MMA Fighting - The MMA Hour - Episode 203

Episode Date: August 25, 2014

Featuring Junior dos Santos, Mike Pierce, Muhammed Lawal, Duke Roufus, Marc Ratner, Jessica Eye, and Rami Genauer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from the Audible Original, the downloaded two. Ghosts in the Machine. The Earth only has a few days left. Rosco Cudulian and the rest of the Phoenix colony have to re-upload their minds into the quantum computer, but a new threat has arisen that could destroy their stored consciousness forever. Listen to Oscar winner Brendan Fraser reprised his role as Rosco Cudulian in this follow-up to the Audible original Blockbuster. The Downloaded, it's a thought-provoking sci-fi journey where identity, memory, and morality collide. Robert J. Sawyer does it again with this much-anticipated sequel that leaves you asking,

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On this Monday, October 14th, 2013, a very happy Canadian Thanksgiving to my friends up north. You know, it's funny when, you know, now I say Canadian Thanksgiving, happy, happy, all that stuff. But when I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, we didn't even celebrate Thanksgiving. I didn't even get off from school. Maybe that's because I went to a private Jewish school and we had enough holidays. It wasn't even a big deal. It was on a Monday. I think there were some CFL games on during the day.

But now, now that I'm a family man, I kind of like the idea of Thanksgiving. I get to celebrate it here in the United States. We make a big deal out of it next month. But today is Canadian Thanksgiving up north. So I like the idea of someone in Moose Jaw, someone in Nunavut, someone in Saskatoon, hunkering down with the family, some turkey, some putteen, some cider, whatever you drink on Thanksgiving. hunkering the eggnog, I think it is maybe,

listening to this show while watching some CFL action, I hope. And if you're listening to this show or watching this show anywhere else around this great world of ours, thank you so much for joining us. It is UFC 166 week, Saturday night. The trilogy will be completed. Kane Velasquez, Junior Dos Santos in Houston, Texas, which is, by the way, the backyard of one Will the Thrill back there.

He grew up in Houston, so maybe he could give us some tips as we head out there on Wednesday. It's a great card. As I said on the MMA beat, a very underrated card, a fun card. Gilbert Melendez, Diego Sanchez, D.C., Daniel Cormier versus Roy Nelson, Dowell Montague, making his UFC debut against John Dodson. I haven't seen him since, when was it back in January when he fought Demetrius Johnson, Jessica I, making her UFC debut against Sarah Kaufman,

Lombard and Marquard at 170. It's a great car. We'll be talking all about it throughout the show. and by now you know the drill. There's a bug that keeps flying around here, and it's so damn annoying. I think I may have just caught it. I think I may have just caught it.

No, I didn't. Anyway, by now you know the drill. Hit us up using the hash... Oh, maybe I did catch it. Using the hashtag, the MMA hour, hit us up on Twitter, or leave us a question or comment in the comment section below,

a relatively quiet weekend when it comes to UFC. But it was busy in the world of combat sports. There was all kinds of different MMA action. Glory kickboxing made its debut on Spike TV. So hit us up. Best Twitter question gets these tops cards right here. UFC Finest. You know about them by now.

And we're giving love to the website. Don't you forget it. Now who's joining us on today's show? Well, at 305 p.m. Eastern time, Mike Pierce, who was involved in that controversial finish against Husseemar, Paul Harris, on Wednesday night in Brazil. Paul Harris held on to the heel hook a little too long. Mike Pierce tapping very aggressively, furiously, and Paul Harris seemed to crank it once that was happening. So as a result, Paul Harris got his walking papers on Thursday,

put out a video, which wasn't much of an apology. Tried to get him on this show, by the way. I tried very hard. He told me he's in an area of Brazil right now with no cell reception. He did DM me, or at least someone DM me from his account, but he can't come on the show. But Mike Pierce is coming on to talk about how injured he is coming off that controversial moment and where he goes from here. King Mo Lulal will be fighting Emmanuel Newton. on the Bellator pay-per-view. They just announced, by the way, Czech Congo versus Vinicius Carros

is the fifth and final fight on that November 2nd pay-per-view, King Moe stopping by to talk about that fight. And also, you may have heard this. He trains with Roy Nelson. He's a good friend, long-time training partner of Daniel Cormia. What's his take on this weekend's

big co-main event heavyweight clash? Rami Gannauer is the president-founder, director of FightMetric. They've got some very exciting things going on. You hear Fight Metric all the time. on this show on UFC broadcast. What did this whole idea come about? And how did it come about?

And where are they going from here? And how do they record these statistics? Also, they announced something very cool today. A very nice charitable effort. So we're going to talk to Rami at around 225. Junior Dos Santos, who of course faces Kane Velasquez. This weekend in Houston, he'll be stopping by at 2 of 5. Great to have the former UFC heavyweight champion on the show

as he prepares for the biggest fight of his career. Love talking to Mark Ratner. VP of Regulatory Affairs for the UFC. So much to talk to him about. So brilliant when it comes to combat sports, his experiences, former executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Great having Mark Ratner on the show. The aforementioned Jessica Evil Eye,

she will be stopping by at 125 to talk about her UFC debut against Sarah Kaufman. Looking forward to that. But first, let us go to the phone lines and welcome in a man who had a front row seat. This Saturday night, this past Saturday night at the Hoffman. Monastates Arena, the Sierra Center Arena, Glory 11. A lot of people buzzing still. New York Rick still hasn't slept after attending Glory 11. We're talking about Duke Rufus.

He was on the call with Morrow Rinaloa, and he joins us right now on the MMA hour. Duke, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm still buzzing from the show. It was incredible. I think it was a great debut for kickboxing the United States. So, you know, I will admit, obviously I know about kickboxing. I watch it casually.

I don't have the same passion for it. I don't follow it. I don't get paid to cover it like I do, obviously, with MMA. But why, in your opinion, was this such a big deal for the sport? Because kickboxing has been on in the United States in the past, but maybe it's some weird hours, ESPN2, versus things like that. But why was this show such a big deal? And why was the outcome of the show, the great fights, the finishes, the stories,

so important for kickboxing? Well, one was the level of fight. who did on, you know, about 12 years ago, I was helping with a K-1 pay-per-view broadcast, and they'll later go to ESPN, but they had never assembled a group of fighters like I had before. Saturday night's fights, I mean, you know, having Tyrone sprung on there, Nathan Corbett,

Saki, and Gita, and then the upsets that happened were just incredible. You can't write a better script than what happened. You know, Rico Belboa came in, Rico Verhoove, and with a big upset, that it was an awesome night of fights. The guys were pumped to give it for the fans. And here we are talking about it. It was just a great night of fights.

And it was just a fun thing to be a part of. I'm blessed, man. You know, I love kickboxing. I love MMA. I love boxing. I think thankful to the UFC, they've been so many paths for a lot of people right now. I mean, there's even the AGON professional wrestling's coming up. We've got the MetaMorris.

professional jiu-jitsu. The combat sports are becoming so big in our public, and, you know, my wildest dreams are coming true that, I mean, obviously with UFC and Fox, it's legitimized all combat sports, and it's just a great time to be involved as a martial artist. I'm very happy. Is it possible with the UFC running so many shows, Belator, it seems like every Saturday night there's a big boxing match, is there a place in the combat sports landscape, in your opinion, for a new kit on the block. Glory coming in, they put on a great product, and as you mentioned,

they have some of the best fighters in the world as far as kickboxing is concerned. But is there enough time in the week for the fans to sit down and appreciate the product they're putting out? Oh, definitely. I mean, you know, I don't tune in to every boxing match. I try and tune in to every UFC or a DVR it.

Now, that's the beauty of DVR these days. I found myself I'm so busy. I'm in the gym in the evening. I was busy Wednesday night. I come home when I watch a fight after they've been on. So that is the beauty of technology. If you are a fan, I mean, I still got to watch the Koto fight. I haven't watched it yet.

That's the type of culture we live in today, and I do believe there is time for it. I mean, without a doubt, UFC is the king. I mean, people can say what they want about boxing. Mayweather has its two appearance a year where they can. kill it on pay-per-view, and he makes a lot of money, and his opponent does. But the UFC wins the whole war all year. And I don't want to make it a war, though, because everyone's getting along great these days. Boydney, whether it's talking about coming into the MMA industry.

That tells us we're doing something great over here. And, you know, it's cool. Again, I think there is room for kickboxing. And I think it gives kids options to want to go into kickboxing. and, like I said, I think Anthony Pettis will love to go into glory if that option were a solid option for him. He did get offered to join K-1 when I was managing him when he was young. It's just I didn't see a good foundation with the Japanese MMA scene there. So we chose WC, and here we are today.

But, you know, the coolest comments I got Gohan Sakki and Thailand Spung like, hey, you coached Pettis, he's awesome. Everybody watches everything. And you know what? Anthony watched Saturday, and he thinks those guys are awesome. Now, one of Anthony's best friends from his neighborhood, he's one of the Money-Mateweather team. He grew up Louis-Raius from Milwaukee. So, again, we all cross-trained. One of my buddies I grew up with was the WBC Middle East boxing champion. Paul Briggs was in Nathan Corbett's Corner Saturday, and he's fought Adamant for the World Title Place.

one of the best boxers from Australia. Pedro Diaz was there, Coach Cotto, with Tyrone Smar. Rashad was in Diron's corner. I think there's just a cross-pollination of combat sports right now. It's a cool. It's not any titles. Everyone trains with everyone. Everyone respects everyone.

And I think our fans are learning to have a lot of different palettes. You know, like I said, some might even get into watching Jiu-Jitsu. Some might get into watching wrestling. I know I do now. I compete. I'm a blue belt and jih Tzu. Who would have figured, right, years ago? You know, this thing's growing because, again, the UFC.

You said something very interesting, somewhat of a side note, but I'm curious about this. Let's say Glory was coming up, and the UFC is where it is. Do you think a young Anthony Pettus goes down the kickboxing route if he's making his debut in 2013 as opposed to MMA? I don't know. I mean, that's a hard one. I mean, we'll see.

I mean, Anthony also loves martial arts and testing himself. That's a good one. I mean, maybe a Pat Barry, you know, maybe he'd have the option. Anthony loves Jiu-Jitsu as well. He aspires to earn his black belt. I don't know. I mean, he loves striking. I mean, he loves boxing.

He loves it all, too. I mean, that's a tough one. It's a really tough one because the UFC, he's re-signed a new contract. So that's a hard one. You know, but I'm real happy with, you know, what the UFC's done for him. So that's a hard question. Maybe Sergio, I don't know.

You bring up a very good point because I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, the success of Glory, like for someone like myself who may not be as well versus other hardcore fans, I wanted to watch that show because I know Tyrone Spong, he's fought in a couple of MMA fights,

I know about his story now, he trains with Rashad and those guys. Do you think for Glory to be successful here in the United States, they need to start taking some of those MMA guys and bringing them over? who knows what happens with Overim. You bring up Pat Barry.

That's a great idea. You know, Brian Foster, a former UFC fighter, was on the undercard. Do you think that's part of the key to their success as well? Yes and no. I mean, Brian didn't do too well. Sure. He got knocked out with a real good spin kick by Raymond Daniels. No disrespect to him.

I mean, Raymond Daniels is a unique talent. He comes from open martial arts tournaments, and he's got a unique style. He's almost like the Prince and Samad of kickback. And hard to fight. That wasn't a good parameter in view. Right. I mean, I think there are some fighters if they burn and don't have success in the UFC,

I think that would be interesting as well. But look at, you know, the street is treacherous both ways. On paper, Overeign should be the heavyweight champion in the world of the UFC because of his striking prowess, but he got knocked out by J-J-2 black belt. You know? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. In MMA, four-ounce gloves, so many things change.

That's what I love about it. When I'm training an M.M.A. fighter, it's a completely different skill I'm training them than when I train a kid and wants to fight in glory and we want to fight in boxing. Now, one thing that people don't realize in M.MA, which makes it treacherous, there's very little grease on your face. The gloves are always going to catch the traction. You're going to get hit a lot more. It's just the way it is. where in kickboxing and boxing, you get to use a lot more vaseline. The punches slide off be a lot easier.

That's why guys' faces look so bad after an MMA fight without the big grease on there for grappling. It makes it a lot easier to get hit. So just that little change, you know, thinking about kickdowns. Like I said, there's unique athletes that could cross over. But even myself, I love that I run. Spong wants to be Bo Jackson. I think that's how many championships rings the Bo Jackson

F. I'd like to see Tyrone Spong be the guy that takes kickboxing to a new level. I love his moxie. I mean, he's a young, talented fighter, and he has aspirations. But selfishly as a kickboxer,

kickboxing background, I'd love to see him be our guy who transcends the sport. And he could do it, man. He's got a great fighting style. He's now living in America. I trained with him for a day, him and Alistar in 06, and he's matured not only as a man, but his personality. He's becoming a real likable character for American people.

And living over here is definitely helping him. But I'm not against it, but I've loved to see him stay home at kickboxing and be R. Star. That's very interesting. I know you're very busy, but if you have, let's say, two hours of spare time, There's a big MMA fight, big kickboxing fight. They're on your DVR you haven't seen either. What do you prefer to watch? What do you enjoy watching more?

It matters what I'm into. I'm not wrong guy to ask. I am a fan, but it matters what I'm trying to learn right now. You know what I mean? Like if I'm in a boxing mood, I go through stages of boxing where sometimes decisions make me mad and I get a little pouty about it. but I got to say I watch all M&A because it's a necessity with the among fighters they have in the UFC.

So the mole style split my time. I do DVR a couple of the other shows. I watch Hawaiian fight or catch some stuff on satellite, Moitai from California. I watch Sanjrikes or King Stars fight from Thailand Friday night or Saturday morning. He was a pound-for-pound best fighter in Thailand. I don't know. I'm wrong got to ask you to watch it all. Okay, fair enough.

Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. No, no, no. You know, I love it all, but I'm a self-proclaimed fight nerd. I mean, when our Big Ten wrestling starting, I have a Big Ten network on our satellite. I tape all those meets, too. So I do tape all the duels in the tournament from the Big Ten network. I mean, I truly am a geek.

You said after the final fight on Saturday that we may have just witness the Bonner Griffin of glory, RICO Verhoeven, defeating two of the greats, Saki and Gita in one night. Why, I mean, that's a very big statement. It's one that's kind of thrown around a lot, but why do you feel like that was equivalent to what Bonner Griffin did so many years ago? One, the toe-to-to-to-fashom that Gita and Verhruven went at it, and he did the six rounds.

And I said in the broadcast, he was the Rico Bell Bowl. He was a Cinderella man of the tournament. Maybe it wasn't the exact, but also, I guess, was referring to the coming out party that Stefan and Forrest gave the UFC, or even what Gabby Ward did for boxing at the time. Those guys at that time in boxing, Goddian wore. Gave a shot to boxing. They kind of changed the way the boxing industry was.

For a while, you only had to be the best to be on HBO boxing, and now Showdown and Boxing has figured out its matchmaking what the UFC's been doing forever that makes good boxing not the best for... It's not the Christians versus the Lions. It's great fights and Saturday night's main

event was an incredible way to finish the broadcast. It was a great fight. You mentioned earlier Sergio Pettis, who recently signed with the UFC and, of course, there's a lot going on with you outside of glory and your work for them now. So just quickly want to touch on that. I know you guys

have been kind of bringing him up slowly. There's a lot of buzz about him, obviously, because of what he does inside the cage and because who his famous brother is, why do you feel like he is ready for the UFC now? His last two fights, his psychological, mental, and emotional preparation, he's really gained a lot of confidence for himself. He's always at the skill, without a doubt. This is a kid that I had fight men at age 15. He bought his first pro-moytai fight at age 17.

He's a very skilled fighter. what I want to do is make sure he has the mindset to go to the Kremlin, the UFC. You know, every fight's a big fight, and being on the 20th anniversary, this is a huge fight for him. But he has got the right state of mind. You know, the last two fights,

he's been the main event. He was the main event on the RFA that was in Milwaukee and it was a main event on the last show in Milwaukee. And he brought out a huge crowd as a sellout crowd, and he's getting used to that type of pressure that needs to be put on them. Obviously, the UFC, you don't know until you get there, but his behavior.

And I like to do in the RFA fight when Jeff Kern was canceled out of the fight, I went through the gym to talk to Sergio. It's like, I don't care whoever. I mean, if we've got to change fight stuff, he was so beyond his years when we switched at a lot of young emotional fighters. At that age, freak out. I know I would have. that, you know, I have a good barometer.

My older brother was a really successful fighter, and I came up under him. So that's how I have a good relationship with Anthony and Sergio. I know how to coach Sergio to be the younger brother and not fall into the trappings of trying to be Anthony. You know what, Sergio? You'd be Sergio and you're going to do great. And why is he fighting as a bantamite?

Is he just growing and his body's, you know, kind of molding into the bantamway? Better because he was successful as a flywood as well. Yes, he was growing. The last cut was very hard on him. I lost his hearing. Wow. It was very draining. Yeah, it is, at this time, I'm a big fan of fighting at the best possible weight you're going to compete at. Anthony Petis barely goes to the sauna to make weight at 55, and he actually grew in size. You know, I've got to take my hat off. One of our secrets to success here in Milwaukee, if people point the finger too much at me, one, we have a great time.

team of coaches, but we work with a place called NX level. They've manufactured JJ Watt. They're our strength and conditioning team, and Brad Arnett is a genius, and he's the one who's been working with our high-level guys, and it's been a big key to Anthony's success. If you look at Anthony's body in the WC days in this last fight, he was actually bigger than Benson Henderson, and Benson's known to be a big lightweight, and they're doing the same thing with Sergio. typically and athletically out there of all of our fighters.

They should Sergio have promised athletically at the Strength and Conditioning Center. And this is a place that trains NFL or NBAers and such. And that's a big help for our team right now. Over, what was it? On Thursday, ESPN.com spoke to Bjorn Rebney, and he made a deal, put out a deal for UFC President Dana White, said that if he signs Ben Asperin and gives him an immediate title shot, but he will not try to resign him.

He will waive the matching clause. He will just let him go for free. He put this deal out there, which is, well, let me get your take on it. What do you make of this whole situation? Because now it seems like Ascran is kind of in limbo, and, you know, the UFC has yet to offer him a deal. Bjorn's making this deal about him, saying that if the UFC doesn't come and give him a deal,

he's going to have to sign him, which sounds someone like a weird thread. Like, where does Ben fit in all this? And how do you like the way things are playing out for him? I feel like at times he's being used as a pawn from one organization to the other personally. Yeah. If they don't want them, then let them go. I mean, I would love to see that fight happen for sure. But George is talking about retiring for one.

Two, in order to make a title fight at well-to-weight in the UFC, they need footage to do to promote Ben, which they don't have. I mean, Bjorn knows, I think, I mean, he's got to know that it's a very hard, you know, asking of, Dena, let's do this. And realistically, you need footage and a contender fight. You know, I mean, there's things you know as being a TV person in the background, where do we get the footage of Ben Asking in the Octagon to promote this because Belator owns and another TV company owns this. There's a lot of things behind the scenes that just couldn't happen.

And it's hard because my fighters are like my children. A week ago, Ben was down. He gets this told to him, Ben's happier, you know, like a kid on Christmas. And I don't like seeing people that I love and care for get their emotions played with. I mean, Ben just saw a week ago as he's close to retirement, because Ben only knows competing. That's why he's doing the big wrestling. match at the end of the month here.

That's how Ben is wired. And, you know, if he can't compete, there's no hope to keep training. You know, he's one of those strange people that loves that carrot on a stick. I hope, you know, I have respect for both men, and I don't want to seem like I'm putting anyone down.

It's just hard. They both got their path where they want their business models to go. And, you know, it's been stuck somewhere in the middle with it. It's hard. But you wanted to sign with UFC? Who doesn't? I mean, that's the thing.

I mean, it's right. No disrespect. Hey, happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends, by the way. But no one's going, I want to be in the CFL. No, I want to be in the NFL. You know what I mean?

Right. No disrespect to Belvoir. They're putting out a great product. But the UFC with the fighters is, you know, no one wants to be the NAPC champion. They want to be the WPC. boxing champion. It just is what it is. I mean, there's going to be number one.

That's like now in kickboxing, everyone wants to do glory because they're the king. I mean, I don't want to play in the European basketball league. I want to play in the NBA. It's just as athletes, I mean, you aspire. It's what you dream about when you're shooting in basketball when you're a kid and you're pretending that you're going to finish the game-winning shot. It isn't in the secondary league. Right.

If that makes sense, you know, I don't want to be the D-2 NCAA champion. I want to be the D-1. It's just, of course, I want Ben in the UFC. The UFC's been wonderful to our team. I mean, you know, I love working with them. They've changed my life, too, and help our school grow and so many ways. I mean, they're a great thing for this industry. So, of course, I want to Ben over there.

That's what I aspire for all my fighters to go to the UFC. Do I work with all the other organizations yet? I mean, I have a lot of great things. friends and martial arts, but at the end of the day, everyone wants to be the UFC champion. That's the true champion of MMA. We got a minute left running out of time. Just want to get you to quickly touch on two other subjects. When are we going to see Alan Belcher next?

And will it be at 205? And how's Anthony feeling? He told us he had a bummed shoulder in that fight, doing some rehab on his knee. Give us an update on two of those guys. Alan's putting some sides on right now, and he's going to return at 205. Weight cuts have been really hurting him. Eric Koch's considering the same thing as last two way cuts were horrendous. He's probably going to be moving up to lightweight too as well.

Anthony Pettis is feeling great. The shoulders feeling great. Just to get a weird miss-at. Our coach Daniel von der Leigh just caught him in a body lock. He fell on a shoulder before the fight. And he's rehabbed and he's feeling good. He's trained very well already for his fight coming up. Awesome.

Well, great job on Saturday, Duke. I really enjoyed it. It was fun to watch a great car, and it was on Spike TV, and there was a lot of buzz about it, and it turned out great. I mean, you made a star. You had Spung Deliver. It was a great night, and I'm looking forward to the show in New York City. I think I'll be there in attendance myself, so I look forward to that.

Well, you're not working. You can have one of my VIP seats. Oh, well, thank you. Come and have fun for sure. You know, I love New York, so I'm looking forward to being there. Greatest City on the planet. I agree, my friend. Thank you so much, and good luck with all your big fights coming up as well.

Thank you, sir. Have a great. There he is. Duke Rufus stopping by. He had the call on Saturday night alongside our fellow Canadian Moranalo. A great show on Spike TV. If you missed it, I'm sure they're going to replay it at some point. It was really great. And as I mentioned, they're coming to New York for their next show, November 23rd. So looking forward to that. And we're looking forward to Sergio Pettis' UFC debut, November 16th. He fights Vaughn Lee on the 20th anniversary show. But next up for the UFC, it's UFC 166. It's this Saturday. It's on pay-per-view. it is the big trilogy fight between Kane Velasquez and Junio Dostatos. But as I mentioned, it's a great card.

And on the Fox Sports One prelims, there is a huge women's ballot between a long-time veteran of the sport who will be making her Octagon debut. That is Sarah Kaufman. She was supposed to fight back in August, but her debut got delayed a little bit. And she'll be fighting someone who made a name for herself in Bellator, who also will be making her octagon debut. Our guest at this time, Jessica Evil. I. She joins us via the magicist Skype. Is she there? There she is. Jessica, how are you? I'm fantastic. How are you? I remember last time we had you on the show, your Skype connection was

flawless, and it is just as great this time. It's crystal clear. How about that? That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm actually at home, so I tried to sit by the window to be able to give you guys some good light. So lots to talk to you about. Of course, you're heading out to Houston very soon for your debut. And you were part of that kind of last group of Belator women's fighters that were left and then they gave you the blessing, you were released from your contracts and you signed with the UFC. Were you surprised that Belator just kind of, you know,

abolished their women's divisions as quickly as they did? Yeah, I mean, I definitely, I mean, I didn't think that it was going to happen that way. I knew something kind of was going on considering after my injury with the Munah Holland fight and me pulling out and we had started to put the pressure on about

me wanting to fight again and we really didn't get much answers. And then I'd heard some about some of the girls actually getting released. So I was like, oh, man, so what does that mean for me? You know, once I heard Muna got released, I was like, man, something's got to be coming for me. And, you know, shortly after that, I got, I mean, within a few days, I got released. Blessing in disguise for you. Were you happy you got released?

Well, I mean, I wouldn't say happy. I mean, yeah, I guess, like, you know, it is a blessing in disguise because, you know, look where I'm at now, I'm in the UFC. But, you know, at the time, you know, I'm very loyal to anything that I do. And, you know, I was hoping that, you know, they would. we would be able to work together. So, I mean, everything works out the way it should. Now, in Bellator, you were fighting at 125. Now you're fighting at 135.

