Archive for the 'Strikeforce' Category

Pictured: Jake Shields dismantles Dan Henderson at Strikeforce: Nashville last night

Strikeforce: Nashville won’t be ranked among the most exciting bell-to-bell action shows of the year 2010, but as the final bell sounded it certainly had offered some interesting results.

The fast rise of “King Mo” Lawal continued with an upset over a tentative Gegard Mousasi. In just his seventh bout, Mo scored takedowns at will and pounded away with shots for a convincing decision victory against a top ten ranked opponent.

The #2 ranked lightweight in the world, Shinya Aoki, was defeated in a slow and methodical bout by a sprawling and brawling Gil Melendez — this, only weeks after the consensus #1 suffered the same fate. Our old friend Dave Walsh at HeadKickLegend commented about the result today, and how difficult it can be to rank Japanese and North American-based fighters together when the rules of engagement differ so much. Personally I like the diversity of style that MMA fans enjoy, but I also see his point.

The main event saw Jake Shields come back from a brutal knockdown to perform a grappling clinic against Dan Henderson, en route to another earning another unanimous decision victory. Shields’ ability to always impose his game, along with Henderson’s advancing age, had caused me to pick him for the unpopular upset here - the first reaction on my Facebook account came “You picked Jake over hendo lol, nooooo way in hell” — and his tenacity mixed with sublime groundwork didn’t let me down. As the final bell rang, it felt like Shields had won over a critic or two, including Frank Shamrock on commentary, and turned a bit of a corner.

Unfortunately, all seems to be forgotten due to what happened after that final bell….

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Pictured: Jake Shields and Dan Henderson square off at the Strikeforce: Nashville weigh-ins yesterday.

Tonight in Music City USA, our good friends from Strikeforce will offer what would appear one of the most intriguing MMA shows of the year. The main features their middleweight champion Jake Shields against former PRIDE champion Dan Henderson in one of the promotion’s most celebrated matches ever. Light heavyweight champion Gegard Mousasi defends his strap against “King Mo” Lawal, and backing it up will be Shinya Aoki in his debut on US soil against an elite lightweight in Strikeforce’s titlist Gil Melendez.

Simply put, I think this is about as good as we’ll get in 2010. It’s downright criminal that our predictions haven’t already been posted, so let’s get right to it:

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Repost from K-1 LEGEND

Vadim Finkelstein is a name that many MMA fans have learned over the past few years, especially within the last few months and Fedor’s epic contract negotiations with the UFC then the signing with Strikeforce. M-1 Global has shot into the minds of MMA and combat sports fans with all of this, never mind the M-1 vs The World series that airs on HDNet. M-1 Global has a big co-promotion coming up with Strikeforce, with M-1 fighter Fedor Emelianenko taking on Brett “Grim” Rogers on CBS.

Our passion may be kickboxing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get excited over stuff like this, so we had to get to the root of matters and talk to the man himself, Vadim Finkelstein.

K-1 LEGEND: Has M-1 Global lived up to your expectations so far?

Vadim Finkelstein: Basically, I’m satisfied with the evolution of M-1 Global. The organization, in the format you can see today, has been functioning less than 2 years. The last year we had many experiments. A new system for the fighters moving up the ladder will be introduced starting from the next year’s season. It will be a more robust Olympic-like system.

K-1 LEGEND: What are your plans for M-1 Global and who do you see as the top prospects to reach possible Fedor levels?

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Tim Kennedy is a guy that is hard to not like; a fighter who puts his heart into his fights and into defending his country. Kennedy talked to Heavy.com about his upcoming fight and his past military experiences, as well as them accomidating his fighting career. Tim, a true fighter, looks forward to being deployed again in the future.

Heavy.com: So you feel like your potential is far from being reached?

Tim Kennedy: Yes. Both in skill in technique and physically. Having been a full time soldier for the past six years, deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places, the mixed martial arts game, certain aspects of it have evolved and I wasn’t part of that evolution. So I might be behind the curve on a lot of the stuff and I’m playing catch up. I think the learning curve is gonna be very steep and I’m getting up it fast, but truth be told, I’m behind it right now.

Heavy.com: What do you feel is the biggest evolution that you’ve kind of missed the boat on?

Tim Kennedy: I think the guys like Georges St. Pierre that are amazing athletes in the first place and have been able to train with the best in all of the different realms of mixed martial arts: boxing, kickboxing, jiujitsu, wrestling, and really take a certain skill set and perfect it. You can take guys like Anderson Silva and throw them in a professional boxing ring and he’s gonna do really, really well. Or a professional muay thai fight. Or you can send him to NAGA or Grappler’s Quest or Abu Dhabi and watch him crush people in jiujitsu. I know what I’m really good at and fortunately I’m able to use my experience to put that onto my opponents. Sure, there are still aspects of my game that need to be refined. You know, one of them has been my muay thai kickboxing.

I just spent some time up in Boston with Matt Phinney and Mark Della Grotte at Sityodtong just working on my finesse kickboxing. Working on elbows, knees, footwork, sweeps, you know, all that stuff that I’ve really been neglecting because I was just that powerhouse boxer, wrestler, Pit style kickboxer. I think I’m behind on some of the niche tricks of the trade that you’re able to integrate into an MMA fight.

If you know this site and myself, you know that the Diaz brothers are regarded as some of the best around. Both are incredibly skilled, yes, both also exude this natural aura around them; they do what they want and could care less what you or anybody else thinks. But the reality is that they are two hard working guys who came from a modest background. The San Joaquin Magazine has what I would regard as an incredible fluff piece on two guys I would never imagine being written about this eloquently. Ridiculous.

