Category — Pride FC

Loved seeing the Fireball Kid, Takanori Gomi, light up Tyson Griffin in the first round at Sunday’s UFC Live 2. It was like the Gomi of old, the PRIDE Gomi.

Toronto BJJ regular Andre “Dida” Amade will be back in action at DREAM 13 on March 22. The Chute Boxe-trained striker will face former EliteXC lightweight champ KJ Noons.

Dida will be looking to end a three-bout losing skid that last saw him fall to DEEP lightweight champ Katsunori Kikuno at DREAM 10. Noons, meanwhile, recently signed with Strikeforce and is on a three-fight winning streak, although he hasn’t fought since he knocked out Yves Edwards at EliteXC: Return of the King two years ago.

Also on the DREAM 13 card are Ikuhisa Minowa vs. Jimmy Ambriz, Ryo Chonan vs. Andrews Nakahara and Kikuno vs. UFC vet Kuniyoshi Hironaka.

In other TBJJ-related news, Murilo “Ninja” Rua, brother of Mauricio “Shogun” Rua (who’s pictured above working out with Dida), will face Falaniko Vitale at May 15’s Shine Fight III.

Rua (18-10-1) is a PRIDE vet with a pair of knockouts in his last two bouts for the Brazil-based Bitetti Combat promotion. Vitale is a 35-fight workhorse who hasn’t competed since a loss to Frank Trigg under the Strikeforce banner two years ago. Ricardo Mayorga and Din Thomas will headline the Shine event.

Only Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira would consider a punch in the face as an opportunity to win. As he tells Kevin Iole over at Yahoo! Sports, eating a few fists and elbows comes with playing a jiu-jitsu game:

“If you’re going to play jiu-jitsu in the UFC, you have to be comfortable enough to play on the bottom. You have to have a strong chin and not be afraid of the punches when you play guard. You can’t have any fear to play jiu-jitsu. You know you’re going to open holes. You know you’re going to get hit and take a lot of punishment, but you have to remain calm and watch very carefully because a hole will open at any time.

“When your opponent is punching you, yes, he’s hurting you maybe, but he’s opening holes and putting himself at risk, too. In my last fight [at UFC 102] with Randy [Couture], if you watched, you can see that Randy threw the elbow and I swept him. I let him stay [in my guard] and be comfortable because I knew he would be open. You learn from experience. There’s pain, but there’s also gain. When you are going in competition you have to be prepared to win but you also have to be prepared to lose.”

If that doesn’t get your respect and admiration you’re not a true fan of the sport.

Big Nog will have a chance to put his submissions – and his face – to the test when he faces Cain Velasquez in Saturday’s UFC 110 heavyweight headliner from Sydney, Australia. Nog is an MMA legend, a PRIDE and UFC champ with a 32-5-1 record and a list of opponents that reads like Batman’s rogues gallery – Fedor Emelianenko, Couture, Dan Henderson, Mark Coleman, Bob Sapp, Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic, Josh Barnett, Frank Mir and on and on.

And his fight with Velasquez, a 7-0 wrestling stud who’s biggest challenge previously was Cheick Kongo, could earn him the first shot at heavyweight champ Brock Lesnar when Lesnar finally makes his return to the octagon. Yes, Shane Carwin and Frank Mir are set to face off for the interim belt at next month’s UFC 111 – a bout that was arranged even before we knew Lesnar would likely be back by July – but everyone still has to prove they deserve the title shot, according to UFC president Dana White. And who’s to say Mir or Carwin won’t be too injured following their battle to face Lesnar when he returns?

For my money, I’m hoping Big Nog out-boxes Velasquez and knocks him out, saving himself a beating in the process. Barring that, I expect Velasquez will use his wrestling and put Big Nog on his back, maybe start dropping some fists onto his face and opening the door for Big Nog to tap him out. Letting someone smash you while you hunt for submissions is a rough road to take to victory. It’s certainly not the safest or easiest or smartest or least painful, and it sure can’t make it easy to look in the mirror the next morning, but that’s what makes Minotauro a legend.