How do you feel about that? I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm literally eating. Like, I just got done, finished eating a meal like, I love it. I'm so excited. I think that people thought that I'm a lot smaller that I really am. And kind of like, you know, how my weight cuts have always gone.

So I'm jacked and not have to lose any water weight. And I've been able to kind of eat more and, you know, gain. a little bit more weight. So I'm excited. I'm excited to be at 35 now. So is 135 your natural fighting weight? Would you prefer to have been fighting at 135 and only we're doing so because the belt organization was featuring the smaller weight classes? Well, yeah. I mean, I feel like, you know, when I got into the sport, like, you know, I was, I wasn't as big as I am now, but, you know, at the time there was a lot of lighter weight girls. There really wasn't, you know, anybody at my size. So, you know, we went down in weight and then, you know, I work with a lot of wrestlers too,

so I think they all know how to cut weight. So we always kind of, that mindset is like, oh, yeah, let's be bigger. You know, and then I realized that was a lot bigger. And then I realized, like, a lot of these curls in MMA don't cut the weight that I do. Like, they don't diet. They don't portion their food out the way that I do. They didn't cut anywhere from 10 to 12 pounds of water weight the week of or do the two gallons of water to pull it all back off.

So I feel like, you know, all these years, you know, I've got 20 plus fights at one, 25 and I mean none of those were ever easy cuts I mean my coaches can tell you that they were I mean they were hard and they were always grueling so I mean I made them work because I had to because I'm a fighter you know by nature so I'm excited to be at 35 I feel like I finally get the full tank like I get to fight like a fighter that has a full tank of gas that I'm not running on fumes I love this fight so much I love the matchup you versus sarah Kaufman as I mentioned veteran she's also making her UFC debut and I think it says a lot about how they view you, that they're putting you in there against someone like a Kaufman who has been a Strike Force champion fought for the belt later on again against Ron Darousy.

What did you think when you were offered this matchup? Was this the kind of opponent that you were thinking for your UFC debut, or did you think they'd maybe bring you up a little slower? I mean, at this point in the sport, I mean, I've already built myself up. I don't expect anybody to hand me anything. So it's like, you know, at this point, I want to fight the best and go up against the best to see, you know, what I'm what I'm made of and also see what they're made. of. So, I mean, really, at this point, there's no easy fight for any female in the UFC right now. All of us know what's at stake. I mean, all of us know it's, you know, either we win, you know, or seek or swim, basically. You know, they'll replace us with someone else if we don't show. So, I mean, like, I don't, I welcome it. I mean, I think, like you said, it does say that the UFC does look at me as a very well, you know, well-respected fighter to put me up against someone like herself. And, I mean, I don't feel like I should be taken, you know, as lightly. I feel like she has. I feel like she has. as a veteran, you know, she was a champion. I mean, would people look at me different if they knew I had a belt?

Not really. You know, I just, I think that, like, I mean, I have just as many fights as she does. Sure. I mean, if not, if not more, I mean, as my overall record, as of right now, I'm 20 and one overall with amateur boxing, amateur MMA in my professional career. So, I mean, I'm a veteran to the sport also. I think it just, you know, it looks different because she, you know, was in strike force. And most people don't know.

I mean, Jan Finney was actually offered to me my third pro fight in strike force, and we were going to take it. It was actually the one in Ohio. And, you know, I just got done fighting, and we were like, you know what, let's wait before we go moving up to 35, you know. And I was so used to fighting at 25. So we're like, hey, it'll happen. We'll make that jump when it's the right time. And I hear you are about to make your UFC debut. And, of course, women's MMA this year, it has been the story of the year in the UFC with what Ronda and Liz Karmouche did in February and all the great fights since then.

on The Ultimate Fighter. Have you been watching the Ultimate Fighter? And how do you feel the women have been representing women's MMA? I feel like they're doing a great job. I really feel like, you know, they're working their butt off. You know, they want to be good advocates. And yes, of course, I watch it. I mean, what female, if any female in this sport says that they're not watching it, they're lying to you. If not, they're secretly doing it by themselves or recording it to watch it later. But I think it's awesome. I think the girls are doing a great job. I think that you can definitely see the difference of personalities. You can kind of tell that, you know, women are firecrackers, man.

It's hard to get them to get along. So it's neat to see everything how it's planning out. I feel like a fight like last weekend, like Jessamine and Rocky, you know, Rocky was an awesome fight for our sport because it shows that girls can really duke it out and they can fight all the way to the end if they really want something. So when you're sitting there, you may not have, you know, a dog in the fight, a friend fighting or whatever, but are you just rooting for great fights because it reflects on you and the rest of the women trying to make it because all of a sudden, I mean, you look at the ratings, the ratings are so much better when there's a woman's fight on tough as opposed to the men fighting at 135. So are you just kind of rooting for the success? It almost feels like a sorority of the women's fighters kind of banding together and just everyone's so happy when everyone does well. Is that the case with you?

Yeah, I think so. And, you know, I think a lot of these females out here, females are very good about supporting females. So I feel like all the females are like making their boyfriends, like watch the fights, you know, and stuff like that. Like, oh, no, we're watching the girls' fight tonight. So I do. I feel like we're all kind of got each other's back in that way. Even if we don't like one another, like we still have the same common goal and we can at least respect one another in that sense. Last time you fought, speaking of a veteran of a women's MMA, you fought Karina Damman. It was an outdoor show, local show, and it started to rain. What was that like? And how dangerous was that? Terrible. Okay, this is my fake gun.

All right, it was terrible. Ariel, it was absolutely horrible. I actually hope people will look at that fight and like cage like, man, is that how just fights? I'm a whopper. Right. They have no idea how slipper that cage was the entire night. I mean, it was literally like a slip and slide. I mean, it was thunderstorming.

It was hard on everybody. I mean, it just wasn't, it was like a weird, eerie night. And I was like, oh, my God, I remember this eerie night. Like, I remember this kind of. feeling and that was like kind of like when I lost the aisling so I like that whole entire time in the fight like I was just having a really hard time mentally staying focused because I was so mad that I couldn't sit down on my punches I couldn't kick the way I wanted to I couldn't compete I felt like I was fighting on a slip and slide and did it rain in the middle of the bout or at some point of the bout or

was it raining earlier I can't recall I remember watching the car but I don't know the whole time aerial it was literally sideways raining yeah as soon as my fight started as soon as me me and Karina went to walk out, it instantly started thunderstorming and sideways raining. And it was like a mist at first, and then it just continuously got worse and worse and worse and worse. And it was like, I know that the both of us really didn't get to fight the way that we wanted to. And I know that, you know, me personally, I knew I had a lot kind of, I just knew that there was going to be something bigger coming on. And I knew with a girl like Karina, I had to, I had to whip her and I had to beat her for people to respect me. and I feel like I didn't truly beat her the way that I could have, you know?

But as far as safety is concerned, hindsight, was that smart? Was it smart to fight at Rainsaw Cage? No, not at all. I mean, considering I had a back injury previously, like, I mean, that was something that was sitting in my back of my head. I was like, man, do I give it my own in this fight and then slip one round and then my back go out? Or, you know, something crazy like that? Or I slip and go end up breaking my arm because it was slippery and I couldn't. based out the same way. So, I mean, no, it was, it was really, really hard, but it was kind of funny.

Like, I almost feel like it made me a stronger fighter because I found myself mentally a lot more in that fight because I had, I had those physical struggles that I really had to mentally bear down. When you were 16, I don't know if you're referring to this back injury, but you were hit by a drunk driver. You broke your back, right? How long were you, how long were you, you know, out of commission for? And was that the experience that led to you becoming a fighter? Um, yeah, I mean, I think it has something to do with it. I was 16, obviously, when I broke my back and, you know, I was in a high school. You were, like, on the street and someone hit you. You were just walking, right, with your dad? Yeah, no, I mean, no, I wasn't just walking. I had a 19, my first car was the 1982 Dodge 600 drop top. So I was like the cool 16 year old in the country.

Look at you. Wow. And I had a digital dash. Okay, I don't know if you remember how cool those things were. But my car actually broke down, so I called my father. He came to help me. We basically parted the cars like this. So it was like his car, my car.

And I went to go get in the car. And the drunk driver actually sideswip and hit me first and ran me over and then pin my dad between both vehicles. And that kind of gives you like the gist of what, you know, actually happened in the car accident. And my dead had to have reconstructive knee surgery, a lot of minor injuries. I broke a thoracic, a T5, which is basically your thoracic, which is like in the middle of your back, and your cervical are the ones that basically paralyze you. So, you know, I spent about four months of my high school years bedridden and not in school, not being able to playing sports, which I am like a sports nut. I mean, football, basketball, track, softball, anything, I'm involved with it. And, you know, I really found out who my friends were.

You know, you're laying on a floor, you know, for four months bedridden because you can't walk. You know, and people didn't come see you. Like, people weren't there for you that were originally there for you. Like, it kind of makes you learn about yourself more because then you start really dealing with these emotions that you had never dealt with before. And I felt like it made me grow up pretty fast. So when I was able to start walking again, I was like, I want to walk, I want to run, I want to be able to do anything. So really at that point, you know, I felt like, I mean, what can't I accomplish? I mean, someone tried to take my life.

Someone tried to physically take my life from me and I fought through and I won. I mean, what physically can I do now? You know, and I think that's always been kind of like my mindset. And I've always believed in myself. And even if I didn't, there were other people around me to remind me how to. And now that I'm a woman, like I feel like I can encourage that night and I can keep that confidence. It doesn't go away.

It's always there now. And that's kind of my message for the thing. people is like, you know, truly believe in yourself. You can make dreams come true no matter what it is. And for the record, no lingering effects from that car accident. No, my previous, back injury was me doing dumb lifting stuff that I shouldn't have been doing to begin with and threw my back out like out of, literally it was like a freak accident, but it has nothing remotely to do with it. I'm actually much stronger now in my back, my upper back, that I was able to do things that kind of prehabit.

to make me stronger now that so I've never had any like neck injuries or any upper back problems at all. So when you were a young girl and you were overcoming that and you, you know, you made a full recovery, how do you get introduced to something like MMA and not be a little worried that, you know, with this, you know, accident injury in your, you know, back pocket, that something bad can happen to you? I'm an extremist aerial. I am, I'm literally a country girl.

Like, I grew up with my brothers and, you know, with people like we were just, I was was taught to never even be scared in any kind of way. You know, my, my dad, my dad raised me to be a tough person. I mean, he had a tough upbringing himself and, you know, we didn't have it easy as children, so I felt like it was just easy. That was the kind of mindset. And, you know, I had seeked out college. I'd seeked out doing other things. And when I found in MMA, it just, it fit, it fit, It fit my personality. It fit like what I almost like emotionally and mentally needed for like to not be angry about things that had happened to me in life or things that I felt were unfair that I had to start over or that I didn't get to, you know, I didn't get that soccer scholarship that I thought I was going to get because I took time out or, you know, I didn't just made me much tougher in the sense. Like when I went to MMA, if I was going to do it, I was going to do it wholeheartedly and I was not going to let anybody tell me not to.

What's going on with the nail polish over there? some pink and then one black one on each finger. Because it's funny. We always do it. We do the different colors, but I'm number one. So, like, we always do the different color like I'm number one. It's kind of, I guess, like, it's a single girl thing that me and my friends do. Okay.

I don't know if it's horny or cheesy, but we do it all the time. So I always, my index is always a different color compared to the rest. Well, your dad? It matches my, it matches my weighing outfit, which everybody will see. All right. And is the pink for breast cancer awareness, or is that just a, coincidence. Oh, it is. Okay, great. It is pink. I try to, last year when I've heard, yeah, last year when I fought for Bellator when we did here, I did a breast cancer thing. I sold

T-shirts for breast cancer. So I'm wearing my dogs forever, which is one of my sponsors, which I'm going to sign, you know, afterwards and do like a giveaway. Same with my way and outfit. It'll be all pink to, you know, represent no breast cancer. I mean, sometimes we need be voices. You know, I'm not trying to do it for any other reason. Like, I want people to see that. And, be able to help in any way that they can. Will your father be in attendance on Saturday night? No, he will not. I mean, it's a hard trip for him to come over,

but he's got some stuff he has to take care of here. So he'll be watching from home. If memory serves me correct, when we spoke to you prior to your last Bell tour fight, the last time we spoke to you on the show, there was a big reunion with your mother going down at that event, right? How are things with your mom now?

We're great. I actually, I went down this summer. I got to go see her house in Florida. Well, she has a remarkable house. You know, we talk a lot. You know, it's, it's awesome to be able to put some of the past behind us and, you know, be able to have, you know, that, that warm feeling like I have my mom in my life. So it's awesome. I mean, I just said her, you know, we text all the time. I mean, she texted me last Saturday and was like, oh, baby girl, you're going to do so great. I know you are. You

are built for this. And, you know, it's nice to have her around. It's nice to, you know, hear her voice and have her in my heart. Will she be watching on TV on Saturday? I'm sure she's going to be glued to the TV. I don't know she'll be watching. I think she might glue herself to the TV. How do you think you're going to feel when you're in there in the Octagon? I know you've wanted this for a long time and you've wanted to be sort of a role model for young women and be a good ambassador for women's MMA. What do you think it's going to be like when Bruce Buffer is announcing your name and there's a great crowd there, a sold-out crowd in Houston? How do you think you're going to feel? I can't wait. Ariel. Like my, I, I, I don't know. I,

I feel like I'm going to really come alive. I think that people think that, like, you know, other, like, I might be nervous or whatever. But, like, I'm an energy kind of girl. Like, I love when people, if people are in good mood, like, I absorb it. If people are in bad mood, I'm like, I hate it. You're in a bad mood. Get away from me. I'm absorbing your horrible energy.

So, like, the past, ever since I signed my UFC contract, my brother, who, you know, he lives with me, will put, like, on our TV, we have one of those smart TVs. And he'll put on, like, we all live. And like, it's Bruce Buffer's voice. So he's like, this is therapy for you, Jess. Just listen. Okay, so for weeks now, he's been saying it. He'll play it randomly throughout the house.

He'll just play, like Bruce Bopper saying, we are live. So I feel like I've played it in my head so many times. And, you know, actually to very lucky me in this sense that, you know, Steepin-My else, like my teammate is actually, that's where he made his UFC debut against Joey Beltrain. and that was actually my first UFC fight I had ever been to in my life. So, I mean, like, what are the odds of that? I'm making my debut in the same spot, my teammate made his debut. And it's like I'm familiar already.

Like, I know what Houston looks like. When I was down there, I went for a run all around the city. I remember how the wayans looked. I remember how the energy was in there. Like, I remember, like, how the fights were. I remember the way, like, when I close my eyes and I think about the fight, I can actually see myself inside the cage and see the Toyota Center. and I know exactly what it looks like.

And I feel like that's kind of like a mental advantage in a lot of ways. Do you see how the fight is going to play out? Do you envision that as well? I never do that. You know, I don't really try to envision it that way because, like, that's not the kind of person I am. Like, I just go out there. I expect for three, five-minute rounds. If it comes out shorter than that, then lucky me, you know?

So I try not to envision that much how to finish the fight because anything can go. and I mean I just I don't know I've just never kind of done that I've I mean the same thing with Zoyla like honestly when I fought Zoyla like I was expecting a kickboxing match I really was I was expecting a lot of kicking I did not expect that I think that's why like when I won the fight I freaked out the way I did like rain around the freaking cage like a

a freaked out squirrel you know it was a great celebration though and a great finish as well you see you don't envision how the fight is going to play out what about the steps you need to take to get a title shot in the UFC. Do you have any idea? Two wins, three wins, one win. What are you thinking? You know what? Yet again, I don't know. I got a four-fight contract with the UFC. So that means I basically give four opportunities to prove that I'm worthy enough to fight for a title. So, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens. If I'm sure if I make it good enough, I'm sure I could convince, you know, my new boss, Dana that I'm pretty legit. Well, you talk about, you know, feeding off other people's energy. Your energy is so great.

I feel in a better mood right now. You're so excited. It's great to see someone so excited to make their UFC debut. I'm looking forward to the fight. Always great to talk to you, and I look forward to seeing you in Houston as well. Good luck. Thank you. I can't wait.

There she is. Jessica Ai, making her UFC debut this Saturday night at UFC 166. It's on Fox Sports One prelims. Like I said, a great card, and that's on the undercard. And then the undercard also has Hector Lombard and Hussimarra's, Tim Boch, versus. C. B. Dalloway, KJ. Noons versus George Soderoplas. That's just the Fox Sports One car. We'll talk about the rest of the card later on, but it's a great one in Houston, and it's one that I think has

somewhat flown under the radar, but that being said, I feel like now things are starting to pick up. We've had a lot of time to digest it, and it feels to me like the last big UFC fight, title fight, was UFC 155, and of course that was a great one. And now we, you know, it's been some time. It's been almost a month since then, and now I'm jonesing for it. It's amazing what a little time off can do for your fandom, so to speak. So looking forward to Houston very much. One man that I believe will be in Houston, he's always there. He is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting men in the world of combat sports.

I always feel honored when I get just five minutes with this man. So I'm very excited right now. I'm talking about the UFC's VP of Regulatory Affairs, Mark Ratner. He has seen and done it all, and he joins us right now on the MMA hour. Mark, how are you? Very good, Ariel. I thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Did you say Hussimarthus was going to be on the Houston card? Did I say that? Maybe it was a... Yeah. Did I say that? If he is, I think he is. God forbid.

Well, yes. I shouldn't have said that if I did. I apologize. Maybe I was getting a little too excited, but that is a very good segue for my first question. Was it the right call in your opinion? You've been around the sport a long time to release him after what he did on Wednesday night? Absolutely because of his history. If this was his first offense, I would say, well, he didn't deserve the bonus, but since he's done this before, and I've heard other stories, I think you have to do what's right, and he was, Dana was completely correct in releasing it. And, you know, some people have scoffed at the Brazilian commissions giving him 120-day suspension.

In your opinion, does that mean anything? I mean, of course, now he can go out and fight for someone else, and maybe he'll get a fight sooner. But in the UFC, you kind of get three to four months in between your fight. So what does that really mean 120 days? Well, they thought they had to do something, and that means he is free to sign with somebody else. That would be up to him,

but he still cannot fight anywhere in the world for the next four months. Do you feel like the Brazilian Commission is doing a good job? I know you had a part in trying to help them get off the ground, and now they're kind of on their own, they're doing their own thing. You know, looking from the outside, looking in, how do you think they're doing this far? I think they're getting better and better. They're developing more Brazilian officials,

and I think that they're doing fine. They understand the importance of it, and I'm happy to say that they're progressing very, very well. So they choose the officials, they choose the judges, all that stuff? Yes, I send them some American recommendations, and it's up to them, or even UK recommendations. It's up to them to select who they want, and I'm always happy to send them a list of names, but it's up to them.

Mark, how come you never suggest Big John McCarthy, or do you, and we just don't see him? Big John, he was in Canada. He'll be working in California, and he's going to work in Kentucky. So he's doing more and more, so his plate is filling up. So do you feel as though he is getting the attention? and the love that he deserves as one of the top referees because he was on this show recently and he was very critical of Keith Kaiser

and said he'll never fight in Nevada as long as Keith is there. We'll get to Nevada in a second. But I still feel like Big John is being reprimanded for some of the things he said a few years ago and he's not being used as much as he should be. Well, I do believe he's one of the top referees in the world and I think you are seeing him more and more.

And if I were him, I would never knock another. state commission because the states do band together and they hear that an official is saying something bad about one of their brothers. So I've discussed that with him. I don't think that's the right way to handle it. So you think it was a mistake to say what he did a couple weeks ago about Kaiser? I believe so. I think that if he wants to have a complaint and he should do it more internally than externally

and not put it out there for the world. Is it a mistake to not, if you were in charge in Nevada, would you license it? him? Well, I never say hypotheticals. I would say that, yes, he's one of the top officials, and I expect him to be here one of these days. I don't know when that'll be, but I certainly never talk about his officiating. He's very, very good.

So right now, of course, you know, you made a great name for yourself as the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. You're obviously no longer there working for the UFC now, but they've come under fire, in particularly after the Floyd Mayweather fight, C.J. Ross and her crazy scorecard, and Keith Kaiser has received some heat. Again, you don't work for them. You have nothing to do with them, but now you're working for the promoter. How do you feel like Nevada is doing these days? As far as the officials they put out, the judges they put out, you know, the faces, the names that we keep hearing over and over again after maybe some questionable calls, decisions, do you feel like Nevada is kind of running itself like, quote unquote, the fight capital of the world? Well, I think what I would want them to do is deepen the pool officials that they use and use a few more out-of-state officials. I was at both the Pachial fight and the last one with Floyd,

and I certainly thought that Floyd won the last fight. I thought pretty simply, I had it 10 to 2, so I disagree with the 6-6-6 score. the Mayweather fight I thought was a once again, or the Pachial fight I thought it was 9 to 3. But I'm sitting in the stands, 10 rows up right in the middle of the ring, and watching it pretty intently, but it's not like being right on the ring. It is a little weird, though,

that we see some of these controversial figures coming back over and over again and some other ones not getting a shot, right? Yeah, you certainly want to spread it around as best you can. So, but that's a commission decision with the, the executive director makes a he puts it out there and then the commission either says yes we want all these guys or no

I'll change one so it both camps are involved so there's there's enough information out there but sometimes these fights are controversial at least the right guy won the Mayweather fight and that's the most important part to me

what was your you know protocol after a referee a judge does something controversial Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whenever the case may come up, what do you do to try to rectify the situation when you were the executive director of the NSAC? First thing I would do with either HBO or Showtime or ESPN, if there was a controversy decision,

is get as much fight film from them because sometimes they have other views that you don't see on television. So I try to get a couple different views and then bring the judge or referee in and then go over it round by round. try to find out what they saw that I didn't or that the public didn't. And one thing that I found, if Harold Letterman had the score one way and the judges had it a different way, then the phones would light up.

And Harold wasn't always right, or sometimes the judges weren't right. So it's always subjective. Are you happy from an MMA perspective with the way officials, let's say, judges, referees, the town pool is evolving. Like, you feel like there are enough people getting into this, doing the research, taking the course as necessary, is the talent pool getting deeper and deeper, or do you feel like you still only have the same faces

to deal with and assign the fights? We need to keep on getting it deeper. It is getting better. I make notes wherever we go. I'll be looking at some Texas officials this week. Australia has been very good. We've got a complete cadre of officials there, as we do in the United Kingdom.

So we're getting deeper. It's a worldwide sport. But we just need to keep on growing it. And in America, some of the commissions are used to some of these names, and they select them. But I always look at the locals. I think it's getting a little better, but we still have a lot of work to be done. The 10-point must system has become, once again, controversial, because Joe Rogan did an interview saying that it's completely crazy. It's a boxing model.

Kenny Florian wrote an article for Foxports.com about it. And it's been talked about a lot. How do you feel about the 10-point must system being used in every? MMA, do you feel like it's a boxing model that is being used improperly, or do you think it works? I think it does work. The problem with that system, whether it be boxing or MMA, is that not all 10-9 rounds are equal, and so certainly in a three-round fight, that could skew who wins. But for the most part, most of the decisions are good, but every once in a while, you're going to get one

that certainly goes against public opinion. But MMA is a lot harder to judge, in my opinion, then boxing, because you've got to know what's going on on the ground. When I first started over here, I thought that the guy underneath on the bottom could never went around, and I've certainly changed my opinion on that because there's a lot of guys who can do a lot from the bottom. So it's an evolving discipline, and I think we just have to keep on just really educating, and that's part of my goals. So you're okay with it right now. You don't feel like change needs to be done? No, I don't think that it would be that easy to change.

I'm not for the half-point system. I can understand it, but I think that the judges really concentrate and do their job, the 10-point must system can work. A couple weeks ago, a Brazilian fighter died while trying to cut weight for a shudo show over in Rio de Janeiro. This, once again, has brought to light the discussion of weight cutting, and especially on the local scene, you know, guys don't have the money to hire people like Mike Dolce, are they doing it the right way? And there was some talk.

You know, I know for one boxing match in New Jersey, they had this whole model about, you know, 30 days out. You'd be a percentage over. They'd weigh you, and then seven days and then one day. Do you feel like something needs to change to help the fighters not cut too much weight? Don't leave it for the last minute. Or do you think overall, here we are, 20th anniversary of the UFC, it's being done relatively safe?

