I say this without exaggeration: This was the best single night of fights I’ve ever seen. (That it was transmitted in glorious high-definition live on the vanity cable network of an eccentric billionaire didn’t hurt.)

On we go.

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Live from (a dude in California blogging a show in) Newcastle Birmingham!

Joe Rogan has a mightily impressive beard, almost a tribute to Evan Tanner. Let’s proceed with the proceedings.

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And B-shows, and mid-tier promotions. The WECs, Strikeforces, and Cage Forces of the world. Basically any set of fights that is high profile enough to filter out tomato cans (for the most part, at least), but far enough away from the big time that great fights can still be made and fighters will be at their most motivated. IFL was my favorite promotion before it’s untimely death for exactly that reason; the matchmakers booked action fights with up-and-comers who understood that they were in striving distance of the promised land of sold out arenas and big live TV audiences in PRIDE (later DREAM) or the UFC.

Also there’s the issue of jumping at the chance to say “I told you so.” MMA is great on its own, but being able to claim that you saw big things in the future of a successful fighter before anyone else is icing on the cake. What can I say? I like to act like I know things other people don’t. And UFC prelims? The last place to jump on a fighter’s bandwagon before they break through. It’s perfect.

So, explanations out of the way, let’s talk about fighting. The last Ultimate Fight Night pretty much what I look for in a night of fights, full stop, but more eloquent men than I have (probably) already commented on the televised portion, so I’ll take the rest. It’s good stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

(Your new DREAM Middleweight Champion, Gegard Mousasi)

Okay, another Dream card has come and gone. We were gonna do a preview, honest. We just got sidetracked. But whatever. The event is over and things happened. So why not read about them? Andrew Rosebrock is on to help.

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By Andrew Rosebrock

Thoughts from the balcony (literally, our seats were in the very first row of the upper tier):

Unfortunately I missed the first two fights, which included sadly Pequeno Nogueira’s debut. Perhaps that’s just as well, as the clips shown later in the night made it look like Pequeno took a pretty bad beating.

My friend Jameson and I made it to our seats just in time to catch the beginning of Alex Serdyukov vs. Luis Sapo.

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