Can you imagine a rematch between Strikeforce champ Alistair Overeem and Chuck Liddell? The result would not be the same the second time around, especially when you consider Liddell’s a bit past-his-prime and Overeem is about twice as big as he was when they first fought. Of course, you would never see UFC president Dana White send his best fighters over to Strikeforce to prove which promotion’s tougher. Wish he would, though. That would result in some amazing cross-promotional battles and would be good for everybody, especially the fans.

Shouldn’t I have something better to do on Friday nights than sit at home watching old PRICE FC fights on Spike TV? And fights I’ve likely seen (and downloaded and rewatched a few times) at that. No matter, Friday is when Spike will debut the Best of PRIDE series. And yeah, I’ll probably tune in because no, I don’t have anything better to do.

Back in September, Matt Hughes signed a new multi-fight deal with the UFC with the goal of only facing big-name fighters. Whispers of Mike Swick and a rematch with Matt Serra came and went. Likely in part because neither fit Hughes’ big-name requirement. Now, it looks like the former welterweight champ could face a true MMA legend in Renzo Gracie, according to a story on Around The Octagon. The rumoured date for the fight is UFC 109 in February.

Gracie is a fifth-degree Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, grandnephew of BJJ founder Helio Gracie and a PRIDE FC veteran who has faced the likes of Carlos Newton, Dan Henderson, BJ Penn, Pat Miletich, Oleg Taktarov, Kazushi Sakuraba and Maurice Smith.

But he hasn’t fought since he faced Frank Shamrock in EliteXC in February 2007, he’s never fought in the UFC and he’s 42 years old. I’ll believe this fight is happening when he steps into the octagon and not until.

It’s an oldie but a goody, from the opening round of the 2005 PRIDE Middleweight Grand Prix. I like it because Mauricio “Shogun” Rua wins in decisive fashion. Love the flying head stomps, soccer kicks, punch passes and knees and more knees. I also like it because Quinton “Rampage” Jackson gets knocked silly, and I think a lot of us would like to see that happen given his Ultimate Fighter idiocy and retirement from MMA to play Mr. T.

I’m posting the clip below for a few reasons. First, ouch. That is one hell of an arm break Shogun suffers 49 seconds into his ironically titled PRIDE 31: Unbreakable fight with Mark Coleman. Second, the ‘roid rage Coleman exhibits after the referee pushes him off Shogun. He even takes a couple of swings at the ref before acting like King fucking Kong. Third, Wanderlei Silva jumping into the ring to go after the big ape. Fourth, the backstage confrontation between Silva and Coleman. Fifth and last, but not least, the hilarious/bizarre moment that Silva and Coleman then share. Only in Japan.

If this turns out to be true it’ll be a surprise but not a shock: The UFC middleweight picture might be getting a whole lot clearer if the story that Strikeforce has stolen Dan Henderson away from the promotion comes to fruition.

It’s no secret the two-time U.S. Olympic wrestler and former two-division PRIDE FC champ was unhappy with the way the UFC has handled things following his knockout of Michael Bisping at UFC 100. It was Hendo’s last fight on his UFC contract and he believed it put him next in line for a title shot against Anderson Silva. UFC president Dana White practically said as much at the time.

Well, we know what happened next. Nate Marquardt knocked out Demian Maia to stake his claim on the title shot and Silva balked at fighting either one, believing that since he’d already beaten both Hendo and Marquardt that the two should fight each other to determine a contender. Then the returning, resurgent Vitor Belfort leapfrogged everybody to get a crack at Silva at UFC 108 after he beat Rich Franklin, whom Henderson had also beaten.

Now, Yahoo! Sports‘ Kevin Iole is reporting that contract talks between the UFC and Henderson have stalemated and that Hendo is on the verge of locking up a deal with Strikeforce. I thought the talks were in limbo for awhile now but maybe they’re nearer the end than I was led to believe.

I do know that the UFC has always been Henderson’s stated priority in terms of where he fights and a Strikeforce deal does make sense.

Henderson is 39 and is looking for one last push toward a title. If that’s not going to happen in the UFC, then he might as well go elsewhere. He’d fit comfortably into the Strikeforce title mix at either middleweight or light heavyweight, divisions that aren’t as deep as in the UFC so it makes a title run less daunting.