Well, I don't like to see guys come in. Now, we bring everybody in on Monday night and Tuesday for a Saturday night fight. Right. And most of these guys in MMA signed their contracts 90 days out, 75 days out. Obviously, when there's injuries, they're much quicker. But if you sign a fight 75 days out, there's no reason to come on fight week on Tuesday, and we weigh everybody on Tuesday to have people 20 pounds above. Now, they know how to cut, but I think it's really wrong,

and I think we have to change the culture. and that's a big part of it. And what happened in Brazil, this guy was taking some weight-cutting, some kind of a drug that was good for weight-cutting. And he had to lose too much weight in too short a time, and his body shut down. And it's very, very, very, it's wrong and it's sad, and I think it can be fixed. Are you in favor of same-day weigh-ins? I'm not in favor of same-day. I think that you do need a time to rehydrate.

But I do believe in the case where a guy doesn't make weight and pays a fine and pays the other fighter so much money, then you should have a next day way in saying you only can gain so much weight for that particular scenario. Well, that's very interesting. And isn't it crazy when some of the commissions take the money, like the penalty? Shouldn't all that money go to the fighter? I tried to stop that in Nevada years and years ago. I do believe that there's no reason for the commission to get any part of it. What I was told by one of the attorneys, deputy attorney generals,

was at the time that the commission has to wait for an hour or something for the guy to reweigh is part of why they get 5% of the money or something like that. But I'm against that. And I think whenever we self-regulate, all the money goes to the opponent. But like I say, if a guy doesn't make weight and just wants to pay the fine, it happened in boxing with O'Leo Sajar Chavez. He made a deal, and the fight was signed at 162, and he ended up fighting a 172 and a half, and then he weighed 190 the next day. That doesn't make sense. You know, recently the UFC made a great decision, and I think you deserve a lot of credit for it.

After UFC 164, Ben Rothwell tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone, and the commission in Wisconsin decided not to punish him. but the UFC decided to give him a nine-month suspension, which was very interesting. Why did you decide to do this? Because he had gotten the exemption, but he didn't follow the instructions of the commission, and the day of the fight, when they tested him, his levels were elevated, and that's wrong, and that's, we feel very strongly about that. So if, and I try to make it like, if it wasn't the state of Nevada, this is what we would have done, what they would have done.

For Ben, he got lucky in the fact that it wasn't in a regulated environment like Nevada, and he got to keep the win. Here, he would have got fined, lost the win, and still had nine months. So he gets to keep the win. The decision is not changed, but you did come in and suspend him. Is this a sign of things to come? Because Dana White often likes to say we're regulated by the government. We let them do their thing.

We don't often see this situation happen. But if the UFC feels like the government in this case isn't doing their job, will you step in and give out a punishment if you see fit? Well, we have this code of conduct, and that's contrary to our code of conduct. So I think in this case, it was very much warranted. 90% or more times the state does exactly right. Wisconsin, this was the first TRT exemption, and they just didn't have anything in their rules to fine or to suspend. And so that's why we did it. I think they will put that in their rules, and that won't happen again there.

One of the big storylines heading into UFC 167 has been Johnny Hendrix and GSP going back and forth about VADA, WADA, all this stuff. GSP is doing VADA, Johnny Hendrix doing none of it, and Dana White not a huge fan of the talking point going into the fight. Where do you stand on VADA? And do you like when the fighters go off and do it on their own and not through a commission? Well, I don't like third parties being involved. I think if they're involved with the commission, I think that's fine. I want them to be in conjunction with, and I think you'll see more of that. If the fighters want to do it, I'm fine with that, whether it's VOTA.

There is no such thing as a WADA testing lab, and that's what you're doing to there. But I think what Nevada is doing is sending them to a WADA lab, that are water in Salt Lake. But they're both fine, and I'm against drugs and sports and there's nothing wrong with further testing. And if the guys want to do it, that's good. Nevada does have the right to test at any time. And they do do that.

So they're doing better. There's only so much they can do with their budgets. But any fighter who fights there has to be ready to be tested. at any time. Do you feel like more should be done, more random testing, things of that nature? I think you'll see more random testing in the future. I think that's...

I'm hoping more states do that, and I'm looking at that, so I think that's very important. Any update on the evolution of the UFC gloves? I know you've been working on this. We have centuries making a glove that's a little more rounded, so it would be a little harder to stick your finger out

and pokes a body in the eye, but it's not a perfect solution yet. I think it'll be a little bit better, but the fighters really need to keep their hands closed. And if they're grappling, it's one thing. But I don't think you'll ever eliminate eye pox. But I think it's better. It happened where I thought the referee didn't handle it correctly. He should have brought the doctor in, and then the kid could have, his eyes would have cleared. but we went over that at the ABC meetings,

and the protocol will always be bring the doctor in, which they did in Brazil last weekend. So you know, it's interesting, when you were hired by the UFC, you did such a tremendous job of getting the sport legalized all over North America, but now, as it stands, essentially New York is the only holdout. So, you know, you've done, you know, you've done the boatload of the work that you were hired to do.

So what is, you know, what is life like for Mark Radner now? Are you just kind of chilling and drinking peasant? a colladas at the office over there and not really doing much? Well, I wish it was, I wouldn't be happy if that was, that was the way I'm working on fights today in Manchester and then in Singapore and Brisbane and the next fight in Brazil. So I got plenty to do here as well as working with the Texas Commission. So, yeah, it never quite stops. I think when Lorenzo first talked to me, he said every once in a while you go to New York.

He didn't mention some of these other trips, so I've been very blessed to be able to travel through the world and really learn a lot about life, so it's been great for me. And as you know, we are doing the show in the great state of New York, and of course we still can watch MMA here. Are you feeling confident enough to give us some kind? I know last time you said 4060. Of course, it didn't happen in 2013. It's pretty much a wash at this point, but 2014, how are you feeling about this being the year? Well, I'm always optimistic. I'm always confident. I still say it's not a question of if. It's a question of when.

I was in Albany two weeks ago, and I made a speech before every county sent their representative, so there's 61 counties, and they were all wearing buttons and said, we love New York. And I said, my first part of my speech was, we have a button that we would love to be in New York. I made them laugh. So it's going to happen, whether it's this year or next. But I'm confident we'll be back in Albany in January. We're a fighting organization. I'm going to keep fighting. Do you think as long as Sheldon Silver is in power doesn't happen? Well, he's certainly been a detriment.

We've passed every committee, every vote overwhelmingly, and somehow we've never had a vote on the floor. I think last session we had a minimum of 95 to 100 votes we would have passed. We need 76. I think we had it. We had 67 sponsors or something like that. So it's sort of embarrassing that it's not about the sport. It's about a union power play.

So it's disappointing, but we'll just keep fighting. We'll be in Newark in January or February 1st, I guess it is. Yeah. So we'll be – they know we're around. By the way, you mentioned Singapore. We've heard that the UFC is going there in January. Can you tell us about any other news stops on the UFC calendar next? year. Not that I've seen yet, but I do know on the foreign ones, that's what I'm working on.

Sometimes I hear about things a little bit later, just like you guys, but no, that's all I know right now. It's going to be a big year. There's a lot of fights, and we just keep on Zoom. Like I said, you've seen and done it all in the world of combat sports. Is there one that sticks out? I feel like I could do a whole other interview with you just about your career, but there were so many hot topics I wanted to touch on, and thank you so much for answering them in sort of rapid-fire session. But is there one that sticks out, one moment, one fight, one evening that, you know, in your opinion was just above the rest? It was just the most memorable. And I'll go back to boxing on this one. George Foreman and Michael Moore, George Foreman

was completely out of the fight and he landed this huge right hand and knocked Michael Moore out. I think George was 44 or 45. That was a moment that was unbelievable. I certainly had fan man. I've had the bite fight. I've had a lot of crazy moments, but that was the most exciting moment. Where were you sitting when Fanman came into the arena and hit the ring? I was with my fingers on the canvas. I was in charge and all the rule books, and I read a lot of football and basketball rule books as well, and there's nothing there.

It says, what do you do when a guy flies into the ring? But what I did know was to go right to the timekeeper and find out exactly how much time was in the round and go to all three judges and say, make a note in case this fight starts again. and so you'll be able to judge that round. Oh, really? And what do you think about the, obviously, it's a long time ago, but the decision to keep them out there and all that, so do you feel like that the right call was made?

In retrospect, it's certainly easier after the fact. I should have sent them both to the dressing room. It was cold that night. And we just didn't know Michael Buffer has to get a lot of credit that night for keeping the crowd calm because nobody knew what was going on. If it would have happened in 2003 instead of 1993, it would have been a lot worse. People would have thought it was a terrorist

instead of just a guy flying into the ring. And I'm certainly sure that there would have been some kind of riot that night. But it happened. Michael kept the crowd calm, and the fight continued. It was just another wild night in my life. And, you know, we had Boom Boom, Boom, Ray Mancini on the show a couple weeks ago, and he told me,

somewhat surprisingly, that he wishes there were 15 rounds in boxing. He feels like real champions and legends are born around 13, 14, 14. and obviously this is somewhat surprising given his history and the tragedy that happened in the ring. Do you agree with him? The question I asked was, do you feel like there should be 10 rounds, given all that we hear now about, you know, concussions and brain injuries and whatnot? How do you feel about that? Do you feel like there should be more for the big championship fights?

No. I'm very happy with 12-round fights. I think that's the championship round, 11 and 12. It differentiates between the tens, and I think that was the right decision the WBC made 30 years ago or whenever it was. And there was a lot of exciting 15-round fights, but there was also a lot of 13, 14, 15, and nothing happened that people sort of forget about.

So, no, I'm happy with 12 rounds. Okay, final thing before we let you go, and I ask you about this privately in person, but want to talk about it briefly on the air. Can you tell me about the time you were obviously executive director in the Vassay Athletic Commission, and the WWF circus rolls into town, and it's WrestleMania 9 at Caesar's Palace.

What was that experience like? It was as fascinating as could be. It was outside. I marveled at Vince. He was in complete control of every facet of it talking. I watched him in his little booth there. He was talking to the referees, and it was just a complete show,

but I just didn't know he was that detail or all. oriented. And what I do remember, Yokozuna won the title, and he added for about 10, maybe 10 seconds, and somebody came in, and they took it away from him. Yes. Halk Hogan came in and took it away from him. Yep. I do remember that. Did you have to sanction that new match? Like, did they have to get the paperwork done? No? Backstage? None of that? What we did, we licensed everybody. Oh. And, yeah, so it was under our, under our purview. And they had to go to us. They had to pay us a gate tax, and they have lobbied successfully in the state of Nevada in most states that this is sports entertainment, not a regulated athletic event, so they didn't have to pay the gate tax

but I think it backfired because now they pay an entertainment tax to the state. And is it more than the gate tax? I think it's around the same, but they didn't want government regulation is really the bottom line. But I really enjoyed working with Shane and Vince, and I just think they do a tremendous job. They're great promoters, and I get to know some of the wrestlers, and there's some, the Undertaker, Rob Calloway, is a great, great MMA fan, and a great boxing fan.

Certainly Steve Austin's been to some of Brock's fights. Right. And JR, he liked to come into the fight. So, yeah, those are, I got some nice friendships out of it. And that's a great segue from my last question. Jim Ross retired from the world of professional wrestling. He was on our show and said he was very interested in joining the world of UFC. and I know he was at the office recently.

He met with Dana. He met with you. You're good friends with JR. What do you think? Do you think there's a spot for JR in the UFC? I don't know. I don't get involved in the broadcast world. I think he's a very, very talented broadcaster.

I enjoy him very much. I know he's in mourning for his Oklahoma Sooners today. He lives and dies. You can see him on the sidelines in his black hat right behind the coach. It's unbelievable. It is unbelievable. He can let him walk up and out there. But I think he's very.

talented and I'm sure that no matter what happened at WWE that either at WrestleMania or one of the shows that they'll bring him back for another cameo. But you don't think he'll work for UFC? Well, I've never discussed it with anybody and I don't know. I don't know what would be his role, but I just think he's just a great guy and a great commentator. I agree. Any sporting events are hitting up in Houston?

No sporting events. As soon as Houston's over, though, we are going to go to Sport Accord in St. Petersburg on the way to Manchester, Sport Accord, in St. Petersburg, Russia. So I'm looking forward to that. It's called the World Combat Games. So we're going to try to learn a little bit more about what goes on with them and to see if there's a place for MMA there. So it's going to be a very interesting trip, and I'll be gone next week. I still have a lot of football replay and basketball clocks to do, so I guess my plate is full.

Wait a second. Is this the famous Russia trip that Dana and Lorenzo, keep talking about. This has nothing to do with them, so to speak, this will be my traveling mate, Mike Merce and I, and we're just going to learn a little bit about sport accord and the World Combat Games. When Dana and Lorenzoville, that's on a much higher level. Okay, but this isn't a sign of things to come for UFC in Russia, because he's been talking

about this. Oh, I think that there's certainly a possibility of a fight there, but that would be, you know, to have to go through the logistics. and the regulatory process. But I'm looking forward to a new country and a new city and probably no sporting events there. But I've been very lucky. I've seen a lot of ball games this year, so it's been great.

And I had the pleasure of attending some with you. So thank you so much. And I've taken up way too much of your time. Really appreciate you stopping by, Mark. Thank you for the insight. Thank you for clearing up some hot topics on your side of the fence, as far as MMA is concerned. And I will see you in Houston.

Always a pleasure. All right. Thanks, Air. There he is. So long. Mark Ratner, UFC's VP of Regulatory Affairs, one of the most nicest, just a pleasure to always talk to. And you see him at the events, a wealth of knowledge.

And he has seen and done it all, as I said. I mean, you talk about fan man, the guy is sitting there with his hand on the canvas. Of course, when you're the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, you're at all these big fights. But when you can just sit back and think about all the big fights he's been at in Yokosuna versus what was that? It was Yokazuna Brett Hart, and then Yokozuna beat Brett Hart, and then Holkogen ran in and won the belt like 10 seconds later.

It was pandemonial. If you recall, Halkogan's eye was all messed up. It was black because supposedly a water ski had hit him in the eye. That was the story. I don't know if it was actually a real story, but that was what they were telling us. And I think, wasn't he wearing a mask or was that brewed's beefcake? Anyway, he was a tag team with Bruce Beefcake, but he did win the belt that night. And that was in Nevada.

That was at Caesar's Palace outside. Fun one, WrestleMania 9. So thank you very much to Mark Ratner. We are trying to get a hold of Junior Cigano. And he is obviously a very busy man because he is fighting this weekend in Houston. And he's on some kind of radio tour. And apparently the interview or interview. views before us ran long, so we're trying to get him. But he's a little late. And we won't stand for that.

I don't care if you're fighting for the title. I don't care if you're running for president. You know that when it's your time to shine, when your number is called, as Chale Sondon likes to say, on the MMA hour, you show up. And if you don't, by the time, your lot of time ends, Well, we haven't had to ban someone from the show for a long time, but we are staring at eight minutes away from a ban of Junior Dos Santos. The last time we banned someone, I believe, was Brendan Shaw prior to his fight at UFC 145 when he no-showed us. Of course, things are very good now with Brendan and I,

but he did no-show us, and some others have no-showed us, of course, most famously been folks in his 10-week ban. Mike Chiapetta refused his ban back in the day. if you recall. But I kind of pulled the switcheroo on him on that one because he said he wasn't going to accept the ban, but I just didn't book him on the show. So officially, you may not acknowledge the ban, but I'm still not going to book you on the show for as long.

And it was only like a three-week ban. It wasn't a big one, but he was late. He said he had something to do interview or something like that. But we are staring at seven minutes away from Junior Dos Santos. That gives us some time now to run down UFC 166. I did mess up. Twitter told me. I think I may have gotten it.

Damn it. Twitter told me that I messed up. I did say Husseemar Paul Harris versus Hector Lombard. I was rifling them off there as I was getting ready for Mark Ratner on the show. Of course, Hussi Mard Paul Harris fought Lombard in December in Australia. And of course, we will get to the Paul Harris thing, especially with Mike Pierce, who should be joining us last. And then I'm sure a lot of you have questions about it.

But some other fights of note. Well, I told you about the Fox Sports One card. Tim Boch, C.B. Dalloway, that's the main Fox Sports One card. Hector Lombard versus Nate Marquart. At 170, Hector Lombard's welterweight debut. Jessica I versus Sarah Kaufman and K.J. Noons versus George Sutteropoulos. Also of note on the prelims, this is on the Facebook prelims, Adlon Amagov versus T.J. Walberger, Tony Ferguson versus Mike Rio.

And Jeremy Larson, in my opinion, is fighting the man who is the owner of the best nickname in mixed martial arts today. The best nickname. There is no one who has a better nickname than his opponent. His opponent's name is Andre Feeley. And he has a great record. He fights out of Team Alpha Male. Of course, you know about Uri Fabor and T.J. Dillishaw and Chad Mendez, Joseph Benavides, Danny Castillo. You know about those guys.

And they did suffer their first loss as... as a member of Team Bang or Team Bang fighters, Bang Ludwig, as their head coach, they were undefeated. I believe they were 14 and O going into last week's fight against Hafeel Sunsao. So they did suffer their first loss last Wednesday when Dilsha lost to his Sunsau via decision. But Andre Feeley, who is taking this fight on less than two weeks notice, his nickname is, well, his name, this is the full name with the nickname. I just think it's so brilliant. Andre touchy Feeley

That's just brilliant Is Bruce Buffer really going to say Andre Tucci Feeley on Saturday night in the Octagon? Is that really going to happen? Because if so, I think it's great. And Feeley, by the way, is spelled F-I-L-I.

Andre Tachy-Feeley. Also on the Facebook prelims, Kioji Horiguchi against Dustin Pague. The main card, John Dotson versus Dowell Montague, Gabriel Gonzaga versus Sean Jordan

Gilbert Melendez versus Diego Sanchez which a great fight at 155 Daniel Cormier DC versus Roy Nelson and then the main event Kane Velasquez versus the MIA Junior Dos Santos Hey New York Rick, can I ask you something?

I'm here Should we maybe do the old swap? I mean we're about to approach Romney's time and this is a guy who is usually very punctual you know, should we try to do the old swapparoo at this point? I mean, it really depends on Junior. Listen, Junior Dos Santos is not going to dictate my show, you know, when I have my guess. So we're either having a three-minute interview with the guy or we're going to do the old swapperoo.

Yeah, we can, you mean swap junior to the end or swap? Well, we do, we do Rami now and then we deal with Junior when he comes. I mean, at this point, he's not here. Okay. I thought you meant swapping with Rami. to the end and Junior if he called in now. No, no, no. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Obviously, if he calls in, I'm going to try and reschedule it for the end. We want Junior. Or the end, or just let me know via the Gmail. But at this point, let's move along. Disappoint it. It is very disappointing. And is it a sign of things to come for Saturday night?

Who am I to say? But he is obviously a very busy man, a title contender, and we will give him the benefit of the doubt. But we know he's healthy. We know he's okay. So that's why I'm able to give him a hard time here, because they have told me that he is just a little backed up, but they may not realize who they're dealing with here,

with the bands and whatnot. I want to tell you, so our next guest is Rami Gannauer, who is the founder and director of Fight Metric. Did I finish the main card? I did finish the main card. Anyway, Fight Metric today announced something very cool. They announced this new program, I guess you can call it, called Strength and Numbers.

This was the press release that they sent out. Fight Metric announces, let me just make this bigger because I can't see anything. Fight Metric announces Strength and Numbers programming, donating $5 to charity for every minute of Octagon time.

Fight Metric is thrilled to announce our Strength and Numbers campaign to promote charitable giving and support important causes. For every minute, a UFC fighter spends inside the Octagon, Fight Metric will donate $5 to a worthy charitable

organization. For 2013, Fight Metrics Strength and Numbers program will benefit the Fisher House Foundation. Fisherhouse Foundation is best known for the network of comfort homes built on the grounds of major military in Virginia Medical Centers nationwide or VA, excuse me, medical centers nationwide, and in Europe. Fisherhouses are beautiful homes donated to the military and Department of Veterans Affairs, VA Veterans Affairs. These homes enable family members to be close to a loved one. at the most stressful time during the hospitalization for a combat injury, illness, or disease. This is very interesting now. To date in 2013, and all the fights in 2013 inside the octagon, UFC fighters have earned over $15,000 for the Fisher House Foundation with nine events left to go this year.

That's pretty amazing. So over 15,000 minutes of action has happened inside the octagon, and that's why they're donating over $15,000 to the Fisher House. FightMetrick will keep track of total octagon time in the graphic below. This is on their website. You can go to it at FightMetric.com to allow others to make pledges to an organization of their choice at whatever level they are able. A pledge of even one penny per minute will mean $40 to $50 for a worthy cause. How about that? Keep checking FightMetric.com for the running tally for each event and for the year.

For more information about the Fisherhouse visit Fisherhouse. This is brilliant. So the, in fact, so the official number is 50 minutes, 8 seconds, 19 milliseconds. Current donation, $15,000, $26.58. That's great. I love that. This is one reason to root for decisions, especially in title fights. $25 right there if you're doing a dollar a minute.

So kudos to Fight metric for doing that. and we're going to be joined by Rami in a matter of moments here to talk about coming up with this and also the growth of fight metric. Now King Mo giving me a new number to call. Everyone's switching things up on me here. You know, you've got to put the dashes in between the numbers because then it just looks like one long number and it's hard to distinguish between them. King Moe up after, Rami, an interesting thing about King Moe, as I mentioned, he is fighting, Emmanuel Newton on that Bell Tour pay-per-view. But very good friends with both Daniel Cormier and Roy Nelson,

and I'm curious to get his take on the fight that is coming up on Saturday night. And also interesting about that fight, Daniel Cormier always corners Cain Velasquez. Kane feels comfortable with Cormier, his wrestling coach, in his corner. Is he going to be able to have the fight, do the medicals, Get back out there for the main event. They're back to back. So very interesting. For now, let's go to the phone lines and welcome in the aforementioned.

Rami Ginnauer of Fightmetric.com and, of course, FightMetric as a company. Rami, how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks, Ariel. So did I butcher your last name? No, did I butcher your first name? No. So we're good.

Great. We both nailed it. I've just been running down this new program that you announced today, which I think is fantastic. I love this. Where did the idea come? for strength in numbers. I think it's just such a great idea. It's something that we've wanted to do for a long time,

just to increase the amount of charitable funds that we're giving out to the company. And the inspiration comes from something that I've seen in other sports for many years. If you go to a baseball game pretty much everywhere, you'll see somebody who donates, let's say, $10 for every strikeout that the team's pitchers will record. So it makes a lot of sense to try to find an analog here in mixed martial arts where we can take something that everybody can see, we can allocate some funds against it,

and then ultimately the best part of it is that we get to benefit a worthwhile organization, in our case. For this year, it's the Fisher House Foundation. And is this, you know, so the money, like where does it come from? Is it just coming from FIP metrics straight? Yeah. The point of it initially is just for us to be able to donate to a worthy cause, and if we can draw a little bit of attention to it,

so that others who would like to participate as well, If there's anybody out there who wants to do something similar, we would love to be joined by anybody who's able to at whatever level they're able to do. We'll be tracking the information. So if you want to pledge a penny, 10 cents, however much you can afford, follow along with us and donate to any organization. It doesn't have to be Fisherhouse. If there's a charity that you support in your personal life,

then go ahead and do it with us. Anything that we can do to help get money into the hands of worthy organizations is a net positive. So someone can go to fightmetric.com and actually sign up and you will track the numbers for them? Because what if someone just doesn't have the time or the ability to track how many minutes were spent as far as action is concerned inside the octagon and all that stuff? We'll be tracking the information. There's no sign up for it. It's just come back and take a look at the number and get out a handy calculator and multiply it by whatever it is, by a dollar, by a penny, and you'll be able to see how much the pledge would be.

Fight metric has blown up over the last couple years. I think with the UFC's New Deal with Fox and them showing a lot more statistics, you guys are all over the broadcasts. So I want to start from the beginning so people understand how this whole thing started for you guys. When did the company launch and why did it launch? Why did you feel like this is something that was needed in the sport of mixed martial arts? The first inklings of it were the middle of 2007, about April of 2007. And it started because there was nothing else like it.

I was doing some writing at the time, and I would normally have relied upon statistics for mixed martial arts the same way as I'd relied upon baseball statistics when I wrote about baseball, football statistics when writing about football. But in the case of mixed martial arts, there was nothing to rely upon. So it became something of a pet project or a hobby for me to take a look and see if there was a way to include some numbers. it didn't start out as a business. It wasn't intended to be so, but once the numbers got into the hands of the mixed martial arts community fans, the UFC, people looked at it and said, you know, this is something which we really could get behind. And ultimately it took on a life of town. It started as a nights and weekends thing, and then it turns out that I was doing more of that work than I was of my regular day job.

