3, 0 DefensesEvery once in awhile someone gets to shock the combat sports world, and in 2023, it's Alexa Grasso. The UFC has been high on Grasso since she left Invicta for her company debut back in 2016--she's been one of the most consistently featured fighters in ANY women's division, be it her time at strawweight or her move up to flyweight--but her two bids at the top of the mountain at 115 pounds met with disaster, once in Tatiana Suarez handing her the only stoppage loss of her career and once in Carla Esparza outwrestling her to a decision, and watching her manhandled by 115-pound fighters left the world doubting her 125-pound chances. But thanks to her solid boxing and her ever-improving ground game she ran up a four-fight winning streak, and when the UFC announced that she'd be taking on divisional queen and one of the greatest of all time in Valentina Shevchenko, the collective fan reaction was a unanimous "sure, okay," because Valentina disposing of people was a generally accepted phenomenon and she needed a warm body. The first round was a slight surprise, with Grasso stinging Shevchenko on the feet, but as so often happens, by the fourth round Valentina had taken over the fight, was ahead on every judge's scorecard and looked poised to cruise to her her eighth title defense. And then, she was struck down by the bane of the sport: Spinning poo poo. Backed into the fence, Shevchenko did what she does entirely too often--a spinning back kick--and in the half-second she was turned away Grasso leapt to her back, dragged her to the floor, and became the first person to ever submit Valentina Shevchenko. Alexa Grasso, after years of work, is the Women's Flyweight Champion of the World. But after six undefeated years and the longest women's title reign in UFC history (not counting Women's Featherweight which, as we all know, is Not Real), a rematch with Shevchenko later this year seems inevitable. Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs   Zhang Weili - 24-3, 1 DefensesAre you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. So the UFC solved the problem by picking Amanda Lemos. In a surprise to no one, Zhang absolutely dominated Lemos, outstriking her 296-29, smashing her to the tune of multiple 10-8 rounds, and winning a very, very wide decision. The next step is, in all likelihood, a China vs China championship showdown against Yan Xiaonan.
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Sep 1, 2023 19:46
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NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs  Ryan Bader - 31-7 (1), 3 DefensesRyan Bader is the greatest Bellator Heavyweight Champion of all time, and on a dairy farm somewhere in Wisconsin, Cole Konrad feels a pang of regret. Bader made his name as the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Nogueira vs Mir all the way back in 2008, but his UFC career proved to be one of Sisyphean torment and humiliation that included, somehow, impossibly, being the only man to lose a UFC fight to Tito Ortiz during his last six years in the company. Bader left for free agency and Bellator in 2016 and became its light-heavyweight champion on his first night with the organization, and just two years later he became its first-ever simultaneous double-champion after knocking out the legendary Fedor Emelianenko and taking the heavyweight title. Bader would go on to lose his 205-pound crown, but Fedor never forgot his 35-second drubbing at the American wrestler's hands, and for his retirement fight, he demanded a rematch. Thus it was that the entire mixed martial arts community watched with bated breath as on February 4th, 2023, Fedor Emelianenko walked into the cage one last time and promptly got the absolute crap beaten out of him again. Ryan Bader remains undefeated at heavyweight. His next challenge will be at Bellator's ominous-sounding Bellator 300, as he defends his title against Linton Vassell. Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs   Vadim Nemkov - 17-2 (1), 4 DefensesBellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. Nemkov scored one more defense after defeating Yoel Romero at Bellator 297 on June 16th, and he followed it up by opining about giving up the division and the belt and moving to heavyweight. Bellator hasn't yet confirmed this, possibly because Bellator doesn't know in what fashion it will exist this time next year. Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs  Johnny Eblen - 13-0, 1 DefensesThere's an old combat sports tradition whereby a champion isn't really a champion until they defend their title. Gegard Mousasi has been established as the best middleweight outside the UFC that, despite the one-sided nature of their fight, Johnny Eblen's victory over him was treated as an aberration rather than the passing of a torch. It didn't matter that Eblen was undefeated, widely considered one of the absolute best by his cohort at American Top Team or that he'd dropped Mousasi on his face with his bare hands, the world needed verification. On February 4th at Bellator 290, they got it. Fedor Emelianenko's team was intending to pull one big, beautiful night of success out of the ether for their leader's retirement fight, but it was not to be: Vadim Nemkov had to pull out of the card thanks to an injury, Fedor himself was crushed for the second time by heavyweight champion Ryan Bader, and middleweight hopeful Anatoly Tokov was competitive for the first couple of rounds but was subsequently washed out by Eblen's overwhelming assault. Johnny Eblen is a defending champion now, and as things always seem to go, the conversation changed overnight from his being overrated to his being better than everyone in the UFC. Nuance escapes our fanbase. Thanks to Fabian Edwards defeating the perennially sleepy Gegard Mousasi in May, the next title defense will in fact be Johnny Eblen vs Fabian Edwards sometime later this year. Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs   Yaroslav Amosov - 27-0, 1 DefenseThere may not be a fighter alive who's had a tougher year than Yaroslav Amosov. Bellator picking Amosov up in 2018 was an obvious choice: He was already a world champion in Sambo and an MMA champion in Russia, already 19-0 with 17 finishes, and already being talked up by his training partners as quite possibly the best welterweight in the world. By 2021 he'd run up a six-fight winning streak in Bellator and earned a shot at world champion Douglas Lima, and he didn't waste a second of it, dominating Lima in every round. His success far outstripped his fame, but a scheduled title defense against superstar Michael "Venom" Page in May of 2022 promised to finally give him the spotlight. That, obviously, did not happen. In the wake of Russia's invasion of his homeland Ukraine Amosov returned home to evacuate his family and, once they had passed the border, notified Bellator he was pulling out of the fight and fighting in the war. Six months later, having liberated his home city of Irpin, he posted video of his troop returning to his mother's home to retrieve his Bellator championship belt, which he'd kept hidden in a closet. Amosov's return bout, a title unification against interim champion Logan Storley, was announced for February 25th, just barely one year after the invasion began, and after a year and a half not just away from competition but actively fighting in a war, there were many questions about how much like his old self Amosov could realistically look. As it turned out: He looked even better. When they'd first fought back in 2020, Storley gave Amosov all he could handle and the fight came down to a split decision; in 2023, Amosov wiped the floor with him, repeatedly hurting him standing and winning the entirety of the wrestling war. His home may still be in crisis, but Yaroslav Amosov is, at least, back on his throne. Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs  Usman Nurmagomedov - 17-0, 0 DefensesIf there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built an army of ultra-grapplers, and after his passing the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and Adulmanap's son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. Usman's first fight as champion was both a defense and an entry into the first round of Bellator's Lightweight Grand Prix on March 3rd at Bellator 292, where he met, crushed, and retired former UFC champion Benson Henderson, handing him just the third submission loss of a 17-year, 42-fight career. He'll be facing fellow tournament semifinalist Brent Primus at Bellator 300 on October 7th. Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Patrício Pitbull - 35-7, 1 DefensePatrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like poo poo. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like poo poo, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Pitbull's next fight was the rare cross-promotional bout, facing Rizin's featherweight champion Kleber Koike Erbst on the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin special. It was the only fight on the card that wasn't particularly competitive: He shut Kleber down completely and won a wide decision. There is only one featherweight king outside the UFC. And he's now on a two-fight losing streak, with one of those fights being a bantamweight loss to Sergio Pettis and the other a lightweight knockout to Chihiro Suzuki that he took on four days' notice. Bellator: Please stop killing Pitbull. Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Sergio Pettis - 23-5, 2 DefensesIt's been a long, strange trip for Sergio Pettis. When the world was introduced to Sergio as part of the UFC back in 2013 he was just the smaller, less visible alternative to his big brother Anthony, who was riding high as the lightweight champion of the world and the face of loving Wheaties. but Anthony's time atop the sport was ultimately short, and Sergio, at seven years younger, had plenty of time to develop. In 2023, Anthony Pettis is seemingly retired from mixed martial arts after losing most of the back half of his career, and Sergio is arguably the best bantamweight in the world outside of the UFC. His move to Bellator in 2020 paid dividends: Within three fights he was a champion, and in his fourth, he knocked out the highly-regarded Kyoji Horiguchi in a huge upset and officially arrived as one of the world's best. And then he got injured and spent more than a year and a half on the shelf, killing all of his momentum. Sergio returned right as Bellator's Bantamweight Grand Prix ended, but rather than fighting the winner, he was given a more esoteric contest: A title defense against Bellator's greatest fighter, Patrício Pitbull, who was making his 135-pound debut and attempting to win a third divisional title. Unfortunately, Pitbull's best features are his speed and power, and cut down to 135 he both lacked his knockout power and was, for the first time in his career, the slower fighter. Sergio won a unanimous decision, retained his throne, and will now, presumably, fight to reunify the title against Patchy Mix later this year. Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion  Patchy Mix - 18-1, 0 DefensesThere's something to be said for how silly it is to have an interim championship last so long that it not only has multiple defenses but multiple titleholders, but there's nothing silly about the path Patchy Mix took to get it. Long one of Bellator's best bantamweights and arguably one of the best in the world altogether, Patchy "No Love" Mix has torn people apart across the globe, be it his five fights as the King of the Cage champion, his ninety-second submission of Yuki Motoya in Japan, or his 7-1 run in Bellator. The only loss in his entire career was a 2020 decision against Juan Archuleta, where the first five-round fight of Mix's life saw him exhausted and ultimately outworked. But he rebuilt, and he took Bellator's bantamweight grand prix by storm, and on April 22, 2023, he didn't just defeat Raufeon Stots, he knocked him out cold in eighty seconds. Mix won the grand prix, the million-dollar pot and the interim championship--and now that Sergio Pettis is back, all Patchy has to do is wait for their showdown. Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs  Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 DefensesYup. It's 2023 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses who had been knocked out just one month prior. Undeterred, she had her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card, taking a unanimous decision over Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-3 in boxing. After a year and a half of inactivity, Cris Cyborg will be returning to MMA to defend her title against Cat Zingano at Bellator 300 on October 7th. Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs  Liz Carmouche - 19-7, 2 DefensesIt took more than a decade and some controversy, but Liz Carmouche got her flowers. "Girl-Rilla" was just as present a figure in establishing women's MMA in the mainstream, but she's the most consistently forgotten because she was the losing fighter in all of those establishing moments. She was a challenger for the early, pre-fame Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Championship, and was winning on the scorecards before Marloes Coenen choked her out. She was a central part of the inaugural Invicta FC card, and was planned as a title contender before the big show came calling. She became one half of the first women's fight in UFC history, and at one point had Ronda Rousey in a nearly destiny-defying neck crank, but was ultimately submitted in the first round. She's one of two women to ever defeat Valentina Shevchenko, but when given a second chance at the now-UFC champion Shevchenko, she fell short. Despite her powerful wrestling and submission skills, she was eternally denied the top of the mountain. So it was both particularly appropriate and particularly cruel when she finally won a championship on April 22, 2022--in a way that displeased everybody. Standing champion Juliana Velasquez was winning on every scorecard, but Liz Carmouche got her in the crucifix position and landed a number of, respectfully, small elbows, but referee Mike Beltran called a TKO to the immediate chagrin of the entirely safe ex-champion. The controversy made a rematch all but mandatory, and it took Bellator most of the year to do it, but the two met in the cage to run it back at Bellator 289 on December 9, and this time there was no controversy, as Velasquez submitted to an armbar two rounds in. The weirdness didn't stop there: Liz's next title defense against Deanna Bennett also hit the skids, as Bennett missed weight and was thus ineligible to win the championship. Carmouche put it on the line anyway, and fortunately, she choked Bennett out in the fourth round. She'll be defending her title against Ilima-Lei Macfarlane at Bellator 300 on October 7th. ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs   Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs  Anatoly Malykhin - 13-0, 0 DefensesAnatoly Malykhin's bizarre two-year journey through ONE Championship has finally come to a place of rest. Ascension in the heavyweight division has never been the longest road in the world, but in ONE, where they don't actually bother with divisional rankings past lightweight and there have somehow only been five undisputed heavyweight championship bouts in eight years, the road is very short and easily traversed through violent punchings. Thus, when Anatoly Malykhin arrived in 2023 and punhed two men out in five minutes, that was more than sufficient. But the standing champion, Arjan Bhullar, just couldn't make it to the cage. They were supposed to fight in February of 2022, but Bhullar was hurt, so Malykhin got an interim title by destroying Kirill Grishenko. They were supposed to unify the belts in September, but Arjan was hurt, so they pushed it to December--and then Arjan played contractual hardball, so in a truly baffling reversal, ONE had Malykhin drop to 225 pounds and destroy double-champ Reinier de Ridder instead. The heavyweight unification got rebooked for March of 2023--and then Bhullar pulled out again. It wasn't until June 23rd, with their bout unceremoniously placed smack-dab in the middle of a Friday Fights Muay Thai card, that the match two years in the making finally happened. And it was...massively underwhelming, with Bhullar seeming alternately frozen and as though he wanted to be absolutely anywhere else in the world. Malykhin used him as a punching bag for two and a half rounds, with Bhullar at one point penalized for trying to escape the ring, and Malykhin put a stamp on it with a TKO in the third round. Finally--mercifully--the heavyweight championship is unified. Anatoly Malykhin is whole. And he immediately began talking about dropping to 205 for Reinier's OTHER belt, because, uh, ONE doesn't have any other loving heavyweights to fight. ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs   Reinier de Ridder - 16-1, 2 DefensesThere's a long tradition of B-league hype in mixed martial arts. The hardcore fanbase chafes under both the total ubiquity of the UFC as a product and the way they set themselves up as the end-all be-all of the sport. As the B-leagues create dominant champions of their own, the fanbase inevitably rallies behind them as equal to, if not greater than, the UFC's equivalent titleholder, and further, as evidence of other companies having even better talent. And once or twice a generation, they're right! But most of the time, they're not. Fighters who destroy their B-league equivalents will commonly take a step outside their comfort zone and get immediately rolled by reality. Reinier de Ridder, more than any other competitor, was the popular argument for ONE's supremacy over the UFC: An undefeated ultra-grappler with belts at two divisions, one of which happened to be the UFC's permanently embattled light-heavyweight class. The remarkable ease with which he ragdolled and submitted his opponents, and the shaky nature of his UFC peers, led to wide exultation of his skills and regular comments from ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong about his prospects against the best the world had to offer. It was consequently something of a bummer when he fought Anatoly Malykhin, the first opponent in years he didn't have a strength or grappling advantage over, and looked immediately lost when his takedown attempts did nothing. He had no visible striking defense to speak of and was ultimately, and distressingly easily, destroyed. The cycle has played out once again, the latest idol has lost, and now Reinier de Ridder will have to move forward. He lost a grappling match to Tye Ruotolo on May 5th, because ONE is silly. ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs   Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs  Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 DefensesIt took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. With the death of his 18 year-old sister and fellow ONE competitor Victoria Lee, the future of the entire Lee fighting family is both up in the air and the last possible thing that could matter at this moment in time. For now, they have to grieve. ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs  Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 DefensesTang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare. And then Tang Kai busted his knee and announced he was out with no definite return date. Great job, everybody. ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs  Fabricio Andrade - 9-2 (1), 0 DefensesThe second time was the charm. When Fabricio "Wonder Boy" Andrade joined ONE Championship back in 2020 he was a virtual unknown in the mixed martial arts world, a 20-3 kickboxer but only a 3-2 mixed martial artist who'd been fighting out in the regional circuit of China. His association with Tiger Muay Thai put him on ONE's radar, and his visible striking skills despite being just 21 at the time made him interesting enough for a developmental contract. Said contract proceeded to develop into Andrade going on a five-fight winning streak that only got more dominant as he met tougher competition, and three straight first-round knockouts punched his ticket to the championship picture. His first appearance in the spotlight, unfortunately, went a touch awry. First, bantamweight champion John Lineker lost his title on the scale after missing weight, meaning only Andrade was eligible to become champion, and he was well on his way to doing so before hitting Lineker with an errant strike to the groin so hard it shattered his cup, and with the fight not yet halfway complete, it had to be rendered a No Contest. It took four months to get to the rematch, and it was much more closely contested, but after four rounds Lineker threw in the towel, his face having been punched too swollen to continue. Fabricio Andrade is 25 and a world goddamn champion. ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs  Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 DefensesThe king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. The trilogy match was inevitable, and on May 5th, Johnson beat Moraes by a comprehensive decision, ending the story--and maybe his career. He says he's not sure if he's coming back yet. Fingers crossed. ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Jarred Brooks - 20-2 (1), 0 DefensesJarred Brooks dealt with some crap on his way to a title. By 2017 he was one of the most-heralded flyweight prospects in the sport: An undefeated 13-0 multi-champion as an amateur, an undefeated 12-0 as a professional with fights across three separate weight classes, his heavy wrestling-and-grappling grinding style ground most of his opponents to dust. He took the moniker of "The Monkey God" thanks to his unorthodox striking and wrestling entries--when you're not afraid of grappling, you can get creative with the striking. And then he hit the UFC in 2017 and everything kind of went to hell. Three of his four UFC bouts went to split decision: A debut victory against Eric Shelton Brooks probably should've lost, a followup loss against future champion Deiveson Figueiredo Brooks probably should've won, an intervening bout where Brooks was easily dominating Jose Torres only to score the rare MMA own goal and knock himself out after smacking his head on the ground doing a big, showy slam, and a third and final split decision victory over Roberto Sanchez that really, really shouldn't have been split at all. And then the UFC cut him, despite being 2 and 2 and having gone the distance with the biggest new prospect in the division, because the UFC Doesn't Like Flyweights. So Brooks went over to Rizin, where he intended to build his way up as the next big