Enter Nick Diaz. Almost like the MMA gods were punching out cookie-cutter molds of young men and decided this would be the ideal model for a fighter, both boys are slim where they need to be and all muscle where you’d expect them to be. Long hyped in the media since they broke onto the fighting scene, they both wear the tentatively healed wounds of a fight for ‘every three months since they were 16’.

Inside the ring they’re all nightmare—two separate men, two separate fighters, two different levels of the sport, all bound by blood. Whether it’s their own blood or that of their opponents, MMA affords the fan plenty of both. Where wrestling and boxing both limit fighters to what’s legal and illegal in a brawl, MMA draws the line only at the most inhumane eye gougings and crotch shots. In other words, when you step into the ‘cage’ someone’s leaving on their own accord and someone might have to be carried off the floor. Pummeling opponents with a flurry of punches, kicks, attacks, and takedowns, the sport is relatively new and has become popular in recent years based on a few simple merits—it’s brutal (Nick has been bloodied so many times above the eye that he underwent a new surgery to reduce the ability for that rehealed cut to bleed), and it’s as high adrenaline as a sport can get.

Very understanding of the fact that there’s ‘life inside the ring’ and ‘life outside the ring’, this is where the similarities meet the differences. Polite but not warm, the boys seem to have a calculated amount of personality they are willing to show to a journalist. Never raising their voices above a conversational tone even amidst the thumping of workout music playing in the background, the boys offer up answers to everything I want to know and nothing extra. More important than the Q and A of understanding their training (they compete in Ironman triathlons), and what it’s like to have a brother in the same sport (‘It’s great, I get to learn from his mistakes”), our short sit-down reveals one very apparent thing—they know their goals and they’re here to accomplish them.

Paul Buentello, the fighter best known for falling asleep on Andrei Arlovski during Arlovski’s cleaning out of the stagnant Heavyweight division in UFC a few years ago and double legging himself has been released from his Strikeforce contract. Why? He wouldn’t fight Fedor Emelianenko, so says Scott Coker to Sherdog.

“We offered Paul a six-figure contract to fight Fedor, but he turned it down,” Coker said. “His decision is understandable considering Fedor’s level of skill but, at the same time, Paul didn’t really fit into our plans. He’s been a solid journeyman fighter and we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.”

Now, beyond the obvious here that Coker just offered to put Paul in a bathtub full of ones and give him a rag on a stick to cleanse himself, the funny part is that he then insults Buentello for not being on Fedor’s level. Coker has reached Dana White levels of dumb statements in a very short amount of time. We all know Buentello would get murdered by Fedor, but at least he’d get a comfortable payday and we’d get to see Paul maybe phantom armbar himself or even a heel hook. The part that hooked me was Buentello’s email to Sherdog.

“I have made as little as $1 to fight the UFC champion and been paid as much as six figures to fight an up-and-coming fighter.”

I’m really not sure it would be worth it, but I’d pay Paul Buentello a dollar to fight a homeless man in my backyard. Granted, he’d have to provide his own travel.

In case you haven’t been following the world of MMA lately, Alistair Overeem is basically a large area of confusion. Overeem is the current Strikeforce Heavyweight Champion. What is funny about Overeem; Strikeforce Champion is that he hasn’t fought in the promotion, nay, the United States, since November 2007. So, of course, the internet is getting up in arms over it. Overeem as champion wasn’t a big deal until Strikeforce moved into the obligatory #2 spot in the United States. Then the questions started coming; why wasn’t Overeem fighting in the US? Why won’t he defend his title? Is he on the roids and afraid of drug tests? Overeem claims its a contract thing;

My contract with Strikeforce was only made about three months before the incident, I think they let me fight against (Vitor)Belfort and Paul (Buentello) to lose, but I won. Normally in a contract it says you have to defend your title within a certain period. But my contract just ended there. As I had a long term contract with FEG, I kept fighting for Dream and K-1. It’s ironic that we finally got an offer from Strikeforce and reached an agreement, and I get in some stupid brawl and cut my hand. In jail it got infected and it took longer than expected.

He has been fighting for FEG for quite a while, and is scheduled to fight for Golden Glory on October 17. Of course, he is also taking part in the K-1 World Grand Prix. Overeem and Strikeforce will collide eventually, but honestly, don’t hold your breath.

OK, maybe the main event was a bit anti-climactic. And maybe Babalu’s performance was a tad, shall we say, underwhelming.. And then there was the seemingly endless streak of injuries and the inevitable Nick Diaz-related snag that transformed this card into something entirely different from what it was originally billed as. In spite of these facts, Strikeforce: Carano vs Cyborg still managed to be a damn fine show.

I got to the arena about 45 minutes early just because it’s kind of awesome to sit in an empty arena and just look around at all the seats and know that in a few short hours the place is going to be packed. There was also something hilariously absurd about watching two middle aged stagehands posing as Gina and Cyborg for the pre show walkthru rehearsal. One of the guys went so far as to jab at the camera and mean mug the other guy during the pre fight instructions. It doesn’t get any better than that. Unfortunately as soon as that ended they played an absolutely putrid mashup of “Whoop, There It Is” and “Shook Me All Night Long” for about 30 minutes straight on a seemingly endless loop. That was not so good.

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Posted in Dave Walsh, Gina Carano, Strikeforce | 4 Comments »