And I ended up quitting my day job in 2009 and doing this full time. What was your regular day job? I was a corporate strategy consultant. Wow, this is a lot more exciting. Exactly as exciting as it sounds. So you're a loving life now? I really shouldn't complain. I do sometimes, but that's my wife's problem,

and I shouldn't complain. I say this from time to time to her, and she knows that it's true that I'll sit there, and I say I just can't believe I can pay to do this. You know what's interesting. Obviously, so you say the company started a few years ago, but you have statistics for old fights, So do you guys then have to go back and get the stats for all these old fights?

And if so, how long did that take? Yeah, we had to go back and do everything. Wow. And it's the ultimate goal to do everything of everything. As I said, back in the early days, I would never, ever consider the data collection effort to be complete. There's always more that we can do to get data, and more data is better data. So how long did it take a couple years, I think? And that was just for the UFC.

In the meantime, you know, we filled in some other gaps in the MMA canon, be it pride or strike force or WEC and affliction and all its two-show glory. And where do you stand right now as far as recording the stats for all of the major fights in MMA history? What percentage do you think you've completed? I have no idea because you can pretty much call anything major. There's no bar. I would love if we could do even more data collection than we do today. Sometimes it's a challenge of logistics and sometimes it's a challenge of financials, but ultimately as much data as we can get our hands on is for the good.

And right now in the UFC, have you completed it all? Yeah. I think there's 19 fights from the very early days that nobody, including the UFC's archivists, can find the footage for. Wow. So we're good on the UFC. see except for these 19 fights and one of them is like my my white whale there's a there's a mathew's fight in there which you'd be surprised because he's such a big

name but for whatever reason they just cannot locate that one matt hughes fight uh so there's there's just one fight for mat hugh's career that's missing but you know the results of these fights yeah certainly we know the results from everything but if we wanted to go and and get the complete history there's the ultimate recording of data on the ultimate fighting championship, I'm afraid that it may be impossible unless they go in a warehouse somewhere. There's somebody at home who may have a VHS recording, and we'd be lucky if we could get it, but I'm not keeping my fingers crossed anymore.

I think these ones might be dead. How do you guys pull up the stats so quickly and say, okay, he landed this many like strikes or this many significant strikes, and that beats this and this? What is the system that you use that allows you to then break everything down and get the previous? that so you need to compare what's happening right now too? We have a database. That's the simple answer.

Okay. We have a great and thorough database of information. It's incredibly deep and incredibly broad, and it allows us the greatest flexibility in doing our research that we can take a look at guys and do a simple ranking. You know, we have a stable of queries, which you can just press a button, and it'll call up the information for you in a fraction of a second.

So if we want to know who's landed the most strikes, in UFC history are the most in a fighter. You get down into esoteric statistics, what was the greatest, you know, statistical comeback or who's landed the most leg kicks in a loss. There's all these different combinations that we can always pull up, and it's just a matter of knowing how to manipulate the database. And I'm not a technical person by nature, but I'm getting a little better when it comes to creating these queries and modifying them as our needs are.

Do you have a favorite quirky stat? Something that we mean I know I know. I'm totally putting you on the spot here, but is there anything that comes to mind? as a fun stat that you like to tell people that's just something that no one else really knows? That's a good question. I don't. You know, we get emails all the time from people who have interesting questions, and it's always fun when there's something that we've never thought of before.

This morning, or last night, early in the morning, I got a question from a guy in Australia, and he said, who has the most wins in UFC history without a decision? Who has the most wins in UFC history without any of those wins coming by way of decision? Do you a guess? Oh, you know the answer? Yeah, well, I had to look it up because once somebody asks a good question, I can't sleep until I know the answer. I'm going to go with Chuck Liddell. Vitor Belfort.

Vitor Belfort. Wow. 12 wins, no decisions. And if you want to know just people from the modern era, you know, from the era in which there was judges and five-minute rounds and all that stuff, it's Gabriel Gonzaga. 10 wins, no decision. You know what's – okay, so I must admit, I sort of misunderstood the question. I just thought most in a row So Vitor and Gabriel

have never gone the distance in the UFC, that's what you're saying? They've never won by going the distance. Vitor lost by decision. Right, right, right, right. But they have the most wins without a decision win. Yep.

So these are the questions that... That's fun. You know, who would thought of that except for some guy in Australia who had the... He was nice enough to pitch it our way, and once that happens, it just sets the wheels in motion

and there's nothing we can do until we know the end. answer. So backstage at the UFC events, I'm doing the stuff for now Fox Sports, and I'm often right next to the fight metric team, and I love watching these people work, because it's usually, you know, some youngsters, and they're sitting there, and they're, they have to be so focused. I'm always afraid to talk to them, because I don't know what they're doing, they're sitting there with these kind of remote controls, and I heard, correct me if I'm wrong, that these are just old joysticks from an old video game console, and you guys bought them, and now you've programmed them to do what they

need to do to score the fights, not score the fights, but to keep the stats of the fights. Is that accurate? Kind of, yeah, we were looking for a particular button configuration. You know, we needed, we had a certain set of statistics that we needed to track, and to be able to do that on one game pad, we needed to find something that had a particular set of buttons in a particular configuration, and set about looking online and finding whatever it was, we found one controller in particular that worked, and I ended up, I've gone on eBay over the course of a couple of years, and when there's one for sale, I'll snap it up.

These things are about eight or nine years old, and we've probably bought about 50 of them over the course of a couple of years. And so when these, so usually have three youngsters there, and then there's one guy kind of like the master. What exactly are they doing? Is one focusing on one fighter and doing everything for that fighter, and another are they taking turns? What exactly are their roles?

Well, I should clarify at this point that the people who are backstage are doing one set of data collection, which we would call live or preliminary stat. And that's information which is intended to be real-time in the moment. It's good for a rough draft or a decent guess at what's going on. And then we have a completely separate outfit off-site who's doing this in slow-motion, collecting what we call our official data. And that's the day that we stand behind because we can go back and review things that happen really fast in slow-motion.

It's just impossible to try to collect accurate statistics in real time because these things happen, you know, people will throw multiple strikes in under a second. And there's, like every magician ever told you, the hand is quicker than the eye. It's just not possible to see and record. So the people who we have on site and they're backstage at the venue, it is a team of three people. We'll have one guy who's assigned to Fighter A, to look to the Red Fighter. It's another person who's assigned to Fighter B. And there's a third person who's doing what we call time and position, and that person is collecting. timekeeping information on, how much time did the fighters spend in each of the positions?

How much were they standing on the ground? When they were on the ground, who was on top? If he was on top, was he in mount, was he in back control, how much time did they spend? So it's a timekeeping function. But when we have the official data collection, it's very, very important that there be only one scorekeeper for both fighters within a fight. And the reason why that's important is because you need to make sure that you always have an apples-to-apples comparison within a single fight if you have two different scores,

despite the fact that we have very rigorous methodology, you can't breed out any kind of, you know, all the variance between two different people there. They see things slightly differently. So we need to make sure that for official purposes, it's always one person scoring the fight for both fighters. Obviously that's impossible in real time, but luckily, like I said, we use slow motion,

so people can go back and rewatch the footage as many times as necessary to be able to get the most accurate count humanly possible. How did you figure out that this needed to be done to properly record the stats for these fights. Did you visit the stat keepers for MLB NFL? Because it sounds like you didn't really have much of a history building a company like this. You were just really interested in it.

So how did you figure out that this was the way to do it? I would say for a person who comes from a data collection methodology background, and I do have some, it should be obvious at the first glance. If you watch MMA and you watch enough, If you watched one event from beginning to end, I will guarantee you that you will see one fight, which if you're being serious about it, you'll look at and say, I could not, for the life of me, be able to count the stuff in real time with what I would consider to be a serious accuracy. There's just going to be one of those times when the two guys are going to go crazy.

Even one of the guys could go crazy and he's going to flail. If you want to see the sine qua on, if you want to see the fight that tells you for 100% that you can't ever do this, just watch the first 14 seconds of Diego Sanchez, person's like we do. It's all it takes. If you can watch that and you can tell me that you'd be able to score whether each of those strikes from both guys landed in real time, I would congratulate you, but I don't believe it's possible. And okay, so often people like to criticize Fight Metric and say, well, these stats don't really tell the story, significant strikes, you know, where are they on the ground, where there's

a flurry on the ground, it doesn't really capture the essence of the fight, and you can't really put all your eggs in that basket. What do you say to the doubters? of fight metric and the way that you record stats. Well, I would agree with the statement that you can't expect the statistics to tell the entire story of a fight because I wouldn't expect them to do that. It's not intended to do that. You have to watch. If people would say, is it possible to take the statistics and use them as a replacement

for judging, I would say no. You really do have to watch. If you want to know who won and who wins is clearly a subjective decision, you're not going to be able to take the numbers and somehow conjure up a decision which is going to satisfy everybody. However, you will be able to see things in the numbers that you may not be able to have seen with your naked eye or that you just may have glossed over because by watching the fights that you react emotionally to certain things and you may not see the other stuff, if there is one guy who does one thing that's really incredible, that may overwhelm whatever your senses

were to the stuff that you didn't see, or perhaps by watching it in slow motion we're able to notice things that people can't with the naked eye. So the data being what it is, we believe to be extremely valuable, and it's proven itself time. And again, if you take a look at what the data says and you're able to do statistical tests for significance, it tells the story of fights. It may not, in every instance, tell the story of every fight.

That's the best that you can ever hope for with statistics is that it's going to tell thus the stories. However, on an individual fight-by-fight basis, when you take a single sample and a single observation, you can't be sure that this is going to be the one in which the data tells you one thing, but your eyes may have told you something else. And when that happens, it's okay.

It's not a problem to be able to say, hey, I think I saw something different than what these numbers say. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. But we know, because we've tested it mathematically, that overall the numbers say what they should, and they do tell us what we need to know about the sport. Speaking of criticism, I have been somewhat critical of the ranking system,

I feel like there are too many people involved, and that might not be your domain, and UFC sent out a lot of these invitations. Dana White has been critical of it, or at least the decisions and the choices, who goes where. Are you happy with the way the rankings are now, or do you feel like there are some flaws? My big issue is that sometimes, you know, like Bachel Sondon, that's an obvious one. People don't know where to put him, and as a result of, you know, the law of averages, he drops when, you know, he shouldn't be below Shogun, he just beat Shogun, and then people figure it out or someone like Dominic Cruz going above a Chris Wyman after he just fired. There's a lot of little things that kind of irk me, and I think if it was maybe streamlined and there were less people involved, it would be better.

How do you feel about the rankings right now? There are definitely a couple of things that annoy me. The two things that annoy me the most is, for whatever reason, it takes one entire cycle for people to make up their mind about what happened the night of the fight. So, you know, a guy will win, and then there'll be an immediate ranking cycle, those rankings will come out, let's say, on Monday. And then the next time, the next event is an event a week later, the next event, suddenly the same guy who won the week before will go up again.

And I don't know if it's because the people who are ranking or waiting to see what everyone else did or it takes them more than 24 hours to digest what they saw. Now they really think that the guy was better than he was. I don't know why, but for whatever reason we're seeing this ghosting effect where someone will have one effect immediately after the fight and then it takes another week or another cycle for the full effect to play out. And the other thing that I think can be improved is that we don't get consistent participation

from the entire panel from event to event. And that's why you see some of these moves up and down from people who don't fight. You know, you'll see two guys swap places when they didn't compete, and it looks really strange. And the reason why is because, you know, we get about 75 people every time,

but it's not necessarily the same 75 people every time. The total pool is like 85 people, and we just get a different subset. So you may get a slight variation from time to time because you get a different pool of people. And that's something which I think the rules need to be cracked down so that people who are not consistent from people who don't rank every time. Maybe we need to do something about that.

But ultimately, I would consider them to be a success. I think that they pass the smell test, which is the first goal. You know, you have to come up with something which is not ever absurd. Maybe one person's rankings. We have one panelist whose rankings are a little bit off or a lot off, but in the aggregate, I think that the rankings are certainly viable. The second thing is that this is the largest number of people who've ever been consistently ranking people at any one time. You've seen panels in the past of maybe 10, 15 people,

and we have a pool of 85 people who are participating in a panel after every single UFC event. It's pretty remarkable to be able to get that level of participation and engagement from people who are giving their opinion, whether you agree with it, agree with it or you don't. And by the way, I should make clear that fight metric kind of runs the ranking system, the whole metric, if you will, for the UFC. And by the way, how did you score the UFC deal? And that must have been a big game changer for you guys. Yeah, and before we get to that, we don't participate in the ranking.

Sure, of course. We don't pick the people who participate. We're just the accountants. Right. We do the tabulation. But the UFC deal came about because I was persistent in the very early days and trying to get them to take some statistics and use them for really any purpose. And the first purpose that made sense was to produce some information for the broadcasters

to use during the telecast. So if you've ever seen the game notes that come out for baseball or basketball, there's always a sheet of paper which has information for the broadcasters to refer to during the game to say something interesting happens and you'd be able to look at your sheet and know that that was the first time it's ever happened or whatever the case may be. So that was the initial participation that we had was to give some talking points to the broadcasters and that started at UFC 87. The first fight was the GSP versus John Fitch fight.

And then it continued like that for a while and eventually people got more comfortable with the idea of statistics. We were able to show that they produced some value and the fans started to look at them a little bit more seriously as well. And once that happened, then I think everything just evolved organically from there to the point where today we're able to do statistics. We have rankings. There's fantasy games.

There's all manner of different ways that people can use the statistics and interact with them. And the goal, ultimately, is just to give people another tool to engage with the sport on a deeper level. If you're passionate, if you love mixed martial arts, then the statistics will hopefully increase your engagement and you'll be able to find something in them that you didn't know before that you maybe can pull out of your hat when you're talking to somebody about it in the future. Well, congratulations.

I love it. I think you guys are doing a great thing for the sport. I use it on the broadcast. I use it here all the time. I use your statistics. I love the knowledge that you guys bring in the information. So it continued success to you and the rest of the team over there. And congratulations on launching the strength in numbers program.

I think it's fantastic. Before you got on, in case you're wondering, I read the whole press release so people can understand what it's all about, and they could read more about it at fightmetric.com. And one last thing before I go, someone's asking me on Twitter, just in case they can help you out, what's that Matt Hughes fight that you're looking for? Maybe someone has it on tape somewhere. I think it's the Valerie Ignatsov fight, or, give me one second. Or you can tweet it to us, and we'll retweet it.

In general, if you give me four seconds, I can tell you anything. Valerie Ignatoff, there you go, UFC 22. If anyone's got it, I'll come up. I would be very appreciative. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Rami. Again, continue success. We appreciate everything that you guys are doing, and this new program is fantastic. So happy to have you on. It was fascinating. Really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. There he is. Rami Gannauer of Fightmetric. Check them out over at Fightmetric.com. Tons of stats for every UFC bout. It's a really great tool to learn more about the fights that you'd love to watch. Okay, let's move along now. And we got a great guest, of course, good friend of the show. It's been a while since we talked to him.

I'm happy to have King Mohammed Lawal on the show. He returned to the Beltor cage on November 2nd on their pay-per-view. Big rematch against Emmanuel Newton. Kim Moe, how are you? I'm good, man. Just chilling, man. What's up with you? I'm doing all right.

It's good to have you on the show. You know, I want to ask you, first and foremost, before we get to Newton, I've been thinking about you a lot leading up to UFC 166, because you are good friends with Daniel Cormier. You're good friends with Roy Nelson. What's your part in all of this? Have you helped either man prepare for this fight? You know what?

As far as, like, y'all go out there and have a good time fighting and get paid That's the only way I'm going to help them You know, like, you know, damn, damn, we and Dan are real tight, but no damn forever, you know what I'm saying, because I first started wrestling. Me and Roy have been training for a while

up until this fight, but, you know, it is where it is, man, it's a business thing. They're both making money, and, you know, I wish the best, I wish they both come out on arms and I hope to get paid set checks. But is it weird for you?

Like, are you unhackaged? because you can't train with either man, right, for this fight? Yeah, it's weird, but, you know, it's weird, but the thing is at the same time, I got a fight coming up, so I'm training with guys like Andrea Spang, Jamie the Beech Wilson, you know, I've had guys coming in and out, you know what I'm saying, and Michael Hunter, Andrew Badi, I got Leo Bolo Saral coming out to train me, DeWan wins from Iowa State, he's a, you know, top eight wrestlers in the nation, the U.S. team, he came out.

So, you know, I got a different style, guy I'm fighting for. So for me to tell me either Roy or Daniel would be, wouldn't be, you know, pointless because a man's a different style. So I'm trying for my fight. They're trying for theirs. It is where it is. What do you think of Daniel saying that he wants Roy to cut his beard? Do you think that's, you know, mind games? You can do that kind of stuff, or do you think it's a low-blow? I don't know. I don't know. I've never heard of it, you know what you got to do. You know what you got to do, You know what I'm saying? If it's mind games, if he's a cut his beard, it's a cause of beard.

If you don't, he don't. You know, I don't care what you guys on. If you got them two-hound gloves on or three-hous gloves on and, you know, you're following the rules, I don't care. You know, with Daniel, I have a different motive, so who knows? Well, you've trained with Roy. Do you feel like he has an unfair advantage because he has that big beard? I don't think the beard helps you. You know, so if anything, I think he can be a big beard.

I think it gets hurt you because, you know, like when I have the head, I can grab the chin a lot better because, you know, there's more gripped on it. You know, you get hit in the face, you get hit in the face. I don't think that any type of hair will protect your face, you know what? You know what? They should do a study on it. They should do it on science. They should do it on sports science. That's a great idea.

I love beard, so I'm curious if it actually, because, you know, people used to say that about Kimbo and other fighters. Johnny Hendricks has a big beard. So I wonder if it actually does help or hurt you, like you say. I think it hurts you, especially if you get cut. So you get cut there, well, they can't find the bleeding as easy, you know what's easy. You know what I'm saying? So that could affect you, you know, the blood. But who knows?

I really don't know. I think that more than anything is just that they don't want to get, you know, hair everywhere because when I had a beard, there's times that my, my beard from my hair would get my mouth or get my eyes, you know what I'm saying? It mess me up. You know what I'm saying? So, you know, I just kept it for combat, you know what I'm saying?

training, but, you know, sometimes the beer's hit or miss, you know what I'm saying? Some people are comfortable with it. Some people are lame. Who do you think wins? Putting you on the spot now. The fans? Hey, the fans. The fans always win when it comes to you guys that like the fight.

Daniel will fight, you know, Daniel will come and bring a fight, you know what? He's smart with his style. What else? He just comes to be in the fight, and he's going to knock you out. So you'll have, like, you get chriper styles, and I think that a lot of times you get in a stupid styles, you get a good fight. Sometimes he has the same style. gotta make adjustments so they can make it easier for himself.

But you're not going to pick a winner, and I can understand, but I have to ask. I'm not good at predictions anyway. All right. But what do you think about Daniel's decision to go down to 205 after this, given his history with cutting weight? Do you think it's smart for him? If you're not smart, you can, you know? If he does it smart and he gets someone to help him, yeah.

You know what I'm saying? That would be good scissors for him. So you got a fight coming up. You have a very big fight coming up. It's on the Belator pay-per-view, and it's obviously a rematch against Emmanuel Newton. First, I have to ask, because it's been a controversial topic. Your fight, the Chandler-Alvarez fight, Pat Curran's fight, some great fights on that card. But the main event is Rampage v. Tito.

Are you bothered by that at all? No, I'm not bothered. Because what comes down to, as long as I'm fighting, I'm good. Some people get mad and, oh, you know, that shouldn't be to have them cares. I'm saying. The fights are on a fight. It don't matter if it's the first fight for the last fight. There's all the fights are on the car, that's all it matters.

You're a big fight fan. I mean, I don't know anyone who is a bigger fight fan, not just MMA. You just study and you can talk about anything. Does this fight interest you at all? From a fan's perspective, are you interested in seeing what Tito and Rampage can do against each other in the cage? Well, you know, yeah, it's the thing is like, you know, for me, I just want to see what they got left. You know, because if Rampage is motivated and trained hard, you know, he can, you know, easily not got Tito, but I saw Tito, and Tito's been walking around at T20 for the past, like, two or three months.

So obviously, he's been preparing for this, and I think that Tito wants to show that, hey, I'm not no chump. You know, I beat a few of the guys here and there, though my record hasn't been great the past few years. I think I have something left that can prove myself to these fans. And I think that's what's going to be interested in that right there. Do you have your eye on that fight, and the same way class, and I know there's tournaments and whatnot involved, but do you feel like in the foreseeable future you might fight the winner of that fight? Quite possibly they go to the tournament.

To me, I just want, you know, I got to beat Emmanuel, which I will, and get this belt. Then I got beat Tilly, which I will. And then from then on, whoever makes the tournament or whoever belt towards the fight or whoever, I'm down for it, you know what I'm down to make it happen.

So this fight, your fight against Newton, is for the interim title. Atilvay is the champion. And they said he was in. injured, he couldn't fight, and now it's for the interim belt. He came out and said, that's not true. They asked him to step aside. What's your take on that?

What were you told as far as Attila's health? Well, I was told that he was hurt, you know what I'm saying? The thing is that, you know, nothing is until I don't know the dude, but, you know, he was hurt, he was hurt, he was hurt, he was hurt, all of a sudden the pit of you pop up, and he's not hurt no more. What does that say? You know what I'm saying? Who knows?

He might be, he might, he might, it's like, oh, he could be, or he could be saying, hey, I'm not hurt no more. I can go, but I'm not 100% but I'm willing to fight still. Who knows? You know, to me, it don't matter because you can wait as turn to catch his ass whoop in after I be the male Newton.

But are you more amped up, more interested in fighting Newton to avenge that loss, and then, you know, worry about Vey later? Like, are you happy with the way things turned out for you that you get to fight Newton first? To me, it doesn't matter. It's awesome to whip with somebody's ass.

I'm glad Newton has a chance to get his ass with it because, you know, that playing back to the thing was a joke, you know what I'm saying? It ain't going to happen again. And he's trying to run his mouth like, you know, like he planned it or something like that. He tried to run his mouth like I was like being disrespectful towards them, which I never had been because, you know, he was trying to man, he trained with the Italian McKee.

Antonio was my boy, so I never disrespect anybody that he trains with. But the fact that he was going to try to go out there trying to say that I was being disrespectful to him, but I never said one bad thing about to do before the last fight. He's going to hear a lot in the fight. He's going to be hearing me talk shit to him. Put it like that. You're going to talk to him in the middle of the fight. Tell you out.

Now, fuck him. You're going to be trying to act all brand new and shit. I don't know what I didn't say. I didn't say nothing respectful to him. And I was trying to be cool because I figured like, hey, we train together in the past and I respect him. Well, I don't respect him no more. If you could be like that, you keep it 100, you know what I'm saying?

If you got to be you, be you, be you at all times. They'll be fake. You'll see me. You can see me at the gym. You can see me at my crib. You can see me in Dallas, you can see wherever. New York, I'm always me. You know what I'm saying?

I don't turn on and turn off. I'm always me. And the male, I'm doing trying to stop him like, oh, Mo's trying to be cocky, and he got what he deserves. But try to play up these motherfuckers, man, fuck him. Fuck him and fuck everybody else that rides with him. That's how I see it. He's kicking the ass with November 2nd.

It's definitely going down. I'm going to fuck him up. Sorry for all these F-arms, you know what I'm saying? But I'm just ready. You know what I'm saying? We got three weeks ready. three weeks to go, and I'm going to whip his ass, straight up. Let's take a step back here.

Beltor played a very interesting promo a couple weeks ago, hyping this fight. I want to play it to around a minute or so, and then I want to get your thoughts. I want to ask you a specific question about it. Here's the promo that I'm talking about. It's your of the underdog. Bring it home, baby.

Oh, well, it ain't going to happen again. I'll be doing 99 out of 100 times, you know what I'm saying? Not many people throw it spinning shit as they're running. That's like kind of feminine, like, you know, like, oh, I'm scared. I throw the spinning back fist all the time, you know. You know, you can look at the pictures from when I'm landing, and I'm looking right in his eyes, you know, like I saw where he was before I even threw it.

Now he's trying to please the fans, like his fans, you know, the headbangers and the black skinheads that follow him, you know, I gotta, I'm gonna shut his mouth. I'm gonna shut his mouth. You know, I do all my talking in the ring. I have to not just shut his mouth, but shut a lot of other people's mouth too. The way the fights can play out is,

Riff says, fight. I'm gonna torture him. They're gonna call me the Black Hamble Lecter. I'm coming to fight, man. It doesn't matter. You know, what he brings, you know, I'm just ready to get it done. The big payback, like James Brown say, it's coming. It's coming November 2nd.

And it's going to be nasty. So a fascinating promo, but in that promo, you said that you call this fans black skinheads. You said spinning back fists are feminine-like. You've taken a little bit of heat for this. Do you regret anything that you've said? Well, I said the spinning back-fish he threw is feminine-like. Right. It's like this.