What is surprising is that the UFC would let Henderson slip away – and to rival Strikeforce – over dollars, which appears to be the main sticking point of the contract dispute. The UFC has made a big deal about signing big names like Randy Couture and Matt Hughes to big contracts that will see both of them finish out their careers inside the octagon. Why no love for Dan Henderson?

As for Strikeforce, it’s a smart move at twice the price, whatever that may be. The promotion nabbed Fedor Emelianenko, locked down Gegard Mousasi, picked up Muhammed “King Mo” Lowal and now adds a PRIDE and UFC marquee name in Dan Henderson. If they could just find a way to get him on their November 7 Fedor vs. Brett Rogers card, the one airing live on CBS, that would be a serious coup de grace type move.

In an interview with Fighters Only magazine, PRIDE FC terror and embarrassed UFC heavyweight Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic admits to thoughts of suicide following his loss to the younger, hungrier Junior dos Santos at UFC 103 and says that he’s looking into hiring a psychologist to get him back into that scalp-hunting frame of mind. Makes me wonder why more fighters don’t rely on sports psychologists to shore up the mental aspect of their game, whether they win or lose. It did wonders for Georges St. Pierre following his loss to Matt Serra. Anyway, here’s the quote from Cro Cop:

“I was very, very disturbed after the loss to dos Santos. I was in such a state that I wished to hang myself in my hotel room so I would be gone. Three losses in my last seven fights is nothing but a disaster to me. That’s a terrible score and I’m not happy about it. I already know some things that I did wrong both in the fight and in the preparation for the fight, but there are many questions that remain to be answered. I am seriously thinking about hiring a psychiatrist to help me out. I have already made some calls about it … I will make some changes in my training, because I wish to fight twice more in the UFC. I am a fighter, and I will find the motivation and strength I need … If someone offered me millions of dollars to quit my career right now I would not accept it. [Fighting] is my life and I don’t know any other way to live.”

Jordan Breen over at Sherdog has written a truly grade-A story to address the downfall of Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic, breaking things down in such detail that you really need to read the whole thing if you’re a Cro Cop fan at all. And the piece makes one interesting point that I latched onto only because of my previous post regarding watching Cro Cop highlight clips: Cro Cop’s reputation, especially among casual MMA fans, has been built up and heightened in large part due to the highlight head kicks, something we all hope for and even expect to see every time he steps into the ring or cage, and as a result of these micro-moments of greatness he has become one of the first if not the first Youtube MMA heroes.

I’m excerpting a huge chunk of the story here simply because it’s so damn good, so well-written, and so on-the-button. Much like a Cro Cop head kick circa 2006.

There can be no doubt those physical attributes that made him the posterboy for K-1 converts have diminished. His reflex and strike speed lags, and he struggles to explode away from the clinch as he once was able to when desperate fighters latched onto him. Though some are quick to say that Filipovic is “only 35,” that misses the fact that age — especially in MMA — is extremely relative.

“You’re only as young as you feel” sounds like a hollow line from a dental adhesive or margarine commercial, but it couldn’t be more true in this sport. While Randy Couture is constantly used as MMA’s refutation of aging, “The Natural” started MMA 12 years ago at age 33 after a fairly healthy wrestling career. Cro Cop has been training and fighting for nearly two decades at this point, and it has taken its toll on him. In recent years, he’s had surgeries up and down his body to fix nagging issues from a deviated septum to a busted foot to a faulty elbow to nagging knees. That process isn’t about to stop, and if anything, it will only exacerbate. Prizefighters are like porn stars: When it’s gone, it’s gone. You might have another stellar scene or two, but you’re sure as hell not going to sweep the AVNs.

But it’s wrong to view Cro Cop’s current predicament strictly as a product of wear-and-tear. If anything, his physical depreciation has served to highlight the technical flaws of his game that have always been present and often ignored.

Part of what has been difficult for fans to digest is that he hasn’t just looked awful as of late: He’s looked awful on the feet despite being hailed as the greatest striker in the sport for years. However, chinks in the armor have always been present. Apart from his bouts with Mark Hunt, the southpaw Cro Cop has circled left on orthodox fighters since his K-1 days. Circling into your opponent’s power tends to be a major no-no, but it has always given Cro Cop the best chance to land his left cross and left head kick, by far his two best weapons. When fighters with real striking skills have opted to be aggressive against him, though, he’s suffered as a result.