foreign threat to top star Kyoji Horiguchi--and it was over in eleven seconds, after an inadvertant headbutt cut his opponent's eyebrow open and the blood-unfriendly Japanese network called a no-contest. His international comeback was further destroyed by COVID, and Brooks found himself iced for two straight years as he waited for the dust to settle. By November of 2021, he was making his long-delayed ONE debut; by June of 2022, he was 3-0 and the top contender. And then, of course, his title fight got delayed another six months thanks to an injury. On December 3rd, 2022, he finally got his long-belated shot at a major title, and shocking no one, he wrestled the poo poo out of Joshua Pacio for five straight rounds. Four years later than expected, Jarred Brooks has international gold. And because ONE's weight classes don't matter, he immediately called out 135-pound champ Demetrious Johnson, and because ONE's sport classes don't matter, he's grappling Mikey Musumeci for his submission championship on August 4th. ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs  Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 DefensesXiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs  Angela Lee - 11-3, 5 DefensesAngela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her arguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision. In the wake of her 18 year-old sister Victoria's tragic passing, Angela and the rest of the Lee family have shut down their gym and are focusing on much more important things than fighting. In June, Chatri said Angela Lee was most likely retiring for good, but is going to take a little more time before the decision is made. Seo Hee Ham and Stamp Fairtex will be fighting for an interim title at ONE 14 on September 1st.  Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs  Roberto de Souza - 15-3, 2 DefensesRoberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. It was thus of particular interest when the main event for the New Year's Eve Bellator x Rizin card was announced as Roberto de Souza vs AJ McKee--a test of where Souza ranks with the rest of the world's competition. Unfortunately for him and Rizin, the answer was "under them." He positionally threatened McKee and was able to land some solid strikes in the final round, but was otherwise controlled and lost a decision. On May 6th, Satoshi beat Spike Carlyle in a fantastic fight--but it was a non-title fight, because Japanese promoters are still real scared of their own belts. Satoshi fought Patricky Pitbull at Bellator x Rizin 2 on July 29th--in another non-title fight, naturally--and took the first definitive beating of his career, getting utterly outclassed and ultimately stopped on leg kicks in three rounds. Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs   Vugar Karamov - 19-4, 0 DefensesRizin needed a new champion after Kleber Koike Erbst lost the featherweight title on the scale, and they were by no means done punishing him yet, so the fight to fill the void did not in any way involve him. This was, of course, also part of Rizin's secret hope that promotional superstar Mikuru Asakura could fill the void--but it was not to be, as Azerbaijani grappler Vugar Karamov, who's been slowly whittling away at Rizin's 145-pound division over the last three and a half years, finally got his shot at the belt and he did not waste a goddamn second. Karamov chucked Asakura down, controlled him and choked him out in just two minutes and forty-one seconds. Another Asakura falls, and Vugar Karamov is now a world goddamn champion. Which probably has something to do with Rizin announcing its first-ever event outside of Japan--in Azerbaijan. Congratulations, Vugar. You're an international representative of the sport. A match with Kleber seems outright inevitable, but Kleber also managed to get into a scuffle with both Pitbull brothers at the show, so Rizin may pursue a bad blood fight and leave Karamov to fight a rematch with the only man to beat him in Rizin, Yutaka Saito. Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs  Juan Archuleta - 29-4, 0 DefensesRizin has its first-ever American champion, and it happens to be a fighter with their partner and rival, Bellator. Seven months after Kyoji Horiguchi vacated it--and almost three years since its last defense--the vacant bantamweight throne was finally filled. Rizin had hoped to have Kai Asakura fight for the belt (do you notice a pattern, here?) agaisnt Archuleta at Bellator x Rizin 2, but Kai busted his knee in training and Rizin's 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix Champion, Hiromasa Ougikubo, stepped in. And he was promptly ground down into dust by Archuleta's wrestling game. A lot of Rizin fans took to social media to register their displeasure at Archuleta's victory--I saw him called artless and passionless and a pox on the spirit of fighting--to which I say, my friends, I was there when the truest expression of mixed martial arts was a Gracie holding someone in full guard while hitting them in the ribs with their heel for forty-five minutes. If you don't LIKE wrestling, that's perfectly fine, but if you think teeth-grittingly long grappling exhibitions without a climax are counter to the spirit of mixed martial arts, you have never truly understood it. Juan Archuleta finished his celebration by yelling at Kai Asakura to get his poo poo together and find him, and I'd be shocked if Archuleta/Asakura wasn't the main event of Rizin's New Year's Eve special this year. Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs   Seika Izawa - 11-0, 1 DefenseAll hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin's Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute.