It's like this, right? He's trying to say, you look, you look, in my eyes. Matt, please. Unless it's an aisle, he could turn his head all the way around, he'd be looking at nothing. And I put like this, okay, he threw, you know, granted people would say what they want. Now, if he did it Invictor-like, the different story,

he'd throw it in like, you know what I'm saying? If he threw it in like, he'd be through it in my career. That's what I say he threw a feminine, like he threw it, you know, he threw it, oh, my God, kind of like, not feminine, should I say, but more like scary, like, like, scrappy, not scrappy, but like Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, you know what I'm saying? Kind of scary. Like, if I said,

my bad, I meant scary, cowardly, like, you know what I'm saying? Right. But if he threw it, like,

Invictor FC-like, my career, I'll have been snoring for hours, you know what I'm saying? Because them girls that were in Victor, they throw down. You know,

they throw, they throw hard. You know, he didn't throw, he had thought, like, no, invictive-like fighter.

He threw it kind of, like, scary, and it landed. You know, he got lucky. Flash knocked down. He got me.

I got up. But now, You know what I'm saying? We'll see. We'll see it until November 2nd. Because he's talking about I'll talk about trash. I'm talking trash now because after he won, he tried to act like he'll try to act all brand new.

What do you mean by that when you say brand new? What do you mean when you say he's been acting all brand new after the fact? Why is that something that bothers you? Well, it's like this, right? If I did something, like with Jacob Noah, I said, I caught trash. So Jake Noah beat me. He got like, I'll talk trash. You know, before I find he, he,

him I ain't act cocky. I didn't say nothing bad. No interviews about him. I just said, hey, we trained together before, you know, I'm going to beat him. That's all I said. I never bashed him anyway. After he beat me, he's on the radio show talking about, yeah, Moly's acting out cocky, blah, blah, blah, which I never was. You know what I'm saying? As a matter of fact, we're in a sauna together, and he said, nigger, I'm coming up for you. I was like, okay, I just said, I took it like that. I was like, all right, that's cool. Shug his hand. I didn't say nothing to me disrespectful to him at all. I didn't talk trash to him. I just said, okay, that's cool, whatever.

You know what I just missed it, you know what I'm saying? But the fact that you can try to say that I was talking trash and I was acting cocky, go see cocky and trash talking now. Have you ever been this emotional, this fired up before a fight? Yeah, I kind of am because I'm more motivated with the money. This time I'm more than money and revenge. So it does bother you, even though you said that you didn't care, which comes first. But it seems like you have a legitimate beef with.

Emmanuel now. Like you are you're very emotional when you speak about him. You're often emotional guy. That's what we love talking to you. But I sense that you are more fired up than usual here. Yeah, I am for the fact that the matter is like he's trying to like, you know, talk all this bull.

No one in the more, no emotion would never happen. He just making stuff up, trying to get a certain family to like him. The skin, I mean, not the skinheads, but the head bangers, you know what I'm saying? The mosh piters. Right. He tried to get them like him more by saying I was talking to trash about him. which it never was until now.

So you corrected yourself there. Do you feel like using the words skinheads to describe his fans was a poor choice of words? No, because the thing is, there are two different types of skinheads, which I see in documentary. There's skinheads, they're, like, you know, there's skinheads, and there's the Aryan Nation skinheads.

I never said Area Nation skinheads. I just said skinheads, you know what I'm saying? There's a group of, like, head-banging skinheads or something like that. I see it on TV. Like, you know, and they're taking hate for the area of nation. skin heads. I've seen that. I saw that the mention on it, you know what I'm saying? So I feel like I was so more right in what I said.

How do you feel just being in Beltor now? You obviously have fought there, you know, several fights, and you've moved on, and you've had a relatively good run there thus far. You know, now with the whole Ben Ascran and Bjorn Rebony thing going on, do you monitor this stuff? Do you monitor the way that they're being perceived in the public eye?

And are you happy there? I'm cool, man. I'm happy. I don't, it's like this. I'll monitor nothing, man. I just monitor the fights I want to see. and that's about it because sometimes the media hope to carry things

you might as well just go it's kind of like media takeout news or TMZ news some of it really ain't news it's just like hearsay or it's like oh man Ben Ascran submits

brown belt in 23 seconds but then kicks them and then that can be a headline you know what I'm saying and people talk about that sometimes some of the news is relevant sometimes it ain't But to me, I always care about it.

I just care about fights and watching the fights I want to see. That's about it. Do you want Ben? Do you feel like for the growth of the organization, it's better for guys like Ben, Eddie Alvarez, to resign with Beltoor and not go off to the UFC? It's like this. I'm not about the organization.

I'm about the fighters being happy. Granted out with him in Belvoir, but if he can get paid more somewhere else and be happy and be treated well somewhere else, then that's when he needs to go. You know what I'm saying? You know, any fighter, you know what I'm saying? They can be in Ulysm.

They can be in, MNNFC, they could be in, like, you know, Legacy, Invictor, wherever,

one-fc, you know, shoot-o, whatever. If they can find a place that's going to treat them better and pay them more, why not go to it?

You know what I'm not saying? I'm not saying that Belta can pay more or treat them better, but I'm just saying, like, if he feels like in the grass and the other side,

then go ahead, test it out. That's how I see it. And what about your pro wrestling gig? I, I, admittedly, I don't watch TNA that often, and I don't hear a lot of people talking about you in TNA. Have you not appeared on TNA in a while?

Is the wrestling on the side as you prepare for this big pay-per-view fight? It's not a sobbing, man. Let me tell you something. It's a lot hard enough thought I was making progress. I'm making progress. I had matches. Then I had to go back to the train. I came back, and I took a step back because I hadn't had a chance

to be in the ring much, you know what I came back? I did more matches. But there was as smooth as it was at first. time. So after this fight, I have to go back to Kentucky again. Do more matches. I'll probably be out there for two to three months just doing this to the matches trying to, you know, trying to catch back up. Do you still? It's hard, man. Do you like doing it? I mean, is it a pain for you? What? Just doing the wrestling thing. Would you rather just, you know, focus on MMA at this point? No, no, I want to do both. I understand wrestling. The thing about wrestling is like, you have the

psychology part. You have, like, you know, that's why you have guys that, like, Jesse guys. who did wrestling for like five or six years. It's still in wrestling school, and he does TNA. It's just hard. You know, some people never get it. I'm getting it a little bit, but the psychology part is what destroys me. It's just me back. But you're still going to keep doing it.

You're still going to train and try to have a career on that. Yeah, I'm still going to try. I'm still going to because, you know, Rampage and Tio got to go to Western School too. Right. So they'll realize how hard it is, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not easy. You know, go out there and make the appearances, it's the easy. part, but when you got to put matches together and understand why you're doing stuff

and the reason why you're doing it and the reason why matches go the way they go, that's the hard part. Do you think they'll be successful? That's a hard part. I think they can as long as they pay attention and they keep on pursuing, like, you know, excellence in the sport. But if they feel like they've gotten, you know, they're like they're good like where they're at, then they'll never get better.

They'll never make you. Well, always great talking to you. I'm really looking forward to this fight. I'm looking forward to this fight now way more than I was 20. minutes ago, you got me amped up. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff, and it's good to see you're amped up. It's November 2nd in Long Beach, California. Big rematch in Bellator. King Moe versus

Emmanuel Newton for the interim. Let me say something real quick. Go ahead. Let me say something real quick. Hey, to the fans, I'm sorry, like, you know, the last time Amanda beat me. Y'all got, y'all had to see that ugly-ass dance again, the celebration. November 2nd, you will not hear other-ass dance on more. That shit is the other thing I've ever seen.

Man, he needs to learn some rhythm, because that shit was terrible. Okay. We will be looking out for that. and enjoy the Cormier-Nelson fight. I think that'll be kind of interesting. I wish I could watch that fight with you. I think that would be very interesting. And most importantly, Mo, as always, good luck on November 2nd.

I'm looking forward to it very much. Thanks, man. All right, there he is. King Mohammed Lawal stopping by. Big fight for him. He fights for the Beltor interim light heavyweight title on November 2nd that is on pay-per-view, and it is headlined by Titor-Tees v.

Quintin Rampage Jackson. All right, you've been looking forward to hearing from this man. We finally got him on the horn last Wednesday in Brazil. Controversy ensued when Hussemaar Paul Harris submitted Mike Pierce via heel hook and then held on to the submission way too long. And 24 hours later, he was gone from the UFC. And now we have Mike Pierce on the line to talk about that moment and how he's feeling now in the future. Mike, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you?

Good to have you on the show. Thank you so much for stopping by. okay, most importantly, off the top, how are you feeling? How is the leg after what Husseemar did to you last Wednesday in Brazil? Well, it's certainly feeling a lot better. It's still a little angry, as you would expect it to be. But tomorrow I go in to get the MRI and see really the exact extent of what damages that there are on my knee and my ankle. So we'll see.

But right now it's feeling okay. I can walk around on it just fine, put weight on it and everything. but that's not the whole story yet. And do you feel like something serious happened? I mean, are you able to walk, you know, relatively easily, or do you think, you know, there's a real issue here? It's hard to say. I mean, there could be a real issue there.

I'm just not 100% sure. My knee does feel describe it. I definitely felt at pop a couple times, I think, once in my ankle and once in my knee. So, like I said, I mean, the MRI is going to be the determining factor as to what the extent is. And did you feel the pops, as you put them, after, you know, you were tapping and he was cranking and ignoring the taps? Or did you feel that right away even before you tapped? No, I felt that after the ref was already on top of us and I was tapping the ref, so it was long after the fact.

Do you feel like you'd be okay? Obviously, very disappointed, but you'd be okay. if he would have gotten you in the submission, you tap, and then he would have let go. There would be no issues, no need for an MRI. Right. I mean, look, I think it's pretty clear to most everybody who's looking at it honestly that he held on to it too long.

And I have no problem submitting if I'm caught and there's the potential of serious danger. That's why I tapped to begin with because I knew I was caught and I wasn't getting out of it. But to hold on to it to the extent that he did, there was really, you know, no reason for that. It was unnecessary. I was already, you know, giving up at that point.

I know I'd been caught. His manager, Alex Davis, says that he does this unconsciously, and they're sending him to a psychologist to find out why he gets in the zone where he doesn't feel anything. He doesn't feel you tapping. He needs to almost be kind of, like, removed from the situation to stop. Do you buy this, or do you think that he's actually trying to go out there and hurt people like you?

I don't know. I'm not a psychologist, nor do I really care. The fact of the matter is that he didn't let go, and it's been a chronic problem for a long time. So he needs to address the problem one way or another, how he does that. I don't care, but it needs to be fixed. You said going into this fight, I'm going to read a quote from you, which is interesting to read now. You said, quote, he'll do anything to win because he's either desperate or an asshole. I'm not too concerned about that.

I come in expecting he's going to be mean, try to be a bully, try to cheat. I have to deal with it. And then this happens. So you were expecting him to do something like this to you. Well, of course. Like I said, this has been an ongoing problem for him for a long time. I mean, he got nailed for this in the UFC, a couple of fights back, I believe. And even before he was in the UFC, there were problems with that at Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. I mean, didn't Bustamani, Meryl Bustamani, just come out and say that it was a problem when he was at Brazilian top team.

So, I mean, there's obviously a history of this guy holding onto leg locks or heel hooks for much longer than he needed to. and whether it's intentional or unintentional, it doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that he's hurting guys, and, you know, people are probably tapping just like I was, and he just holds on to it for, you know, just a fraction of a second too long and to the point where it does, you know, the damage to people. That's unnecessary. That being said, do you think it was the right move to cut him from the UFC?

You know, that's solely up to Dana. I think he made the right thing. I think the commission made the right decision. Yeah, so I mean, like I said, this guy is hurting people and unnecessarily. So, I mean, I understand if people get hurt, that's part of the sport that's going to happen. But to do what he did was, you know, very unsportsmanlike and pretty much goes against all the codes of conduct that the UFC flip on us athletes. Were you surprised when you heard he was released? What was your reaction?

You know, I was a little surprised. I mean, I kind of figured that something would have. happened to him in the ways of like a fine or a suspension or something like that. But clearly Dana was not happy or thrilled at all as to what he saw. So, you know, he's one that makes those decisions. And from your perspective, let's put the aftermath of what happened after you tapped aside. How was he able to pull this off? Like, when you look back, it was obviously a very short fight and he caught you with what, you know, is his patent and move.

what was the mistake that you made that led him to submit you via heel hook? Well, the mistake that I made was I just engaged too quickly. I started off kind of with some quick movement, so I had to size and lateral movement, and he wasn't really doing a whole lot. I was like, okay, I'm going to go for it. So I threw my jab, followed by an immediate hook right, and the last two punches hit him pretty flush,

and I knew that he was rocked, and he had his head down when I got done throwing that right hand. So I was thinking that he was, potentially going out and I just needed to jump on him and keep throwing those fists until the rest pulled me off and, you know, surprisingly, he wasn't all the way done and was able to kind of keep things together. And he, you know, immediately went to what he knew because he knew he was in trouble and jumped to his back. I got out of the first heel hook, started to come back up to my feet, and he kind of had a little bit of an angle on me. And I wasn't

expecting him to drop down like he did. It was kind of strange, but that's, you know, Paul Harris's game. and I was just caught up against the fence and I couldn't really get out of at that point he already sunk it in and the rest of his history. Some were wondering if he would lose his strength dropping down to 170. Obviously you hadn't fought in a mile to 185, but what did you think of the 170 version of Paul Harris?

I mean, he was a strong guy, but I still hold strong to the fact that I think the strongest guy that ever fought was Paul Bradley. I don't know. Paul Harris is a pretty big dude and everything, but, you know, I only had, you know, a 31 seconds with the guy. It's hard to really give a good judgment, but, you know, Paul Bradley was a pretty damn strong guy, too.

What was the trip home like? You know, you go all the way to Brazil, it ends up like that, then you have the moment afterwards where it looks like he's trying to injure you. How miserable was that flight home? Or I think you took multiple flights home, right? Well, let's just get some straight. The flights there were miserable, the flights back were just as miserable. I ended up getting there a day late to begin with because our flight was delayed. delayed, delayed, and then finally canceled, and we had to spend the night in the hotel and take a flight out of the following evening, which was no fun. But yeah, I mean, it fought all the way back home from Brazil, losing the way that I did just really sucked. I mean, I don't like losing that way, especially so quick. I mean, I felt great. I wanted to fight, and I just didn't get to do what I wanted to do, unfortunately. So, yeah, it was no fun.

How uncomfortable was the flight home or the flight's home, given the state of your leg? it was, I don't know, like I said, it just felt weird. I know when I was flying back, my ankle swole up a little bit more just because we were in the flight. But I still had some decent movement on it. I was kind of surprised because, like I said, I heard it pop once the ankle and once in the knee. And I wasn't even expecting to, you know, after I, after you let go to the submission to get back up on my feet, I was like, oh, okay, well, maybe it's not that bad. I don't know. But afterwards, you know, kind of walking around on it, giving it a day.

it progressively got a little tighter, a little more swollen, but, you know, it's starting to feel a little bit better and, you know, giving the flight home and everything, I think it's still doing okay. It's been icing it a lot,

and, you know, tomorrow we'll figure out what, what's really going on. Did you speak to him after the fight? Did you say anything to him? No, honestly, I don't even know if it was English. I, you know, said good fight to him or whatever

after the fight and everything, and he just kind of looked at me and nod, he didn't say anything, I don't even know if he knows English. Have you seen that video that he put out talking about the whole controversy? No, I haven't spent any time listening to his side of the thing. Do you have any interest? Not really.

I mean, look, here's my point. The guy is a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu. I think he was – you get it from Brazilian top team. I'm not 100% sure. My point is that he has plenty of experience. Obviously, what you just. He knows where that point of no return is. He knows how long, too long.

And really, to me, there's no excuse for that, you know, to go farther than it needs to, unless you have, you know, bad intentions or, you know, really want to prove a point somehow. So I don't, I mean, maybe he does have some psychological issue. I don't know. I'm not a psychologist or a doctor to, you know, make those kind of decisions. Right. But, yeah, I mean, I just think that he should have known better. And so this is interesting because, you know, the fight ended quickly,

but there's been so much controversy after the fact that I think a lot of people would actually be interested in seeing a rematch, but given what you've just said about him and given his history, and, you know, guys like John Fitch have come out and say, you know, if World Series of Fighting signs this guy now that he's released, I don't want to fight him, given his history, would you, knowing what you know about him, and being there in the cage with him and after what he did to you,

would you fight him again? Well, that was kind of the talk once we got back to the lock. I mean, I really feel like I didn't get a chance to do what I did. You know, I wouldn't mind fighting the guy again and just, you know, not getting caught this time, the second time around, obviously. But, you know, I know that I had the guy hurt. I knew that he was in trouble and he just jumped down out of leg lock. And unfortunately, the second time, I wasn't able to get out of it.

But knowing that he tries, or at least you think that he, you know, whether or not he does it consciously, subconsciously, does it on purpose, whatever, that he, you know, injuries happen, he holds on things too long. Would you want to put yourself in that position again? It's hard to say. I mean, if I had a fight again, I would, but it's not a fight that would be jumping up and down about going, oh, yeah, let's do that. Because, yeah, I mean, like you said, if he has a history of hurting guys, I mean, other fighters aren't going to want to fight him because of that, other promoters. I think I heard some about Jordan Redney talking about not wanting them either. I mean, you've got to think about it from a promoter's perspective, too.

I mean, if he's out here hurting guys and putting guys out for a long time, not only does he have to pay Paul Harris, but he also has to pay whatever the medical bills are to rehab, the guy that he beat, and get him ready to fight again, too. So there's a lot of cost involved with that as well. So it's kind of hard to be Paul Harris, I guess. And by the way, you mentioned going to Brazil and the flights being miserable. Now that you've done it, do you think that there's something to the fact that all these Brazilian fighters beat the foreigners?

And sometimes, you know, if the fight was taking place somewhere else, things would go differently, but they may have an advantage because of the trips that you have to take to get over there? I don't know. I don't like to believe in that stuff, to be honest. I think anybody can be beaten anywhere. And, you know, I think Jake Shield kind of proved that a little bit with Maya beating him in his hometown. So I don't know. There might be some element to that, but I don't want to believe in it.

You know, I mentioned that quote that you gave to ESPN about him being a cheater. And, of course, he was popped for, you know, steroids after his fight against Hector Lombard. Did you feel like you were fighting a guy who had an unfair advantage against you? Forgetting about what he did with the submission. But, you know, Paul Harris, as a fighter as a man, did you feel like, you know, he was a guy? did you feel like, you know, he was taking shortcuts? Are you asking me if I think he's on steroids again? In your fight, going into your fight, you feel like he was on steroids?

I have no idea, to be honest. I don't know that I've ever fought anybody that's been on him before or even trained with anybody who's been on him. So to be honest, I have no clue. I'm really naive about that. I've never done this stuff in my entire life. So I guess we'll see, I mean, I'm sure this week, the urinalysis will come back for everybody and we'll see if he test positive or not. I have no idea, but yeah, I couldn't tell you.

They tested you, right? Yeah, they tested the way they did in Brazil is they tested everybody once they got to the arena and then they randomly tested guys after their fights. So I don't know if he was one of the guys that got randomly tested again after the fight or not. I wasn't one of the guys, but I did get tested obviously before the fight. Well, yeah, I just got the news right now that all the tests came back clean. Oh, okay.

That's good. Because the last appearance that he had was when he got popped against Hector Lombard. So that is obviously good to know. So right now, the way things stand for you, you have this appointment tomorrow, and then you'll find out how long you'll be out for when you can resume training and whatnot. Why do it on a Tuesday? Like, why wait so long if you heard some pops? Well, I think because today's Columbus Day,

and a lot of people don't have time, and a lot of them aren't open. So I got the appointment done early this morning. I got it set for tomorrow at 8.30 in the morning. So I'm getting on it as soon as I can. And you couldn't do it on Saturday or Sunday or anything like that Friday? No, not the – I don't think so. Okay.

But, I mean, are you uncomfortable? Like, do you need crutches to get around? No, I don't need crutches. I can walk around. Like I said, I mean, look, I like to think I'm a tough guy. I can handle a little bit of pain. Sure. So, you know, it's not going to keep me down.

I'm not going to keep me down. I'm going to keep moving a little bit without, you know, hurting myself further. But, yeah, I mean, I can move around and everything. And all that. I just can't, you know, do a bunch of crazy stuff. I'm not doing backflips or nothing. So you went into this fight on a four-fight winning streak, and this one was so quick.

It happened in a blink of an eye. You know, how do you rebound from this? You just chalk this up to, you know, a freak thing that happened. You got caught. and that's it, or do you feel like you need to make some serious changes here to get back? Because I know what's unfortunate for you is that you were working so hard to get, you know, that recognition. You were stuck on the prelims and you were very, you know, frustrated about this. And here you are on a main card and this happened.

So how do you rebound from this? Yeah, it's just frustrating. Look, I think there's a little bit of element of luck in the sport. You know, I just happened to be very unlucky that particular time. I got caught in submission. You know, I thought I read the punches right. I thought he was really hurt to the point where I could finish him. So, yeah, I mean, I'm just going to keep improving.

I'm going to keep working on, you know, my stand of him to keep working on my ground game, make sure the leg-lock thing never happens again. You know, I just got to keep going forward, though. Well, Mike, I hope everything goes well tomorrow, and please do keep us posted. I know this is not the best terms to come on the show and talk about a fight, but you're handling it with class and certainly very, very unfortunate. forgetting about the actual fact, just the fact that you suffered some kind, even if it was minor injury, when you shouldn't have, just a very strange situation and unfortunate one. So thanks for coming on,

and we wish you all the best tomorrow on your appointment and beyond. All right. Thank you very much. There he is. Mike Pierce stopping by. For the record, some have asked, I do think it was the right call. I do think he should have been released. He held on. He tapped. and once you've done this before, doing it against Tomas D'Uval at UFC 111 in New Jersey, suspended 120 days by the New Jersey Commission for that, done it twice in 2007 in Brazil, holding on to a submission, doing it in jiu-situ competitions, being accused of doing it in training,

at some point something very dangerous can happen. someone brought it up to me that, you know, Hoyst Gracie held on to submissions too long at UFC 1. And you're 100% right. He did. Go back and look at it. A lot of guys were tapping there and Hoyst was cranking. A, was a different time. And I don't know if a lot of people knew exactly what they were watching and how to properly, you know, referee it.

And B, this guy has a history. He's done it before. Unfortunately, Hussein Maripal Harris has done it before. If it was his first time, I can guarantee you. pretty much that he wasn't going to be fired. And yes, we have the Babalu Sobrow situation that comes to mind. You have the Paul Daly situation. I think that this is actually worse than the Paul Daly situation.

They're both bad. Punching someone, sucker punching someone after the bell is very bad. But to crank on someone's leg when you have him in that position, in that vulnerable state, and to possibly seriously injured. It sounds to me like Mike Pierce wasn't seriously injured, but to possibly seriously injure someone who knows what you can do as far as tearing ligaments, which is worse, by the way, than breaking bones.

Taring ligaments, ligaments having to heal after being torn is a much longer and tougher process than breaking bones. I broke an ankle playing basketball, and thankfully, they did not break any ligaments. But they told me if I did, it would have been a much tougher process to get back to somewhat 100%. So you have him in that position to the point that a tough guy like Mike Pierce, any fighter is tapping. You know that he is in some amount of pain. He's not going all the way to Brazil just to tap quickly.

So you know that he's in some kind of pain, and he's trying to fight out of it. This is a tough wrestler, gritty guy. Mike Pierce, I mean, you say gritty. You think of Mike Pierce. He's that kind of fighter. And then you get to the point where, yes, the referee was somewhat late, but still, I think that there is a code between the fighters. Look at what Anthony Pettus did against Benson Henderson. Anthony Pettus, Herb Dean didn't hear the verbal submission, didn't see any kind of submission, and Anthony Pettus felt the pop and let go.