He walked into Fedor Emelianenko’s right hook repeatedly, and shortly after, barrages of left hooks followed. Hunt’s right found him repeatedly in their MMA rematch. While people remember the Cheick Kongo bout for Cro Cop’s testicles being battered, the Frenchman dominated latter proceedings with his right cross and right kicks to Cro Cop’s exposed body. In one of the most brutal starchings the sport has ever seen, he walked right into Gabriel Gonzaga’s shin at skull-level. And Saturday night, Junior dos Santos pelted him with both hands, but especially rights.

Compound this issue with the fact that he generally struggles going backward. At his finest, Cro Cop was less the tiger he was once nicknamed for and more akin to a shark, circling opponents quickly at short range. Watch the Nogueira bout to see the ideal range and movement for his attack; it is little coincidence that he displayed nearly all of his offensive weapons in that bout’s first round. When forced backward, his primary weapon to halt opponents was his left cross — the same punch that destroyed Bob Sapp and got the wrecking ball rolling on Wanderlei Silva in their second bout. However, from Hoost to Cigano, when opponents are fleet enough to avoid the punch, or stay close enough to stifle it, he’s less a fighter and more a cornerback.

Maybe most critically of all, for all his striking acumen, Cro Cop has never been a quality counterstriker. At his best, whether in K-1 or MMA, he attacked first, hurt his foe, then finished the job. When ambushed, he’s always pushed opponents away and circled out wide to reset. Even against Josh Barnett, whose game plan in their second bout was haphazard punch-swarming to set up the clinch, Cro Cop was still almost entirely defensive. Even his punches on Sapp and Silva were not really pure counters as much as fighters walking directly at him with their hands down.

The point about counterpunching is especially relevant, as it is the method through which the cleanest chances for damaging blows in combat sports are created. It is no coincidence that virtually all of the top fighters in the sport right now are adroit at either slipping punches to counter (Emelianenko, BJ Penn) or parrying punches to counter (Machida, Rampage). At this stage in the sport, it’s not good enough to just endlessly circle left, hoping to set up a roundhouse kick to the dome.

There’s also been a noticeable reduction in his actual striking arsenal. His bouts at this point are reduced to a few sparse punches and failed attempts at the left head kick. However, his brutal salvos of leg kicks and body kicks mostly appeared when his opponents stopped moving, as in the cases of Nogueira or Silva, or when he was facing rigid and awkward opponents like Hidehiko Yoshida and Hong Man Choi. As for his punching combinations, their appearances were almost entirely relegated to when he got opponents stuck in the corners of the ring. The punches that polished off Mark Coleman? The furious barrage on Aleksander Emelianenko? The brutal head-and-body assault that started the destruction of Josh Barnett in their third bout? Every single one of those opponents he’d trapped in the corner of the ring, a point sorely missed as people squabbled about Cro Cop’s adaptation to the cage in terms of how it would affect his ability to stop takedowns.

So, where were all these deficiencies in 2003, when he was putting the boots to hapless foes, and why are they so painfully vivid now?

Obviously, the aging process plays a formative role in exposing these flaws, but it’s actually a quintessential double whammy: Cro Cop’s physical decline also coincided with the general improvement of heavyweight MMA and more consistent fights with top heavyweights. Your baseline heavyweight in an elite promotion in 2009 is a bit less likely to circle face-first into the strike that his opponent is synonymous with. Some are even talented and brazen enough to throw strikes against a former K-1 World Grand Prix runner-up, and aggressively so. Even if they wanted the fight on the floor, as Gonzaga and Overeem did, the ability and willingness to trade strikes in a way that the likes of Herring, Waterman and Coleman couldn’t made those takedowns that much easier.

Perhaps a better question is why so much was expected from the man upon his arrival in the UFC. After all, the reaction to his decline is not simply a tough-but-necessary acknowledgement that his better days are behind him, the way many now view Randy Couture’s performances. Instead, the response is one of sullen dejection and disappointment, not because he’s past his prime but because that fact means he cannot and will not fulfill their lofty expectations for him.