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Sep 1, 2023 19:46
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fuckl you
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Sep 1, 2023 19:58
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as in that's what I voted
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Sep 1, 2023 19:58
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“Miguel Torresi”
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Sep 1, 2023 20:53
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DeimosRising posted:“Miguel Torresi” yeah that sequence was good poo poo carl. george roop.... was he the guy who was like 6'2 at fw? by far one of the most unique physiques in the sport. i can't imagine even the best gyms being able to get a guy with the height and reach of roop to put sparring rounds on their fighter without also possibly killing their fighter, especially in south korea. i love tkz CarlCX posted:If you're 32 and you realize your body, heart and brain aren't in this anymore, and you make the distressingly unusual choice of listening to them, you're already outperforming an awful lot of the fighters you're leaving behind. i had no idea who this guy was, and i never saw him fight, but kudos to this guy for seeing the writing on the wall. please leave brain trauma for the young, broke, and desperate - as is tradition.
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Sep 1, 2023 22:03
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Also a good tkz moment: the time his friend told the story about seeing overeem's hog
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Sep 1, 2023 23:13
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lol that picture of the brothers Pitbull with Sapp is tremendous.
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Sep 2, 2023 00:58
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The first Chan Sung Jung fight I ever saw was his return from military service, and watching him destroy Dennis Bermudez and then go hug his wife and little babby immediately endeared him to me for life. Guy absolutely ruled and went out in the sweetest way possible considering it was a loss. Hope he has a very long, very happy, and very healthy life in retirement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0B6sfuR2I
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Sep 2, 2023 01:41
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oh yeah and i hate that you used a really nice picture of jon jones, and it is absolutely mind bending to me that ryan bader is champion of anything.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:21
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ilmucche posted:Also a good tkz moment: the time his friend told the story about seeing overeem's hog really funny. and if for some reason you haven't watched tkz / poirier, please, please, please do.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:22
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Marching Powder posted:oh yeah and i hate that you used a really nice picture of jon jones, and it is absolutely mind bending to me that ryan bader is champion of anything. I wanna go back in time and tell people that Ryan Bader is gonna KO Fedor R1 twice.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:29
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Marching Powder posted:really funny. Im not sure that it's the best mma fight of all time but it certainly makes the long list of nominees
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Sep 2, 2023 03:30
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TheKingslayer posted:I wanna go back in time and tell people that Ryan Bader is gonna KO Fedor R1 twice. I wanna go back to the night he cost a goon a nine-fight parlay by losing to Tito Ortiz in 2011.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:47
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Shumagorath posted:I wanna go back to the night he cost a goon a nine-fight parlay by losing to Tito Ortiz in 2011. Hmm I can't find anything about that in the GDT(requires archives) or in the Bet on MMA thread, not sure where else it would be. Closest I see is this Boregasm posted:Well there goes my parlay goddamnit. Nice knee though. But that's referring to Condit vs Stungun, far as I can tell. Brut fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Sep 2, 2023 |
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Sep 2, 2023 04:14
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I won’t name and shame, but the bettor read one of my frequent posts referencing that bet within the last year and asked me to let them forget it. Sorry; too funny.
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Sep 2, 2023 04:29
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Brut posted:Hmm I can't find anything about that in the GDT(requires archives) or in the Bet on MMA thread, not sure where else it would be. i think this might be me, i vaguely remember something like this. i'll see if my betting history goes back that far lol
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Sep 2, 2023 05:10
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Shumagorath posted:I won’t name and shame, but the bettor read one of my frequent posts referencing that bet within the last year and asked me to let them forget it. Sorry; too funny. was it me?