Benson didn't complain. He didn't protest. I believe that when two guys stepped inside the octagon, if you want to be able to you. to talk about martial arts, if you want to talk about, you know, any form of martial art, there's always this code, right? There's always this agreement that opponents should have with each other to conduct themselves like true martial artists, sportsmanship, not break that code, not have, you know, not, not do any dirty tactics. And that's what this was. Now, whether or not he does it on purpose, whether or not he's in the zone, whether or not he's

truly trying to hurt someone, who knows, no one knows. He'll sit. He'll sit. He'll sit. He'll sit. He'll that he's not trying to, but who knows? All you can look at is history. And because he's done it before, and they brought up the failed drug test in their statement, who knows if that's, you know, and that just kind of adds to the pile. To me, even if he didn't, if you didn't get popped for a PED in December after the Lombard fight, he still should have been released after doing it a second time. It's just, it's too dangerous. And now, given where the sport is, where the UFC is, you can't have that. You can't have that. You can't. can't do that. Someone taps and you see that visual and someone put out this video of, of him,

you know, there's like a clock and it stops and they rewind and all that stuff. And it's like 1.2 seconds late. Well, to that I'll say, it was 1.2 seconds late. It should have been 0 seconds late. He should, when someone taps, you should let go and you're looking right at the guy. So even if he's tapping on the referee, which, you know, the referee had to, Keith Peterson had to actually like jump in there on top of them and break it up. Even if he's doing that on the referee, you still see it, you get it, you're looking at the guy, you have to let go. You can't do that.

UFC was forced to do this and unfortunately I think they made the right call. It's very dangerous. Guys can get hurt and there's just no place for it, especially in the sport where, you know, you do something a little too long, rear naked choke, heel hook, arm bar. there's some serious injuries that can happen. Some people have brought up the Dan Henderson Michael Bisping fight. And that, to me, is a very ugly side of our sport. I wish everyone was like Brian Stan when he knocked down or knocked out Alessio Sakara in Sweden a couple of years ago.

And he stopped himself before, you know, throwing that extra punch. I wish everyone was like that. I didn't think the Dan Henderson, Michael Bisping moment was a great moment for our sport. I know a lot of people celebrated because they don't like Michael Bisping. and they wanted to see the American boy, Dan Henderson, knock him out and further injure him, but I thought that was a very ugly moment. It was a great fight, great knockout,

but the extra punch, that flying punch at the end, while Bispin was clearly out, was unnecessary. But with that, I feel like there is some momentum involved, and you are told from the referees to not, you know, stop fighting unless they stop you. Well, guess what? In the Paul Harris fight, the referee did step in there, even if it was late,

and he was still cranking. And again, I feel like there is a code. I feel like there's some kind of agreement that needs to happen where that you need to acknowledge, where if you have someone in this position, if you feel the tap, if you hear the tap, anything like that. If someone says, you know, I tap, you got to let go. Now, if someone yells, it's very different.

I don't think you should let go, to be honest, because then it opens up to all kinds of controversies. We've seen this before with many guys. We've seen referees step in when they probably shouldn't. someone yells, I don't think the fighter should let go unless the referee stops the fight. But if someone says tap, someone says I quit, someone is tapping, you got to let go. He's done it before. It's unfortunate.

He's a very talented fighter. And the worst part about this, he went in there and submitted Mike Pierce in 31 seconds. Mike Pierce, who had won four in a row, who was super tough, who up until that point was 17 and 5, and his only losses in the UFC were to Josh Koshchek, Johnny Hendricks, John Fitch. That's it. Prior to the UFC, he had lost to Mark Munoz

and Nathan Coy. This is a very tough guy. This guy has been in the sport for a long time, six years, and it doesn't get manhandled like that. Beat Carlos Eduardo Hosha,

beat Aaron Simpson, beat Seth Pizzinski, beat David Mitchell on route to this fight. Knocked out Aaron Simpson in 29 seconds of the second round with a great punch

last year in Minneapolis. So it was very impressive, but unfortunately no one's really talking about that. the whole thing has been completely overshadowed by what he did after the fact. And as Mike Pierce said, Bjorn Rebony, the Belator CEO, said they are not interested in Hussimar Palhires, which I find to be a very curious decision. I give them a lot of credit for standing up and saying we don't want people like that in here.

But at some point, someone's going to sign him. And what's unfortunate about the whole situation is that Hussimar Pal Harris has never been more, quote unquote popular, more well known than he is today. People are going to want to watch him fight the next time he fights. End of the day, this is the fight game. It's not golf. It's not figure skating. Bad boys, good or bad, will gain, you know, they'll gain opportunities, they'll gain riches, fights, and things of that nature. Wherever Hussemao-Paul-Hara's fights next, It is going to be a story. Everyone's going to cover it.

People are going to watch it. You can't tell me that a fight between Husseh Mark Baharas and Ben Ascran would not be a talked-about event. So who knows if they are really interested, really not interested. Bjorn told TMZ that they're not interested right now. But this is a guy who's coming off a win, so he's not so much a UFC cast-off, so to speak. He is controversial. People are obviously fascinated by the story, given the amount of traffic and the amount of interest there was in the story. Controversy sells. And it's a weird thing to say because

I'm saying on the one hand that the UFC is right in firing him. But on the other hand, I think someone should look at him because if you're trying to make a name for yourself, let's be honest. It may not be the popular thing to say, but I can guarantee you that every promoter out there Thursday morning or Thursday night when this came out, thoughts on themselves, we can get Husseemar Paul Harris. And what would that mean to us? And then you might come to your senses and say, maybe this isn't the smartest thing and we don't need this negative publicity and whatnot, but I can guarantee you that it will be covered, it will be talked about, and I think every promoter needs to look at him. First, he should go see a psychologist.

He should figure out why he does this. And someone needs to give him the clean bill of health and say that this guy will not do it anymore, or we've corrected, whatever issue is leading to him doing this. Because until then, if I'm a fighter, I don't want to be in there with him. There are enough risks going into a cage and fighting against someone that, you know, I don't need that extra risk of when I say I'm done, someone's going to try to injure me more in a vulnerable state. Makes no sense. And after that rant, let us finally go to the phone lines where the man who will be fighting Kane Velasquez on Saturday night for the third time, Junior Dos Santos, is standing by. Junior, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. How are you? How are you? you know, I don't know if you know this, but we are a very strict show here.

And when someone's late on our show, we often put down bands where we say you're never allowed to come back, but you're lucky. You're one of the nicest guys in the sport. I enjoy talking you so much that I'm not going to ban you. How about that? Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you very much for it. It's always good to be talking with you. Well, thank you. So you're in Houston right now, right? Yeah, I'm in Houston. What's the buzz like? Do you feel anything, or is it a little too early right now? Yeah, pretty too worried, but I'm still focused, you know, thinking about how it's going to be the fight, and I'm anxious, like, looking forward, you know, to be fighting again, especially in this really important fight that I have now.

So you say that you're anxious. Were you anxious going into the first and second fights? Are you usually anxious, or do you feel like this is a really big deal for you? Yeah, it's normally, normally happen, you know. normally I stay a little bit anxious and all for the fights because we train hard for three months and all and we come to the fight. We just want to go there and finish the work. You mentioned training and a big part of the primetime series, which I've enjoyed greatly, has been you know, you over-training for the second fight and you feeling like that really hurt you in the second fight. At what point did you realize that this was hurting you? Was it after the fight? Was it during training camp?

towards the end where you thought I pushed myself too far. When did you realize you made a big mistake in training for that second fight? Yeah, I realized that after the fight, you know, when I was at the hospital. I didn't know I was over-training because I didn't know how to diagnose that, you know. So when I went to the hospital, they did some axioms and they told me that. but I was feeling pretty okay you know but now it's different I learn a lot from that

and now I'm having a better following like a lot of people good people following me and it makes me more prepared you know I know more about my body how I'm reacting reacting for the trainings and everything as far as training goes

what did you do differently this time as opposed to last time different yeah to not over train. Nothing, you know. Yeah. No, nothing.

Like, I used to train a lot, you know, and for all my fights, I take very serious, you know, because I love to do this. But this time I just have, actually, for the hunt fight, I already have some doctors and all. I think I got a little bit more professional. Like I said, I'm following, like, my body is reacting for the, for the training, you know, and now I know I'm feeling good, you know, and actually I'm feeling very well now because I'm happy, too, you know, to be fighting again for the title. It's very important that's what I want at this point on my career.

So I'm happy, and I know my performance is going to be better than the last time now. How many doctors do you have working with you now? Because it seems like you have a lot of people who are taking care of you for this fight. Yeah, I'm a blessed guy, you know, I have good people around me all the time. Yeah, for sure, I can count them, you know, but it's a little, not too much, but just a little bit of people, good people around me, and that makes me happy because they are there to help me, and I can feel that. One of the people that you have working with you is this, I guess you can call them Masuse, who is blind, who works with the World Cup,

the Brazilian national team, the soccer football team. This man is unbelievable. Just watching him briefly on the primetime show, the way he works his hands, is amazing. Is this the first time

that you've been working with him going into a fight? And how much has he helped you? Yeah, he helped a lot. It's good to be worked with him, too. Yeah, I worked before with him in the Mark Hunt fight. I worked with him,

and I felt very good. It's good, you know. I used to do massage with him twice a week. After his party sessions, I do this massage with him. And I'm feeling way better. You know, he's a great person and excellent massouci. You know, watching the show and listening to interviews and whatnot, your team and yourself very critical of Kane Velasca is talking about how, you know,

he couldn't finish you in the second fight. you knocked him out in a matter of seconds in the first fight. You're saying once again that, you know, he hits like a girl when a few months ago you were kind of trying to move away from that. Why have you felt the need to be so critical? And talk trash in a likable way because you're a likable guy and you have this nice demeanor. But a lot of it is coming from your side and he's not really saying much about you. Yeah, like, what I have to say, man, all my phrases were way longer than that, you know. The countdown, the countdown on the primetime show, they are very creative on adding the whole thing, you know, the videos.

And that's it. And like, I didn't say again that, you know, I just was explaining, but I don't have much more to say about it, you know. Everything. If you guys, like, you know, I don't like to disrespect any of. of my opponents, especially King Velasquez, because I think he's a true warrior, you know, he's a great champion. And for me, he's great, you know,

to have him as an opponent, you know, that makes me feel hungry for victory, you know, and I train harder to go there and try to beat him, you know. So at this point, I'm really glad to be competing with him. And, yeah, The way to promote the fight sometimes is longer than we go. We really go. But which is it?

Put it on the record for us right now. Does he or doesn't he hit like a girl? No, for sure not. No, for sure not. He's a heavy weight. He's a heavyweight and all the heavy weights they hit really, really hard. This is the most dangerous division in the UFC in the everywhere. When you talk about the heavyweight champion, we're talking about the baddest men on the planet.

So you have to respect that. And for sure, he doesn't... He's like a girl. He doesn't matter too much, you know. If you let that girl, depends on the girl, right? If you have a lot of her face, she's going to knock you out probably, you know, like, I don't know, like Misha Tate or Ronda. Right. But you feel as though on the flip side

He can't take a punch You said that also in the show You knocked him out In a matter of seconds in the first fight And you know He didn't knock you out He dropped you but he didn't knock you out In the second fight

Do you think that this is a guy Who has a suspect chin Who if hit hard Will go out Yeah I think In this case of the chin I think he has a pretty good chin

You know He showed that and a Chi Congo fight but he doesn't have that very hard team you know and maybe

I don't know maybe because I hit hard too you know but I believe so much in that but yeah he is a very complete fighter

you know I admire him as a as a fighter like I said before you know I'd like to see him as a champion

but not in my division my division I'm going to be the champion This is your third time fighting him in less than two years. Do you feel like this has helped your career as far as the way the fans view both of you around the world? Because often when someone has a rival, going back to this famous ones like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in our sport, Chuck Ladell, Tito Ortiz, also like Anderson and Shail Sun. And when someone has a rival, it seems like both men are elevated. So are you able to see that, you know, even though you guys are fighting and you're trying to both go after that time,

title, you have helped each other as far as becoming bigger stars in our sport. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was telling you, you know. It's very important for me, you know. I think I'm going, I'm raising, I'm competing in another level because I have a great opponent in the other side, you know. So it's very, I really appreciate that, you know. I'm glad to be fighting with Ken Velasquez again, you know. I think this rivalry between me and him is a great thing, you know,

to make me a better fight, a better, a fighter, a better person, too, you know, because, yeah, it brings me a lot of good things, and I appreciate that. His team, his coach, Javier Mendez, says that you don't train with anyone like a Daniel Cormier. He's out there sparring with, you know, arguably the number three best heavyweight in the world. What do you say to that? Are you sparring? Are you training with guys who are on the level of Daniel Cormier back in Brazil?

Actually, you know, Daniel Cormier is the number two of the rank right now. So I don't think so, right? Right. Because he's really good, you know. His Olympic level on wrestling. And I think he is, actually, I don't think he's a really great fighter. you know so I think that that's really good for Ken Velazas to have a partner like him and to have such good training in their gym you know so it's very important especially in the heavyweight division because it's so hard to find good heavy weights to training you know to train with but but I'm having a good training like there in Brazil like I have good people around me you know and I used to bring the same people all the time to help me because I already know them and I like they, I know they, they will be there to help

me, you know, and not to try to do something stupid or just up here. So it's hard to find good people to train with. But for sure, King Velasquez and the premiere, they have a very good relationship and they help each other a lot. Kane recently received his Brazilian Jiu-Ditzaa Black Belt. What do you think of BJJ. Well, I never saw that very much, you know, but I think if he

got a black belt, probably it's really good, it's good, you know. Jiu-Jitsu is very, it's very, it's very different, you know, just competing in Jiu-Git-Sou is one thing, but use the Jiu-Git-Su during an M-M-A fight is very different, you know, so you have to

train a lot, you know, to do this. And, well, I think Congratulations for him, you know, for the black belt. And maybe if the fight goes to the ground, we can do some jih Tzu in the fight. In training, you're with regular people. You see so many people coming up to you in training in the classes as far as what they show on the show.

Do people, do you find that people try to test you that it's hard to, you know, you're training for the biggest fight in your sport, the heavyweight title fight, a third fight against Kane Velasquez, yet you're amongst so many, you know,

regular people. Do you feel like sometimes it gets a little too crowded in training? Yeah, sometimes it gets a little too crowded, you know, but I don't have my own gym

in Brazil and all the gyms we have in the city where I live now. Normal people come to train you with, with us, too, you know, with the coach and everything, and sometimes it's hard,

especially when they see cameras and things like that. It's hard to take them away, you know, from that. Yeah. And they usually, usually they are there and I like it. You know, I like it to have this contact with them. But sometimes it's too much. But I'm feeling very okay, you know, that doesn't bother me because when I start to training and I start to work on my skills,

you know, I keep my focus on that, and I can do this very well. In the Mark Hunt fight, you pulled off an amazing spinning back kick, and you knocked them out with it in the third round. Any surprises for us? Is there anything new that you're going to show us on Saturday? Yeah, maybe. I can do anything, you know. I have no limits.

I like to think like that. You know, I have no limits. I can do everything there. But when I see, if I see some space from some, opening to do something different, I will do that. And I hope it works. So you have something up your sleeve, maybe?

Not something specific. I used to train a lot, different kicks and everything, you know, including different moves on jihitsu, on wrestling. I have a good wrestler helping me, helping me,

Kitak-Prieve, you know, and I think I learned lot. I improve a lot with him. So, well, everything is, everything can happen in a a night fight and I'm ready for this everything. By the way, are you still interested in boxing or are you done with that? Well, no, I said that sometimes, you know, for sure, I'm a boxing guy, you know, I love to do, I love to boxing with my training partners and everything. But now, like I said that sometimes ago

but now everybody's saying this you know everybody was to fight with the boxing guys and it's pretty it's become a pretty

I don't know not very serious you know yeah when I say that I say serious you know

I would love to fight some somebody to fight boxing right have you talked to the UFC about it

No, no, I've never talked with him, but maybe, actually, I did talk with Dana, but just a little bit once, some time ago. Wasn't very serious, you know, maybe next time I have the opportunity, I would do that. For someone like Klitsko, either Klitsko brother, how long do you think you would need to be able to fight someone like him and do well against them? I think if they give me four months to get prepared, I can beat them. Four months, that's it? Yeah, that's it. I used to train a lot. I used to train boxing a lot.

In the beginning of my camp, all my camps, I do just boxing, you know. I love to train boxing. And I think I got enough skills, you know, in boxing. I know how to see a good fight of. boxing. So four months, that's what I need. And if you win this fight, they say you'll fight Fabriceu Verduemnex, and you beat him in your UFC debut at UFC 90. Does that interest you to fight him again? Yeah, it's interested for me to fight anyone. I write this person, like, this guy just

have to be able to be fighting, you know, to put himself on the number one of the rank, you know, to be fighting. Of course, I'm interested in to fight with him. If UFC say I have to fight him, I'll do that gladly. Okay, let's end on this, Jr., and again, thank you for the time. You know, obviously you come from a very humble background, and you've come a long way to where you are today. Is it true that when you started out when you were a young kid,

you didn't even like fighting? This wasn't something that interested you at all? Yeah, I didn't like fighting. I was a crying boy, you know, when I was a kid, I didn't like fights. When people, when other kids play with me or try to fight with me, I started to cry and I go back home, you know. That was true. That was very true. And so what changed for you?

How did you stop crying? I don't know. I become a man, right? maybe because of that. And, yeah, I think I'm bored to fight. You know, I don't do that because I don't like people. Right. I do that because I love to do this.

You know, it's all about the sport. It's nothing against nobody, including me. Was there a moment, though, that you remember, where it clicked for you or you're like, this is something I want to do because to see you now as, you know, one of the best heavyweights in the world, one of the best fighters in the world, didn't like fighting, they used to be kind of a, you know, crybaby is an amazing difference.

Yeah, that was very interesting, like, for me, when I was, like, 20 years old, something like that, a 19 years old, I started to watch some MMA fights, you know, and I saw, I, then I'm, I used to dream a lot, and I started to dream myself being a MMA fighter or something like that, And then I started training with Coach Yuri. And after some time I was doing my first MMA fight.

And when I see, here I am. Wow. And one of your coaches, not Yuri, but another one of your coaches, has never been to your fights. But now he's going, right? Because he felt like he was bad luck. Am I correct here? Say again, please.

One of your coaches on primetime, his name is escaping me, but he didn't want to go to your fights beforehand because he thought he was bad luck, he was super... No, he went to your fight that you lost against Kane, and now he doesn't go anymore because he thinks he's bad luck. Am I getting the story right? No, no, no, yeah. This is Yuri.

Oh, this is Yuri. I never went to a fight, you know, my fight. My fight. In that fight, of King Velasquez he wasn't there, too, you know. He never came for a fight. But this time he's here with me, and I'm gladly, you know, he didn't have the visa, the American visa. to come for the fight.

So it was hard for him. But now he got, and he's here with me, and I'm glad for this. So this is his first time with you at a UFC fight? Yeah, his first time watching, like, Junior Los Angeles, the fight. Wow. And does that give you more motivation? It must be nice to have him with you, your first coach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very nice to have him here and give me some extra motivation for sure. you know, he's a really good person, you know, and I want him to see myself being champion again. Well, another good person I know, Junior Dos Santos. Thank you so much. No hard feelings, by the way, for coming late. It's water under the bridge. A pleasure and honor for us to have you on the show just days before your big fight.

Best of luck to you. Looking forward to seeing you in Houston, and I cannot wait for this fight. It's going to be a classic. Okay, thank you, man. And I'll see you on Saturday, okay? Oh, yeah, I'll see you on Wednesday. How about that? Oh, yeah, better.

There he is. Cigano, Junior Dos Santos. He meets Cane Velasquez for the third time Saturday night, Toyota Center, Houston. It's going to be a great crowd, a brilliant move on the UFC's part to put that fight in Houston. A lot of Latino fans, I believe it's either sold out or close to sold out. And then when you consider the fact that Gilbert Melendez is on the card, that he's fighting Diego Sanchez. Cormier is not too far. Cormier grew up three. and a half hours away from Houston.

This is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it very much. Now, speaking of which, Mama knows, did not have a very good UFC fight 929. For the first time since we've been doing this, she was under 500.

She was 2 and 4. The only fights she got right were... Were the only fights that she got right? She hit on Maldonado and Tiago Sola. Right. And some people even think Maldonado lost, including yourself, right? I had to have... My initial reaction was that he lost, but I'd have to watch it again,

which I have not because it wasn't that exciting. Sure. You know, it was interesting, because I kind of forgot, and New York Rick came with a... They call it a shit-eating grin. He knew what her record was, but he just wanted to say, yeah, it didn't have a really good night, he said. He enjoyed it.

He enjoyed every second of it, and you were looking forward. You're looking forward to right now kind of putting her down and making her feel back. And she felt horrible. She didn't even want to give me picks for UFC 166. How good do you feel about this? Not good at all. You do feel good. Don't lie.

Why would I feel good about this? How does it benefit me to feel good about this? Because it started as somewhat of a rivalry. Oh, no. It never started or ended or had a middle. there was no rivalry and it never will be. Well, how did you do? Did you do any betting?

No, I don't think I bet on that card. Oh, yeah, I did, actually. I put down a small amount on stun gun because I thought it was crazy that he was an underdog to begin with, which I mentioned on the show. And you won that one? Well, yeah, but I actually pictured it

being much more of a grappling affair and he was having a lot of trouble doing that, but, I mean, that knockout was something else. There was something else. And some people saying, oh, if Paul Harris got cut, look at what Kim did to Eric Silva. Again, that's different. I mean, yes, you'd like for guys not to punch when someone's out. But in the flow of the action, heat of the moment, momentum, I'm not hating on Kim for that.

Well, there's a, I mean, the difference is the ref was pulling Paul Harris off, whereas Kim was going to get that extra punch as the ref was jumping in. It wasn't a case where he was shrugging off the ref or doing something in spite of the ref. trying to stop him. Completely different scenarios. Of course. There's no place in the sport for that, especially as a repeat offender. If it's your first time,

there's ways you can feign ignorance and you can pretend that you didn't feel the ref or make up some kind of excuse. After this number of times, there's no place for that. And by the way, it's the same thing with steroids. You know, like the first time you pop for steroids, more often than not, you get another chance.

But if you do it over and over again, like anything in life, the leash is shortened and you're going to lose your job. So the point is not a great night for Mama Nose, but she's back for UFC 166. And I will just say, I haven't told you about this, but this is all culminating. Basically, these are all kind of tune up fights, smokers, if you will. It's all culminating to the 20th anniversary. You realize that, right? What is all culminating? This.

This rivalry. We've got a huge rivalry happening on Saturday night, but it's exhibition for us here on the show. This rivalry, Mama versus Nicol Rick, will all be answered. It'll all culminate at UFC 167. Do you want to know what happens or do you want to wait? Tell me.

Let me hear it. Both of you are going to have to pick the entire card. The entire card. And whoever has the better winning percentage wins. Wins this little battle. Wins what? This battle. bragging rights. That's all you need in life. You don't need presents, toys, gifts, money. It's all about bragging rights.

You need to be a relatively new fan of the sport, a mother, a four, a grandmother of three. You spend your days and nights thinking about the sport. You need to beat her. You need to outpick her. That's what you have to be. Forget about training for your fight. This is the fight of your life. You realize that. She's texting me right now. I'm ready. Are you ready? I want to see that text, first of all. It's right here. I want to see it. I'm ready. How can I show it to you? People are going to see other texts. No, no, no, I want to see it after the show.

Sure. She said, I am ready. She is down. It's going down at UFC 167. Between that, we have UFC 166. These are all kind of exhibition. I mean, we'll get your thoughts, but it all leads up to that. None of that matters once we get to 167.

So if none of this matters, what are we even doing here? What do you mean? You're saying exhibition. Exhibition as far as the grand scheme, it's not like a tournament where all this counts. But this is all. been a buildup, if you will. It's a slow build. People like a slow build. It's all been a buildup. Now, she goes five and oh. Think about it. She goes five and no. And then there's six main card fights on October 26. Then there's, I believe, six or either five fight for the troops. And there's

another Brazil car with Henderson and Belford. And then, so there's four UFC fights between now and November 16th. What if she goes, you know, 20 and O? What if she will be on? The pressure will be on. The pressure will be on. You're saying that it doesn't matter for anything. No, it doesn't. But then it will lead to intrigue. Do you understand what I'm talking about? I think, just, we're making magic here. This is entertainment. All right? Don't take it so personal. All right? I know there's a lot at stake. I know there's a lot of people gunning for you, but you have to remain focused.

I'll try my best. So how do you feel about that? I'm nervous. See, I could tell. The buildup, she's into it. By the way, she gave me the entire card, but I'm not going to do it. I don't think it's... I mean, we've been doing main card for now, so let's just... But how about the confidence?

Confidence, yes. The bravado? Yes, yes. It's very nice. Okay, main card UFC 166. Her picks John Dotson over Daryl Montague, Sean Jordan over Gabriel Gonzaga, Gilbert Melendez over Diego Sanchez, Daniel Cormier over Roy Nelson,

Kane Velasquez over Junior Dos Santos. I like those picks. Okay. Are they all favorites? They are all favorites again. She gets very mad when you mentioned that. You asked me this time. I wasn't actually going to bring it up because I know last time you tried to...