It is hardly a new hypothesis that many of Pride’s fighters attained a staggering aura of invincibility due to the crafty and lopsided pro-wrestling-style matchmaking of parent company Dream Stage Entertainment, but it is still an important one. It is fairly telling that one of the most famous moments of his MMA career is decapitating masked Mexican luchador Dos Caras Jr. For that matter, it is perhaps even more telling that his signature K-1 moment is destroying Bob Sapp. Perhaps no fighter in MMA’s short history has been better suited to the Youtube generation and the highlight reel, and that’s largely due to the brutality he was able to dish out against sacrificial lambs.

The potency of his knockouts coupled with his aesthetic and authentic gimmick — the Croatian anti-terrorist force member with enough sangfroid to spare — made him MMA’s first larger-than-life fighter. That, along with the fact his exploits came within the ring of Pride, in a heavyweight division that was markedly deeper and more talented than the UFC’s (which featured the likes of Mike Kyle and Wesley “Cabbage” Correira), solidified the idea that he could be UFC champion simply upon showing up in the Octagon.

This is not to say the man’s resume is without merit. However, the question is how that merit was distorted as people convinced themselves he would rule the UFC with an iron fist. Victories over Heath Herring and Igor Vovchanchyn were strong wins six years ago. Now, though, we know Herring to be a dependable if flawed gatekeeper-to-the-stars, and Vovchanchyn was marginalized as an elite fighter the moment his contemporaries developed half decent boxing and top games. Aleksander Emelianenko has gone on to be a strong heavyweight, but at the time Cro Cop dispatched him, he was an out-of-shape novice with a special surname.

The best wins of Cro Cop’s career are over Wanderlei Silva — a longtime light heavyweight now bound for 185 pounds — and his trifecta over Josh Barnett, the only perennially top heavyweight he’s defeated in his eight-year career, though I imagine that trio of W’s doesn’t look too damn good right now given Barnett’s recent indiscretions. Beyond these fights, when you think of Cro Cop against elite fighters, you think of him losing. And in some cases, to non-elite fighters as well.

At the time, each of those losses could be justified in some absolving fashion. He lost to Nogueira, the second best heavyweight of all time, due to his inexperience on the ground. Against Kevin Randleman, he simply “got caught.” Against Fedor Emelianenko, he simply bumped up against the best heavyweight we’ve seen yet. Against Mark Hunt, he was burned out and unmotivated after his fourth fight in six months. All of these explanations were reinforced by the fact that somehow, losing in Pride was not at all indicative of the success one might have stateside against the likes of Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia. Interestingly enough, during his Pride tenure, Cro Cop was part of the “Big Three” along with Emelianenko and Nogueira, but historically, he actually fits in much closer with his hypothetical victims Arlovski and Sylvia, two other quite successful but often faltering heavyweights.

His victory in the Pride Openweight Grand Prix three years ago, in which he notched the two best wins of his career in a single night, came specifically at a point where the hackneyed UFC-versus-Pride suddenly wasn’t such a landslide any more. Pride was crumbling under the Shukan Gendai scandal surrounding the promotion’s underworld ties, and “The Ultimate Fighter” generation brought the UFC prosperity, and as a result, some of the sport’s best fighters. Those who parroted the superiority of Pride for years, as well as the neutral parties who wanted a UFC heavyweight division where Justin Eilers didn’t fight for a heavyweight title, placed unfortunately high expectations on a fighter who they desperately wanted to believe was a superhero instead of an aging, fallible heavyweight standout.

I fear this piece coming across as an attempt to impeach the career of Mirko Filipovic on all fronts. Let me assure you, that is not my intent. If anything, I see crucial value in pointing out his technical and competitive shortcomings to actually bolster his standing in public memory. While I would find it unnerving for history to depict Cro Cop as an absolute all-time great with an iron-clad resume, I would be equally dismayed for him to be remembered as a bittersweet failure because he couldn’t vindicate vehement Pride fans.

He will be the owner of a scintillating highlight for the rest of time, but his actual resume won’t position him as the dominant heavyweight it was assumed he would always be, in the ring or the cage. He should be remembered just as much for his impressive victories as for his failures when it counted the most – to Hoost, Hug and Bernardo, to Fedor, Nogueira and Gonzaga. However, he should not be scorned for failing to live up to the unrealistic expectations of those whose hearts skipped a beat whenever Simon LeBon’s voice filled a Japanese arena.