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Sep 2, 2023 05:10
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update: was not me. what was me tho was on sunday 7th of april 2013 i missed out on hitting a monstrous 13 fight parlay because marcus brimmage was knocked out by some rear end in a top hat named conor mcgregor.
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Sep 2, 2023 05:18
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Reminder tomorrows card has an early start time Prelims 11:30 cst Main 2 cst
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Sep 2, 2023 05:57
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i have seen sergey spivak fight exactly once and i have never been so poo poo scared about the outcome of a fight in my entire life.
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Sep 2, 2023 06:39
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He's gonna gently caress up Cyril Gane.
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Sep 2, 2023 06:44
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4041044 Head to the GDT and discover if he does, in fact, gently caress up Cyril Gane. Prelims in 30.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:05
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For those not watching live, here's your spoiler-free report from Paris: Don't watch the prelims.
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Sep 2, 2023 20:00
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PFL's worst void of entertainment, Lance "The Party" Palmer got knocked out by Bibert "Albert's lil bro" Tumenov, in part by running his own head into a cage stanchion https://twitter.com/Grabaka_Hitman/status/1698062626880679989
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Sep 2, 2023 21:05
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don't know if ive ever seen a fighter pull an mma version of the Gus Frerotte move of knocking yourself out before. ty lobmob!
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Sep 2, 2023 21:23
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LobsterMobster posted:Bibert "Albert's lil bro" Tumenov, l I heard Ceebert is gonna be a monster.
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Sep 2, 2023 22:24
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Marching Powder posted:update: was not me. what was me tho was on sunday 7th of april 2013 i missed out on hitting a monstrous 13 fight parlay because marcus brimmage was knocked out by some rear end in a top hat named conor mcgregor. How much was it for I want to suffer vicariously
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Sep 3, 2023 03:30
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DeimosRising posted:“Miguel Torresi” Miguels Torres
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Sep 3, 2023 03:31
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DeimosRising posted:How much was it for I want to suffer vicariously my betting history is a pain in the rear end to scroll through so this isn't exact but it was a $5 bet with the potential payout of nearly 5k. i wasn't that devastated when he got knocked out because only a few fights in my parlay had happened and i never expected to win it anyway.
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Sep 3, 2023 04:21
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Some news items: Paul Felder is entertaining a return to MMA quote:The retired fighter turned UFC commentator took the first step needed in order to make a comeback to the octagon. Felder (17-6 MMA, 9-6 UFC), who retired in 2021, says he has re-entered the USADA testing pool and is leaving the door open for future fights. Nothing is set in stone, but Felder is certainly leaving the door open. Weidman leg fracture quote:The former middleweight champion [Weidman] revealed on his Sirius XM show that he suffered a fracture in his left leg during a unanimous decision loss to Brad Tavares at UFC 292 on Aug. 19. That comes on the heels a gruesomely broken right leg in a loss to Uriah Hall at UFC 261 in April 2021.
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Sep 3, 2023 04:27
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book weidman vs pereira
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Sep 3, 2023 05:09
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Faustian Bargain posted:book weidman vs pereira
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Sep 3, 2023 05:10
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Faustian Bargain posted:book weidman vs pereira lol that's a great euphemism for 'i want to see a man die in the cage'
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Sep 3, 2023 05:49
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Faustian Bargain posted:book weidman vs pereira book weidman against nobody. kimbo305 posted:Paul Felder is entertaining a return to MMA At least he's being somewhat realistic about it, "hey I'm old maybe there's someone else old to fight" instead of the usual "I'm making another run for the belt!" bullshit we usually hear, but I still think it's probably a bad idea. But I guess it's not like he was getting repeatedly knocked out at the end of his career, so I dunno, I've seen worse situations.
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Sep 3, 2023 09:12
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Brut posted:book weidman against nobody.
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Sep 3, 2023 15:20
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Marching Powder posted:lol that's a great euphemism for 'i want to see a man die in the cage' I was there live for Paula Costa vs Johnny Hendricks. Pereira vs Weidman seems so much worse
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Sep 3, 2023 17:01
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 23:02 |
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Mr. Weidman you need to retire because your bones break every time someone performs an extremely common technique on them. Retire before you explode like hitting the buttons on a crash test dummy toy when someone double-legs you.
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Sep 3, 2023 17:29
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