But she gets very mad. To say I took extra special joy in that. You could have just said you didn't know. But I'm looking at it. Presenting the facts here. Right. But yes, those guys all our favorites. Listen, at this point, she just needs a couple of ones.

wins. I mean, two and four is, you know, I'm close to... Looking at them, there's actually surprisingly a lot of heavier favorites than I would think. So let's go from the bottom real quick. Dodson, minus 330, Montague plus 270. I like Dodson here, but, I mean, minus 330 is a lot. But, man, let's just... say I don't think I'll be betting on this one. There's too many unknowns, but I do like Dodson.

I think Dodson could rightfully claim that he's as good or only one step below the champ Demetrius Johnson in that division. Yeah, that was a great fight. He's lost a lot of momentum. We haven't seen it since January. Who would say he won it, I don't think that that's necessarily the case. No, but he was close.

He was actually winning the first two rounds. He knocked him down a few times in that fight. So he's right there and I think that nothing's going to change in terms of that status. I think Dodson's going to get it done. But minus 3.30, I don't know if I'd play that one. Then we have, actually, this doesn't seem to be in order. What's the next fight? Jordan and Gonzaga.

Yeah. Jordan is minus 225. Gonzaga is plus 185. This is an interesting one because usually, you know, veterans get a little more of an edge and Gonzaga is coming in as the underdog. But I think Jordan's athleticism is going to be a little bit too much for Gonzaga. and I like that pick as well. Minus 225 may be worth a play,

but I'd probably look for something props-wise in terms of knockouts or finishing under X number of rounds. Okay. Then we have, what's after that one? Gilbert Diego. Gilbert is a huge favorite here. Really?

Minus 650. What? Sanchez is plus 475. So if anybody's liking Diego Sanchez in this one, you're getting some good odds on it. Wow. Plus 475 for you. Diego Sanchez.

You doing it? The thing is, I like Gilbert. Style-wise. I like Gilbert here. Now, obviously, I'm not playing him. At minus 650, that's ridiculous. But I definitely think that Gilbert's going to have what it takes to neutralize Diego's wrestling, and on the feet, Gilbert's just a step above, a cut above Diego.

Now, would it surprise me if Diego was able to relentlessly come after Gilbert and get him down the required number of times it takes to win him. the fight, it wouldn't surprise me. But I think that as a whole, you just have to think that Gilbert's going to be able to shrug those off and keep it on the feet. So I'm thinking Gilbert here, but minus 650 is insane. So if anybody out there likes Diego, there's definitely some value on him there. Go nuts. Cormier, another big favorite.

Minus 525. Nelson plus 415. Nelson has the ability to land a big punch. So it's very possible that he could win this fight. That said, everybody knows I'm the world's biggest Daniel Kormier fan. I think he's the best heavyweight in the world. I think if he cut down to light heavyweight, he could win that title too. So obviously I'm going with Kormier here.

Minus 525. I mean, he has Nelson beat in almost all areas. So I obviously wouldn't recommend a bet. I never recommend a bet on something that high, unless it's part of a parlay or something small. But Cormier is definitely the pick, and I agree with your mom on that one. And then the main event. So so far I'm in agreement with all of our picks.

Kane, I like Kane as well. He's minus 230. JDS is plus 190. I think that this fight's going to play out very similarly to the previous fight. Now, Kane was able to rock junior early, which led to him being able to have his way with him. Um, there's a lot of people, um, throwing the theory out there that if he's not able to rock him, it would be entirely different. He wouldn't be able to take junior down so easily.

I just think that regardless of that, Kane's game is so diverse and he has such a deep tool bag that he's going to be able to do whatever it takes to win the fight, whether it's, you know, outpacing junior for five rounds, whether it's finishing it early. No matter where it goes or how long it goes, I think that Kane Velasquez is, um, a superior fighter. Now, if Junior lands a bomb on anybody, they're going to sleep. I mean, the guy took out Mark Hunt, for God's sake. And that's not easily done. So that fight could end at any time with Junior Dos Santos knocking Kane out or getting a TKO, something like that. But my money would be on Kane here, just because I think you always go with versatility. If a guy has more ways to end the fight, that's the guy I'm usually going to go with.

You know, it's so funny, going into the first fight, I thought, Kane was the best and given his wrestling and went out. There was some talk about his knees, so I was a little worried about making that pick, but Kane is going to win, and obviously he gets knocked out. And then I remember going to the second fight at UFC 155, and I just thought, I knocked him out, he has his number, Junior's going to steamroll right through him. And now I kind of feel different. I kind of go back because it's like, look what Kane did.

I don't even know what to think at this point. Well, that's what I'm trying to say. about how you flip-flop and feel. Totally. I totally flip-flop. I backed Kane on both of those fights. Did you? I mean, Kane was the underdog going into the second fight,

and I was telling everybody that that's insane. The first fight had no bearing on what would happen. It was just that both guys were injured, and it wasn't a good barometer to use for how the second fight was going to go. So I like Kane here. By the way, I disagree. Because it was so quick that, you know, there's no telling if you were to even shot that early. You got caught with a very big punch.

And I don't think that a bum knee would affect that punch. Of course. What? Well, yeah. It doesn't affect your mobility, ability to evade the punch, ability to get what kind of motion you need in the right? I don't think it's fair. Junior was injured too. That's my point.

They were both injured. It's not a good barometer. But it kind of equals each other out. Two negatives equals equal positive. That's not really how it works. Yeah, okay, fine. If they're both injured, it doesn't go, okay, so we cut off both their legs. Now, that's the same fight.

No, it's not. Yeah, they were both injured. Not a good barometer. But regardless, we're way past that. We've had another fight to see, and that one played out as it did. Yep. Both guys being healthy, and I think that we're going to see something similar. And by the way, how do we know they're healthy?

We only found out about junior after. We hope they're healthy, but we don't know. Right? How can you say they're healthy? It's true. Okay, so let's assume that everybody is injured. Because we don't know. Then it's going to be like the first fight.

Well, because we don't know. No, I mean every fighter in every fight. Oh, okay, okay. Because we don't actually know. Right. So there it is. There it is. UFC 166 this weekend.

I look forward to it. We'll be out there beginning Wednesday, media day, all that good stuff. Okay. Let us move along. Let's answer some questions. and then go because soon the mics are going to start falling, the lights are going to start falling. Someone does something around here to kick us out.

One more time, what's at stake? At stake, we have our Tops cards. Would you mind holding up the box to your right? I got this one. I'm so tempted to open one of these. It's just sitting here. I want to know what's in it. Well, we got to send that.

Yes, I used to be such a big baseball card fan. The greatest gift someone could give me was a box. Opening a box of cards, there's no feeling like that. It's hard to replicate. It's like the Christmas present opening it up. It's such a great present back in the day. This one we've got the 2013 Tops UFC Finest with a suggested retail price of $100. So that's a valuable set of cards that Ariel is holding right there.

Each box contains one autograph card, one autographed card, one autographed jumble card, and then four regular jumble relic cards, non-autographed ones. So you're getting a lot of, you know, pieces of memorabilia. robilia that have been either worn by a fighter or used in the UFC, like pieces of the mat, pieces of their gear, or even full mouthpieces. Really? Full mouthpiece? Full mouthpiece.

In here? Yes. That is weird. So for more information on Tops and that set of cards specifically, you can visit Tops on the web, or you can talk to them on social media at Tops cards or on Facebook. Facebook.com slash Tops. they're very into mixed martial arts, the Twitter account, the Tops account. So it's a good account to follow.

Okay, let's answer some questions. Okay, let me get these website questions up first. I'm just fixing my pants because I feel like I've been sitting here for a while, in case you were wondering. Okay. Now, by the way, okay, I was just going to say, if there's anything about Paul Harris, I might get your thoughts on it because I went on a little rant there, but there could be some new stuff.

So let's say. There might be a few things on Paul Harris. I know you were talking about it, but I was doing other things, so I didn't really get your take. I'll let you know, I'll let you know, because while I was killing time there, not killing time, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah, no, I heard you talking about it,

but I was on the phone, so. I won't hold you to it. Hussamar Paharis, here's the question. I've been watching MMA for years, and I watched this controversial submission at least five times. It only took one second after the ref jumped in for him to let go. I watched other fights where there were up to two seconds without controversy.

Oftentimes, fighters are criticized for stopping before the ref jumps in. I've seen fights where refs have even missedaps. I know the heel hook can do major damage, but it's just as legal as any other submission. I see no wrongdoing here, your thoughts. So I addressed this whole one second thing, 1.2 second thing earlier. And I think it's crazy.

Are you seriously going to tell me, after looking at that? Can we see it right now? I can't really see it anyways. I can't really talk well. Do we have it? We have video of it, so we're going to... Yeah, play it. Are you seriously telling me, after looking at that,

that you don't think that there was some dirty tactics involved, that that was unsportsmanlike. I'm looking at it right now. Gets him down. I'm trying to see the screen here. And there's multiple taps happening. And the crazy thing is that the referee, Keith Peterson, is in there trying to break it up while he is tapping.

Are you telling me that that was not dirty? Really? Someone like Mark Ratner, I'm watching it again here on the replay on So heel hook, pierce, grab the cage, Peterson says no, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I mean, how many taps? And then he's tapping his back. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

That is too long. It's too long. It's dirty. Someone like Mark Radner is going to say that that's dirty and he should be cut right away, then I'll take his word for it. And you agree, right? Absolutely. This is nothing like any of those.

You're telling us, oh, some fighters hold for two seconds while a referee is like trying to pull them apart as hard as he can. There's no way. When? When did that happen? There's a line. I mean, things that you're mentioning

are like phantom taps or refs missing taps and things like that. Those are not things that are related to this. This is a person's conscious decision to try to injure somebody. And he's done it before.

And there's a history of it. That's what I was just about to say. So, yeah, obviously, it sounds like you and I are on the same page on this. Don't like it. And regardless of, comparing it to other cases, that shouldn't be what we're doing here. Also, two wrongs don't make it right.

Exactly. If something has been done wrong in the past, let's get it right now. And this was wrong, so absolutely agree with cutting him. It sucks that he lost his job, but the UFC has no choice. What are they going to do? Leave someone in there who keeps doing this. I mean, it's one thing if we're talking WWE, and that's part of his gimmick that he holds on to taps too long,

but this is actual real fighting. Can't let that happen. No. It doesn't benefit the UFC either. As Mike Pierce said, you have to pay for guys. who are getting injured. You have to pay their bills when Paul Harris puts them on the shelf. So it doesn't benefit anybody and it doesn't look good for our sport to have that happen. I don't know if someone addresses this, but what do you think of then on the flip side?

Because it's a very weird thing. But on the flip side, I do think that other promotions should look at him. It's the fight business and controversial fighters sell. So what do you think? Is that weird? I mean, it has to be said because that's just the reality of the situation. I think that's up to the commissions. They have to decide whether he's licensed or not. The other fight organizations have to do what they have to do to get ratings, to get the best fighters that they can in there. But I think in terms of banning a fighter, that's obviously up to the commission.

Anyone who says, like, oh, we're not looking at him, I mean, I think that you're kind of, you're trying to play the PC card. Every promotion, in my opinion, is thinking about him. He's a free agent who's coming off a win, who's impressive. But you have to make sure that he's doing things the right way and he's not playing dirty. Yeah. I don't know how to, like, freeze what I feel about it. It's a very, like, tricky way. He will be fighting in six months.

I don't disagree with you. And I'm not saying that's right, wrong, whatever, but he will help someone because he has never been more popular. People haven't been this interested in who smart Paul Harris ever. Well, our next question is perfect then. Here we go. Next question. What's next for him? Apparently, Bjorn, Rebney, and Bellator don't want him.

Where does he go next? WSOF, 1F. Where is he going? Well, let's just say they really don't want him, which again, I don't know if it's the smartest decision because Ben Ascran versus Paul Harris, on many levels, with Ascran talking all the smack that he does, is the biggest fight they can put together for Paul Harris. For Ascran, too, outside of the UFC. You know, especially with their ground games. I mean, that's a great fight. Forget about the controversy. Just Ascran versus Paul Harris, you agree is a great fight, right? A guy who, I said on the previous show, I don't see Paul Harris going in there and doing what he used to do, tapping out a guy in 30 seconds in the first round. He took Mike Pierce and caught him in 30 seconds in the first round. So the submission itself was, you can't, there's not enough praise I could give that submission.

What happened afterwards, I have no respect for. But him fighting Ben Ascran would be an incredible. incredible ground game, an incredible ground matchup, because Ben is able to completely dominate guys on the ground, and Paul Harris is able to do the same, even from his back. So I couldn't have more anticipation for that matchup, but we'll see what's to come from that. That being said, if I had to guess, I'm going to say WSOF, because they have not been, you know, I guess, you know, Fitch gets released, O'Connor. gets released and by the way I thought both of those were good pickups on their part um berkman beats fitch and he's fighting for the title and it elevated his stock I think okami is a name I don't think he's going to you know sell out arenas but it's a nice guy you can say that you have a top 10 middleweight on your roster um so just given the fact that they've been trying to build up their their roster

and get the biggest names possible if I had to guess I'd say WSOF our next question this is in regards the rules in general. Fighters are explained the rules in advance, so why does it take multiple incidents to only get worn? Fighters seem to not care about grabbing the cage or eye poking because they know it will take multiple incidents to get worn, and that's pretty much it. I couldn't agree more.

It's a very weird thing. I mean, even in that case right there, Pierce was holding on to the cage, and Peterson, the referee, had to tell him, you know, don't do that. I mean, there's oftentimes where, you know, someone like Eve Levine, like I remember the GSP and Nick Diaz fight, and GSP was in Diaz's guard. I think at the end of the third round and the horn sounds.

And then Diaz swipes at him, tries to punch him. A lot of people forget that, but he actually tried to punch him after the bell. And then Eve Levine goes into his corner and says, if you do that again, I'll disqualify you, whatever. It's not like that in other sports. It's not, you know, if you go off sides and football, they don't say one more time or, you know, going to give you a 15-yard penalty or whatever. If you pull a face mask, if you hit someone, you know, head-to-head, whatever. in other sports traveling and basketball, all that stuff.

So it's a very weird part of our sport, and the only way I can really explain it, and this is a very good question for someone like Mark Ratner or referee, but the only way I can explain is that things happen so quickly, and because of the nature of the sport, much like someone, you know, like Henderson hitting a Bispang, things can happen so quickly and there's momentum and just they feel like they give guys, you know,

a bit of a longer leash. They allow them to do some things, where in the rules, technically it will be illegal. In the flow of a fight, it's not illegal. They don't want to stop the fight every time. Is that right? I mean, technically, no. These are rules that are being broken every minute in a fight. So I don't know how to get around it, but it is a very weird and gray part of our sport.

And much like refereeing is in our sport, I think it's in a very great position now. And judging as well, 10-9, every judge seems to judge a fight. differently. Referees are all different. The sport is still essentially, you know, 20-something years old, and it's still growing, and I think that I'll all be taken care of. But let's not forget how young this sport is. Well, I think that that's kind of, how do I phrase it? If we start enforcing the rules as they're dictated, then the sport will adapt, meaning if you start taking away these points for grabbing the cage the first time,

you're not going to grab the cage again. So, you know, I understand trying to give fighters every chance to win and not wanting to put somebody in a hole immediately. But we can't just let this keep happening. I mean, the cage grab in the Kim fight completely changed the face of that fight. It went from him being put in a bad position to almost moments later winning the fight. So we need to do something about it. And I think that enforcing the rules as they're dictated is the way to do it. because the fights will then adapt to that.

Yeah, you're right. Maybe I'm too soft, too lenient. I mean, how about Joseo Aldo Chad Mendez? That's a great case. It's very similar to the Kim fight. Yeah. But that was just on a bigger scale is for the title. You have to work all the way back to get to the title.

But yes, at the end of the day, it's the same thing. It sucks, and it's a big problem. I think that the refs, they're not doing their job. You can't, especially when it's like three, four warnings. I mean, I can understand one, but like three, four warnings. geez because sometimes in boxing, they'll take someone will hit close and they'll give a warning, or there's too much clinching, stalling, whatever.

But when you're trying to do things deliberately and you're doing it three, four times, then something needs to be done. And often it's not. Our next question, now that Fallon Fox has just been beaten, will this actually be a positive step for Fox with regards to her being accepted as an equal competitor in the WMMA scene?

Surely this will counter those who said Fox had an unfair advantage. I guess so. I think what it will guarantees that she'll receive less attention, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, she wins 10 in a row, then things are going to change. But at least for now, she's going to receive less attention. And let's be honest, this fight against Ashley Evan Smith on Saturday night at CFA 12 didn't receive a tenth of the attention that some of her previous fights did. So for whatever reason, the found Fox hype train slowed down a bit. the loss on Saturday received attention and, you know, that was bound to happen.

But I want to see, does she keep fighting? Does she rebound? We'll find out Fallon Fox's intentions now and how dedicated she is to the sport. I've never questioned it, but we're going to find it out now and see after a loss how she reacts and if she becomes better and all that stuff. There's still going to be that controversy. There's still going to be, you know, those questions being asked. and let's not forget she's up there in age as well.

She's north of 35. So let's see what happens. But I think for now, people, the questions won't be so much. Does she have an unfair advantage? It will just be about, you know, the general case of the situation. And then I think how she rebounds. I think that's going to be the talking points now when she fights. I agree with that sentiment.

I don't think she'll ever be accepted as an equal competitor just because the situation is different. But my stance on this has always been if you sign to fight her, then that's it, you know? Yeah. You know the commission. Exactly.

Everybody knows at this point. If the commission allows it and the other fighter signs on the dotted line, that's the fight, and that'll have an advantage or no advantage, that'll be it. And now that it's seen that she can be beaten,

there's nothing really else to say about this case unless something changes. Yeah, and you can tell because no one was really talking about it going into it. It was just another. fight in a Saturday night, which was good.

Speaking of WMMA, our next question about Holly Holm. What are your thoughts on Holly Holm and her MMA win streak? When and how soon do you think we can expect seeing her perform inside the Octagon? Well, she's obviously on the UFC's radar. A lot of buzz about her. She comes from a great camp. She looks fantastic. She's also fighting lesser competition.

I noted on Twitter on Friday night when the fight was happening and reminded me of Maple Leaf Wrestling, which was the show Saturday, Saturday, mornings in Canada where they would have like, you know, Ultimate Warrior versus John Finkelstein out of Hamilton, Ontario, who, you know, was not exactly the fittest wrestler. You know what I'm saying squash matches. And she is, I mean, just given her boxing background, limited kickboxing background, she is way more talented than the women she is facing. And let's be honest, this opponent she fought on Friday night was a late replacement. She was supposed to fight the woman who had defeated Cyborg a few years back. Cyborg's only lost before she was really Chris Cyborg.

But anyway, she is so technical. She's such a joy to watch. The way she mixes things up, she is primarily known for her boxing skills, but her kickboxing skills are so great. She was tested on the ground briefly in a Bellator fight, but not against top-level competition. Honestly, I'd love to see her in the UFC now. I know she has two. two fights left in Legacy, but there is a clause where she can leave for the UFC if she wants to, if she gets a good deal. A fight, her and someone like, you know, Germain Darandami would be fantastic. And there are other fighters in the UFC like Alexandra Albu, who's recently signed, who is, you know, according to Sherdog, one and O. UFC claims she's 5 and O, but it's all very murky.

So she has enough experience where I think she can hang. I think the key is to get her in there when she's 100% ready because there's so much buzz and attention. So I can, if I had to guess, I think she'll actually fight those last two fights in legacy, at least one more before coming into the UFC. I know they've talked and I know she's on their radar. So there's nothing fishy going on. It's all being done at her pace and it's not like she's being ignored. So fear not.

But I can't wait to see her in the UFC because as far as striking is concerned. I mean, you can make a case right now. She is probably far and away the best. striker as far as women's MMA is concerned. Is that a crazy statement? No, definitely not. No, right? I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I lose my mind towards the end of the shows,

but I feel like that's legit. Yeah, no, that's definitely not crazy. I know you were over in Chicago for Glory, but did you see the highlights of that? I didn't. I didn't see that or the Fallon Fox Fight. Well, you know, you need to go to MMAfighting.com because we had the gifts up, courtesy of a zombie profit. I mean, we like to cover the sport.

So if you need a place to get news and videos and whatnot, it's a good place to go. You kind of work for it. Thanks for the hot tip. Yeah. Yeah, I got in yesterday, so I didn't have a chance to see it again. Oh, they didn't have internet there. That's okay. Anyway, moving along.

Our next question. The ticket sales came out for the Bellator pay-per-view, and 10,000 seats were still available. Considering how much they have to put into the pay-per-view, if it fails, will it be as bad as the elite-X-C, or will they recover from it and avoid pay-per-view and stick to T-E? your thoughts. Look, this is one of those things that, you know, we are, what, October 14th, the fight is November 2nd. I mean, there's going to be a lot of people walking up, a lot of buzz building up. I'm not saying that it's going to be, you know, bigger than UFC 100, but I think it's a little too early to call this a failure. I will repeat what I said a few

weeks back. First off, they're hurting themselves on two fronts. They have loaded this card, even with some great undercard fights, Terry Edom, making his Beltore debut. They just added check Congo versus Vinices Caros, which could headline a Spike TV show. The main card, all those fights on the main card could headline a Spike TV show. So that's five weeks of fighting. And let's be honest, this season, while doing well, you have to wonder, on Friday night, by the way, you have to wonder how much better it could be doing if they were putting on stack cards or as stack possible. It's very hard, A, to put on a show every week. UFC doesn't even do it for 13 straight weeks. And it's, and it's doubly hard, if that's, if that's a word, to do that while you

stack completely one show over the rest. Spike TV is a TV company. Viacom, they're not in the pay-per-view business. I still don't understand why they are doing this. I don't get it. If it's just for the Eddie Alvarez situation, I feel like it's bigger than that at this point. I still don't understand why they're doing it. And I feel like, imagine they put it on this card for free. I just think they could get maybe two million viewers. Who knows what they can get? A million, a half. I think they would do better than a million. I think they'd do better than a million and a half. They could get in the two millions. Why are you doing this? You're not a pay-per-view company and you're owned by a TV company. If you were, if you were Bellator owned by, you know, just the old

crew, then I can understand because you can make a lot of money off pay-per-view. But now as a TV company, I just don't understand it. And by the way, I should say that the promo for the The Alvarez Chandler fight gave me great hope. Now, I'm not trying to be too negative here, but it gave me great hope on Friday because the way they started to tease it, and I believe there's going to be a countdown show, and they'll be more leading up to it. But the way they started to tease it made me think that they actually are going to tell

the real story of this fight. And what I mean by real story, the Alvarez contract situation, the friction with Bjorn. Hey, take the clips from this show. do whatever you got to do to sell the fight because the way Alvarez said, I can't wait for Bjorn Rebney to put that belt around my waist

made me think that they're actually going to do it and that's the smart thing to do. That's what you should do. Tell the story. Tell the story of this outsider who doesn't want to be there who's trying to take down your poster boy and the poster boy trying to fight for his company

and the guy ran out of the cage last time you saw him and he said F off to everyone and tried to sign with the UFC but it didn't work out. Tell the story, who cares? Tell the real story. Fans will get behind that. Then you got Newton and Kingwell.

it's a great card. I think they've done as good of a job as possible building this card. Hopefully for their sake, everyone is healthy. And it's somewhat unfortunate that, you know, the main event kind of overshadows that because people get hung up on that. But it's a great card. If you buy this card, it really has nothing to do with Rampage and Tito. You could buy it for those other four fights. And it's pretty solid card. Those three fights, in particular, the title fights. But that being said, I don't understand why they're doing it. I really don't. It makes no sense. This is our last one from the website. What country market will explode next for the UFC?

And then he lists Sweden, Russia, Mexico, et cetera, and why? Well, I'm going to exclude Sweden. I just don't think of it's big enough. It's got to be Russia or Mexico. And why? Well, they just signed a massive TV deal in Mexico. There were Televisa, which is like the equivalent to Fox. And it's, you know, almost everyone gets Televisa.

It's a massive deal. Russia, I say, is interesting because of all the great Russian fighters coming up and getting signed. But if I had to pick one, I'll say Mexico, even though they've been slow to come around with a heavyweight champion like Kane Velazquez, with combat sports being so popular there. And with this TV deal, which they don't have a TV deal of that magnitude in Russia, I think that could be a game changer. So given the fact that they have the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if they go to Mexico in 2014. And I wouldn't be surprised if it blows up. Maybe not like it did so quickly in Brazil because Brazil had the history, but it could be a very good market for them. Dana White always likes to say he thought Mexico was a no-brainer when they bought the company.

