Archive for September, 2008

(Ishida and Misaki are among Japan’s best. How would their first stateside forays go? [Pictures: Sherdog])

This past weekend saw a pair of live events broadcast in the US for the benefit of American MMA fans. Each was shown on what would be considered “21st century media”, as Strikeforce made a return to the Playboy Mansion that was shown by webcast on Sherdog, while HDNet put on yet another live event, this time the 24th installment of Sportfight from Portland, OR. Dave Walsh is on board to help out with this weekend’s fight action.

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M-1 Challenge is the newest program to enter the MMA TV lottery and is the brain child of Vadim Finkelstein. In the US, it’ll be brought on a weekly basis by the good folks over at HDNet, who have to be considered something of a necessity for the hardcore fan by now. The one hour show will, on a weekly basis, show 5 full and edited fights from the M-1 Challenge Tournament. This tournament features 10 teams from across the globe with 5 fighters per team in weight classes from 155 to heavyweight. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? There are 2 teams from Russia (Team Legion and Team Red Devil), then the US, Japan, South Korea, Finland, France, Spain, Germany, and Holland. Interesting that no UK team was chosen for the inaugural season or whatever they wish to call this. Our first episode comes to us from The Netherlands and there’s a pretty good size live crowd present. Recording date goes all the way back to March of this year.

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Tommy Hackett referred to the B-Show Assault blog in his last post here, and from now a brief look back at a show in the history of MMA will be a regular component of Total-MMA. Today’s edition looks back at the career of Evan Tanner through many of his most memorable UFC fights, starting back all the way back at UFC 18. Read the rest of this entry »

TUF is back. And that means Kendall Shield’s top notch reviews are back too. Check it out.

Kimbo versus Ken is a war of words.

Regardless of how the announcement works out, we can all agree that the RING magazine shirts are going to be awesome!

Affliction today made their big announcement, and amidst the hyperbole, conjecture and everything else, what it breaks down seems to be about right, if not a little disappointing to fans. After Affliction canceled their October show due to what seemed to be poor ticket sales, they announced that they would be bringing forth some huge announcement today, which seemingly would involve Golden Boy Productions. Well, they did.

Affliction will now be the official apparel company of Golden Boy events and Ring magazine. As a part of this deal, Golden Boy has decided to co-promote shows with Affliction. What this actually means has not really been explained all too well, but once again, this can only leave us to stew about it and come up with possible scenarios. Will Golden Boy provide undercards to Affliction shows? Will Affliction provide undercards to major boxing cards? Will they combined put on mediocre fighting cards? Will this involve HBO in some way?

While there are many of us that are fans of both MMA and boxing, these two sides do not always work well together. There are still many boxing fans that see MMA as a passing fad, just some cheap, unsophisticated garbage for the masses. Then you have the MMA fan that sees boxing as the old dinosaur that is going to be extinct soon due to the new, more evolved and somehow more humane sport of Mixed Martial Arts. Both sides do have their merits, but I’m not sure if they make good bed fellows in this case. This wouldn’t be the first time a promoter has attempted to toss together boxing and MMA, or even the first time somebody has mixed MMA with something else, but history isn’t smiling too kindly on this. For some reason I am thinking of U-File Camp shows, where they would blend together MMA, sparring matches, demonstrations and pro wrestling and how tepid the response was to that, or K-1 shows that featured MMA matches to supplement the lack of name value their current generation of kickboxers has with fans. 

I know that I’m willing to give this a chance, but I’m not exactly sure of the pull that Affliction has right now to make this work, or exactly how well these two will work together. This could either fail miserably or could bring this concept to the mainstream and get a good buzz going and attract fans to both sports. 

Late last night, it was made official that the body of Evan Tanner had been found in the desert of Southern California. Tanner was champion for the United States Shoot Wrestling Federation, a UFC Middleweight champion, and a one time challenger to the light heavyweight crown in the UFC. He has been on a myriad of adventures over the last few years and has blogged extensively about them. Recently, Evan notified the MMA community at large of his plans to enter the desert, informing all that “any failure of equipment” could prove deadly. Sadly, it is apparent that such has occured.

Our various writers now remember Evan Tanner:

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