It's taken some time, but now that they got that TV deal, they always kind of work around that. Then they bring the ultimate fighter and all air old fights, build them some stars. This is the game changer, Tel Aviza. Okay, these are our Twitter questions available to win the tops cards. First question, has Paul Daly's momentum for a UFC return? ruined because we bring him up when talking about the Paul Harrah's incident. You know what? I actually thought of that. And the first thing I thought when I saw that clip of Dana White talking to Jeremy Schap on ESPN2 on the Oberman show when he announced this on Thursday,

Paul Daly is screwed. Because there was a time when it seemed like Dana White was open to this, to this idea somewhat. I know he slammed the door. But if Paul Daly went like 4 and O in Bama now, I could see the momentum building, there's no way because, if Daley gets back in, Paul Harris fans will ask for him to get back in, and now they have to set this example, Paul Daley is screwed. I don't think he's getting back in. Our next question, the stun gun fight seems to be flying under the radar. Do you think stun gun is going to use his stand-up more now? He clearly has power. It's funny because people were criticizing him for not having power going into this fight. I don't know if it's flying

under the radar. I think that it got attention. Paul Harris situation overshadowed everything, but I think that idea, I believe it was, was it Chale that said it on the show or someone else, Kim versus Jake Shields kind of makes the most sense, right? I mean, that's a fight that rankings-wise, style-wise, I think that makes sense, right? I also like that fight, yeah, it's a good fight. So that's what I think will, I don't know if it will happen, but, you know, they talk about Singapore, maybe he'll fight on that card in January. but you know look at Kim's record I mean the guy is obviously very talented so that fight shouldn't open your eyes

I mean he was getting blasted in the second round came back it was a great comeback but it wasn't exactly the most impressive Kim fight of all time first round he obviously won and was looking good second round he was on the verge of losing very close to losing I'd just like to add more to the point of the question that he's never really been power puncher not a power puncher but I was going to say was he's never been afraid to be on his feet. He's not one of those guys where he has to take you down, otherwise he's screwed. He's competent on his feet and he's not afraid to be there. In this case, and it's mostly because he has a very, very sturdy chin. And only, only I believe the Carlos Condit knockout, you know, showed anything in regards to him being vulnerable. And even

then, I mean, it was a huge flying knee from one of the best finishers in MMA history. history. So yeah, he's competent enough on his feet and he's not afraid to be there. That said, his bread and butter is obviously getting you down and controlling you. So I don't know if we'll necessarily see more stand up from him, but I don't think, you know, he's ever shied away from that. But obviously, as I said, he will take you down and he will control you. Yeah. Our next question. In my opinion, the winner of the main event of U.S. 166 is the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time. Your thoughts on that. Dave Meltzer wrote an article yesterday about Kane Velazquez, and he touched on this.

And now, certainly the winner of this trilogy is in that discussion. I'm not ready to just say Fador is yesterday's news, even though he is yesterday's news. You get my point. Although he was leading the morning report today, talking about the deal with Dana. That never happened. but he's definitely in there and he's probably top three of all time. You can make a case. It's all arguable.

But I would definitely, yes. And by the way, both of them are in the discussion already, but this kind of seals the deal. You said top three. You mentioned top three and then you mentioned Fador. So who's two or three in that conversation? Well, two or three? Oh, right now? Yeah.

Well, no, honestly, I have them. Well, I have them both of my top five for sure. sure. I would say Kane is in my top three right now just because, you know, he got the last win and it was so dominant. Okay, so then who's number two? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm, that's what I'm thinking. Um, Bob Sapp. I'm just joking. Come on. Um, you know, people that come to mind are, you know, the big nogs, the, uh, the Josh Barnett's, but. I mean, it's hard to say Kane is not number, Kane or Jr. Orr, whoever wins this is. is not number two already.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bare minimum. Yes, yes, yes, 100%. I'm just kind of leaving some, you know, a slot open. A wiggle room if you forget. You know, I don't put the Arlowski's. I don't put the Silvias in there that high up. As far as, you know, heavyweight history is concerned.

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's not, you know, Mark Coleman. I don't put those people up there. Do you? No. I think that with a win, Kane more so than Junior just because Junior has that loss to Kane in the middle. It's kind of weird.

Yeah. Like, Kane, because he would have won the last two of the trilogy, it makes it more like, you know, the first one didn't matter. So I think if Kane wins, he's the best heavyweight of all time. Yeah. Yeah. You could certainly make that that, that, that, that, that, case, you know, Randy Couture is obviously in the mix, but I still, you know, I still would think

that I think Fader and his prime beats Randy, probably, and, um, Kane and JDS, you know, the sport is obviously evolved. And Brock is in the, I don't care what anyone says. Brock is in, in the mix there too. He was a different fighter after his surgery. And, uh, I know that I will piss off some people, but he's certainly up there. I don't know if he's up there with Kane and JDS right now, but he's certainly maybe in my top eight or so. Fair? Yeah. But honestly, you can definitely say right now,

Fador, Kane, JDS are the top three best heavyweights of all time. So you put both of them above Big Nog at this point even? I'd say you can make the case. Am I going to do it right now? If you want me to, sure. Okay, fair. Our next question, your thoughts on Spike's initial glory broadcast.

I thought it was a solid showing, and Morrow was outstanding, as always. Was this tweet brought to you by New York Rick and his crew? True? I mean, it's the thing speaks for itself, doesn't it? So I watched it on Saturday night. And what I thought was interesting was I got, you know, I think my colleague Luke was making a little too big of a deal about this, but I got some tweets from people saying, you know, are you watching? You're watching? I was a little late to watch it live. So I watched it via tape delay. I had some family things to take care of. I enjoyed it immensely. I liked the one night tournament, although I still get a little weird about it. I still. I'm not sure in this day and age that it's the safest thing. I think that Tarant Spong looked great, and he's the face of the promotion, and he's a big star, and he's someone that makes people like myself interested in this because he's an

MMA guy now as well, and he's linked to an MMA team. Has a guy like Rashad in his corner, as Duke Rufus pointed out. I thought that even though Verrahoeven of the four-man tournament was the least accomplished one, and probably the biggest underdog, Rufus was calling him. Rico Balboa. Was his name, Rico, right? Yes, Rico. Look at me talking kickboxing.

But I thought that was actually brilliant for them. I thought it was the best possible scenario because you built a new star. People still want to see Saki and Gita fight. There are huge names. I even know about them. And so it was like the best case scenario. I was surprised that Haritanov fought on the undercard because he's a name and I thought they'd want to feature him.

And even Raymond Daniels. I remember Raymond Daniels, the guy who beat Brian Foster. He made his Strike Force debut, fought in his only MMA fight. It was a very big deal. It was on the undercard of the Diego San... Not Diego Sanchez. Gilbert Melendez versus Josh Thompson first fight in 2008 when Gilbert lost his title.

And Raymond Daniels was a big deal. In fact, I think his nickname is like the real deal or something like that. And he lost and didn't look good. And he kind of disappeared. But I was excited to hear that he was on the undercard. Anyway, point being, I enjoyed it. I thought it was a very big mistake to end the broadcast before hearing from RICO. It was too abrupt.

And what were they really rushing to get to? This is live sports. You kind of have to roll with it and build the star. But I'm curious to hear about the ratings. And I hear obviously that Spike doesn't really care. It was just a great night. The big difference here is it's the best organization as far as kickboxing concern. So they have the best fighters.

It looks good on TV. The graphics look great. I like the way they use Ron Kruck as the, the reporter backstage and you got the you know the the reports and set the scene backstage i thought that was that was great and i wish other promotions would do that as well even if it has nothing to myself you know kind of in that role i just think it's a nice little addition to the to the broadcast i thought morrow was great it looked good the crowd was into it they seemed intelligent i mean you were there tell me i obviously i know you're somewhat biased here but was this a home run that

everyone is saying it was in terms of the event itself it couldn't have it couldn't have been better um And I say that as somebody who, you know, hadn't been to kickboxing events live until these last two. But being there in person, I'd say that it's almost incomparable. There's nothing like the atmosphere in the building when the best heavyweight kickboxers in the world are squaring off. It was something that hasn't been replicated before for me. And it's one of those things where if you see it, you'll understand and you'll be a fan. Yeah, it was fun. And they're here in New York on November 23rd.

There's some big names on the card, right? Well, Petrosian, widely considered, you know, the best kickboxer in the world is on the card. Here's a problem that I have. They need, like, you know what's so good about the UFC and I think helped the UFC greatly? Five champions for a very long time. It was very clean, the weight classes. Here with the tournament champion, champion this. It's too confusing, like, who's the top dog in every weight class.

There's rankings. You can find them. on... And who's doing these rankings? Glory. Glory is producing the rankings. But isn't that weird that the promotion is making the rankings? Shouldn't it be like an independent...

Yeah, because they could be changing to do whatever they want. Sure, but I mean, that's how it is right now. There's no telling what it could be in the future, but for now they're ranked based on Glory's rankings. So let me ask you this. I'm looking at the glory ranking page right now, right? Sure. The middleweight guy, the top guy at middleweight is our... Artem Levin.

Not Joe Schilling. Didn't he win their thing, their tournament last month? Yes. Not last month. It was two weeks ago. But it was last month, September. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yes, he won the middleweight championship. So shouldn't he be number one? Where is he on the list? I don't even know. It just says official glory rankings. I'm clicking on middleweight, Artem Levin. And then I see his stats, but I don't see the rest of the list. guys.

See what I'm saying? Oh, here they are. Artem Levin, Joe Schilling's number two. Yeah. And then, and then, uh, semi-Shiltz is the top heavyweight. Shouldn't it be Rico?

Well, that's a whole different, uh, conversation because semi, you know, isn't fighting right now, so. Sure. But like, Gokon Sakhi's number two, Gita's number three. That, that one might have not been updated just because of the, okay.

The time. Yes. If Silva's eight, that one simply wasn't updated yet because the fights just had that on salary. Spong is number one because he won that tournament over the summer. Yes. Okay, so there's featherweight. Why isn't there a bantam weight? That's just not a weight class that they have at this time.

So it's just featherweight, lightweight, lightweight, well, to wait. Okay. And what are the weights? Like, lightweight. What is light weight? They're based on kilograms, so they're like similar to ours. For example, the light heavyweight tournament, the one that, like the light heavyweight fights, the one that Spong was in is at, I believe it's contest.

at like 209 pounds. Okay. Heavyweight, there's obviously no limit. Middle weight was like 187 pounds. So it's very similar to the MMAW. How come I don't see Petrosian anywhere? Is this his debut for glory? Oh, is he Walterweight?

I don't even see him in any division. Oh, he's number two in lightweight. How is he the best kickboxer in the world if he's number two? Who's number one? Robin Van Rousselmala. Yeah. I don't believe that let me, uh, well, I'll get back to you in the rankings. Okay, well, look, point being, I'm interested.

I like this. I'm curious about this story about kickboxing coming and trying to make it and being on Spike. I'm very interested and I enjoyed it greatly, so that's all I can really say. This is in regards to Spong. Should Tyrone Spong continue to do both MMA and kickboxing, or should you focus on one or the other? If so, which one? Side note, I thought it was weird that the coach from Wolfslayer was a referee. Not weird, I just didn't know that.

I believe the name is Dave Jackson. And I tweeted about this. No one got back to me how this happened or if he has a history as a ref. But if anyone's listening, I'm curious about this. Anyway, Tyrone Spung, the quote-unquote Bo Jackson. By the way, could we pull up this clip and send it to Gloria and just remind them of where... I mean, should I be getting royalties for this title? I mean, he's just using it now everywhere.

And I don't even think he knew who Bo Jackson was when I said it. It's okay, though. I'm happy that he's, you know, gaining success from it. But really, a little credit here. and there, you know, a little pat on the back. I think he should. I don't think it affects him greatly. It might hurt him, though.

If he gets knocked out in MMA, you know, now that I think about it, maybe not. See, I think he did his job. He got people like myself interested in him because if he didn't do that, I wouldn't know as much about Tyrone Spong. I wouldn't have had him on this show. So it's different. But if he loses an MMA, it hurts him in kickboxing. and he has probably too much riding on kickboxing right now.

It probably gets paid the most in kickboxing. Like, I don't think he should do the boxing. If I'm Glory, if I'm World Series of fighting, I don't want him boxing. I don't see how that helps him. Maybe he has a great contract, but I really don't see how that helps him. So right now with this whole thing blowing up and, you know, there's a real chance of it being the top, you know, draw in kickboxing. I don't know. He has a contract.

Yes, to fulfill it. but A, if I'm Spike, I want him in Bellator. And B, if he's not in Bellator, I probably would rather him just do the kickboxing. And I agree with Duke. Focus on one thing. Probably better for you. Wow, this is the first time we've had one of these.

Yeah. Here's our twit longer. Let me see if I can zoom in on this. There we are. A lot of glory questions. Hmm. I believe that this one was selected by one Ariel Hawani. I like this question a lot.

Glory was awesome this weekend, but got me thinking, for any non-UFC organization to compete, did they need a polarizing figure to go head to head with Dana, a la McMahon, Eric Bischoff in the Monday Night Wars? Here's a thing. Two things about this. Polarizing, no. They need a figurehead. I think that's something that's very much lacking. They need someone. They need a promoter who's out there doing interviews, talking the right kind of promoter. You can have the wrong one and it hurts you, but the right one who just gets you attention. People like to talk about the business. People like to talk about the promotion. these things are things that we're used to.

Bjorn, Dana, of course, Scott Coker was very well-liked. Even some of the failed promotions, you always have a guy, and I feel like they don't have that right now. And I do not think they should go head to head with Dana. That would be a big mistake. Focus on your own sport. Focus on your own fans, your own markets, all that stuff. What's the point of getting into a war with Dana? It never works.

And you're a different sport. So what's the point? Don't be polarizing. If you want to be, if that's who you are, then try. sure, but don't try to be just to be polarizing and do not go ahead to have Dana because that doesn't help you in any facet of the game. Why don't they have a promoter guy or do they have one and I don't know about it? I don't believe there's any promoter at this time, no. It would be good, right?

Sure. it's always good to have, you know, somebody that represents the organization being there to promote the fights themselves. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Let's skip this one. Why? Why?

Why are you skipping it? It's a little glory heavy. No, no, no. I actually think it's a good question. Okay. Do you believe that a partnered show between Glory World Series and Bellator MMA would work? No. I think it can happen, but the next part of the question is best of both worlds are confusing.

I actually think that they should stay separate. Cross-promotion, you know, help each other out, but no need. Two different sports. Leave them alone. Next question. Do you guys think the UFC should take Bellator's offer and give, quote-unquote, offer, and give Ben Ascran an immediate title shot? It's laughable.

It's ridiculous. It's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Bjorn Rebney and Belator are going to dictate who the UFC gives a title shot to, the fact that they even think that the UFC might even respond to this, let alone it actually happening, is ludicrous.

And I think they're smarter than that. It's all PR, and it's just nonsense. I think the real interesting thing here is that, as far as we know, the UFC hasn't offered been asking a contract yet. That's what they're saying, right? That's interesting.

What are they waiting for? Are they not interested in them? Is he kind of stuck? And now they're saying, oh, if they don't do it, they may have to resign him. What a threat. This is your champion. Treat him like a champion. This is a guy who has been dominant in your organization, won tournaments, beat contenders, and you're just kind of using him as this little pawn in this little game. And for some reason,

Ben is falling for it. Ben's getting excited. You really think, Bjorn Rebney said this. And Ben tells Josh Gross at ESPN, oh, I'm so excited now, this is actually going to happen. You really think this is going to happen now? You really think that Dana's going to be like, that's a great idea. I'm going to sign a guy. guy who has never fought for us, who we don't have any footage for, who a lot of fans don't know, and give him an immediate title shot because he just beat, you know, a couple guys in Belator, one Russian guy landed one punch against him in a five-round fight. It's not happening. I think at this point, Belator should just try to re-sign the guy, honestly, and stop disrespecting

him, because at this point, it's just, it looks, it's silly. Like, you really think Dana White's going to take you up on this offer? Do you agree with me that this is silly? It's absolutely silly. And the UFC doesn't have any stake in that. They don't care. They can sign him out right if they want him. They don't need to get some kind of stipulation about title. It's crazy. It's ridiculous. And by the way, isn't it interesting that Bjorn Rebony all of a sudden has become very combative towards Dana? Before he was doing the right thing, in my opinion, he was kind of leaving it alone, but he's, I don't know. It's an interesting thing to monitor. It's changed. Our next question. It seems that many enjoyed the shammer.

rock documentary. This was aired on Spike. Who else would you like to see that a doc on does this help Bellator at all? Well, first off, I enjoyed it greatly. I thought it was a very interesting watch. One part made me feel uncomfortable when he went to see his brother who was homeless and was kind of like, you know, is there anything I can help you with? Let me know. And I mean, the guy's homeless. And he said that he reached out to him for some help last year and he ignored him. That kind of made me feel uncomfortable. But for the most part, I thought Frank was very open. And, obviously the meeting with Ken, which again, you know, these guys are showmen and they have met before, but it was a nice sit down and it was emotional. And overall, I thought it was an entertaining watch.

And I think we need more of that in our sport. The history is sometimes forgotten. I mean, I'd like to see documentaries on Couture, on Liddell, on Coleman, on Dan Severin. I mean, there's so many guys and stories and Crow Cod and Fedor. I mean, there's so many characters in this sport who kind of get forgotten as time goes on. on, Sakoraba, I mean, it just, you know, possibilities are endless. Does it help Belator? But then I start to think, like, how does this help Belator? Like, why are they airing a Frank Shamrock documentary out of nowhere?

He doesn't work for Belator. He was on Fightmaster, but this is not airing during Fightmaster. You'd think it would, so you'd be more emotionally invested in Frank Shamrock. And then you start to think, you know, just based on who the shamrocks are and how that thing ended, are they building to a fight? At the end, I kind of felt like I was watching a countdown show. I actually know the producers of the show. I used to work for the guys who produced the show.

And I emailed one of them and I said, great job. But I got to ask, was this leading to a fight? Are we going to see Frank versus Ken on Spike TV? And his response was, I can't talk about it. I signed an NDA. Interesting. He didn't deny it. Can't talk about it.

I signed an NDA. Respect it. but I am starting to think that there's something up here. So we'll see. For now, I enjoyed it, and I'd love to see more of it. Our next question. Now that Okami is in WSOF, do you think... What questions today? Unbelievable questions.

These might be our best questions ever. I mean, somebody had a hand in curating them. Yes. Well, well job. Good job. Good job. Now that Okami is in WSOF, do you think everyone that was angry with his UFC exit will support him? No. I mentioned this on Sunday night. I can't wait to see what happens when he fights. Everyone who's up in arms, if you live in the market that he fights in,

if you're at home, you should buy tickets, you should watch him on TV, you should support him, because you were so outraged that he was cut. And then I got people saying, oh, you don't have to be a fan to be outraged, really? So what do you care so much? The principal, come on. You guys are fighting for the rights of the fighters. The UFC made a business decision. And one of their, you know, solid but unspectaccomplicated.

not that popular fighters had just lost to a rising star. They thought it was an opportunity to, you know, cut ties, much like stars get cut from NFL teams, from NBA teams, from MLB teams, NHL teams that happens every day in sports. And the fans reacted like the biggest injustice had ever happened. Now, if you may disagree with it, that's fine. He was your favorite fighter. But I can guarantee you, based on his Twitter followers,

based on the attention that he received leading up to his fights, Yushanokami wasn't the most popular fighter in the UFC. Chal Sunn himself was on this show prior to UFC 104 and was pissed off. And that was the birth of Chilin. He has admitted it. He was pissed off that he was carrying the promotion for that fight when he fought Yishinokami at UFC 104. Because he wasn't talking, he wasn't doing anything. He wasn't building the fight.

So those fighters, you know, they get cut. But back to the question, do I think, absolutely not. Should they? Well, they'd be hypocrites if they don't. Our next question, do you like seeing stats shown during fights? I personally find it a distraction. I like it. How can it be a distraction?

It helps tell the story. After the fight, I think it's great, like a boxing match. During the fight, it paints a picture of what's going on. I like it. I think it's a plus. I think it makes it seem more like a sport and professional. I don't want to speak for Gaz here, but I think the implication is something along the lines of

you're focusing on the stats or letting that paint the picture for you. Like, if I tell you this person has landed 30 strikes, and this person has landed 15, you might be swayed in a different direction from that point on than if you were just watching the fight. It helps tell a story, though, I think. My position is I love more stats. I'm about to see every possible bit of data that I can.

But I think that that was the implication of the question. It's 2013. I want to see as much that we can, and there are great people working behind the scenes. I want to see what they can come up with. I like history. I like the most significant strikes since this fight, in that. I like that stuff. I think it makes MMA seem like more of a professional sport.

I think this is our last question. Will you be in New York Rick's Corner slash posse for his amateur debut if it happens? You can be the MMA version of Jimmy Hart. Well, I mean, I think I've already put my offer out there. It's the ball's in your court. You'll be there. Well, I mean, will I be there and just some kind of, you know, you know, like you want me there to just attract some attention? or do I have an actual role on the team? Like, am I holding Mitz?

Am I picking up the shoes? Am I putting, you know, the little ice thing on your chest in between rounds? Like, what exactly am I doing? I mean, we'll find something. Okay. Oh. But, like, will I feel needed or am I just going to be kind of... Listen to you, feel needed.

Well, I want to be needed. I want to be needed. You know, I want to help out. You know, I kind of, you know, should we bring up the text from your mom or not? No, no, no, no. We shouldn't bring that up. Okay, that's a problem. That was a great text.

It was very funny. Let's not bring up the text of my mom. Okay, fair enough. But shout out to my mom. Yeah, shout out to your mom. I mean, kind of made me rethink the whole thing, but I won't bring it up. Anyway, point being, I'd like to be there. I'm still not quite sure where we stand. It's October 14th.

I haven't heard about any training. But he seems a little ornery today, so I don't want to push him too much. The whole, you know, picks thing kind of got the feathers ruffled, right? Bad mood. Yeah. No. Of course, Aeroa will be involved in some way. Thank you.

So let me cycle back through these. Let's see who the tops winners are. Yes. As we approach 5 o'clock Eastern time, four hours. Let's try and get everybody home nice and... I don't know about you guys back there. Okay, great questions this week. Who do we got?

Okay, so this one. Stats, liked it. Okami. Oh, yeah. But that, whoa, wait. our boy over there is in the UK Yeah I think he

Yeah he is Sorry bud Um Sean Rock doc Yeah Chris Uh Kyle See the thing about Kyle

I like Kyle But he's just such an annoying Pacers fan So I don't know if I could give him the love Damn Great question But my man You'd like to bug me

When the past are doing well We'll see We'll see Damn Yeah Garrett Regarding Yep yep

Yep Yep my back pocket already. Oh, the Vikings guy. Okay. Glory was awesome. Oh, polarizing figure, right? Yep. Tarant Spong. Thoughts on glory as a broadcast. Yeah, I kind of went off on that for a while. Wonder what's a greatest heavyweight of all time. Yeah. Yep. DHK. Paul Daly. Okay, let's go. Greatest heavyweight of all time. John Fur. John Fur. Congratulations. I think he's a long time fan and then let's go to let's give another one because they've been so good today

Chris not C-dub about Shamrock versus Shamrock. Boom. Boom. Reach out to me. Tops. Reach out to maybe by 2016 you'll get the cards. Let's not push it. How about that? Let's not press our luck. 2017. Let me just talk about the Tops cards

one last time real quick. Let them know what they won. Tops finest 2013, one autograph card, four Jumbo Relic cards and then one autographed Jumbo Relic card. Check out Tops on Twitter at Tops cards or on Facebook, Facebook.com slash tops. There you go. UFC 166, Alfred, you can hit my music.

Bang. And by the way, a happy Columbus Day to those celebrating. I'm not really sure. We were trying to figure out what exactly Columbus Day means, but if you are celebrating Columbus Day, which I assume means a day off for you, a happy Columbus Day. And a happy Thanksgiving to all my friends, north of the border. my family, my friends, although my family doesn't really celebrate Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoyed the show. It was a fun one, my friends. As we gear up for UFC 166, that was a weird sound. It all started many, many hours ago with Duke Rufus. Thank you to him. Good job at Glory 11. I believe I'll be there. Glory 12.

Maybe they can put me on the poster. Who knows if I play my cards right with New York Rick back there. But good job and good luck with all his big fights coming. up. Jessica Ai, how great was that? Jessica Ai made me feel really good about life. And I look forward to her UFC debut against fellow Canadian Sarah Kaufman this Saturday, UFC

166. Mark Ratner, great as always. Got a little more time with him, which was actually a nice little positive that came out of junior being late. So thank you very much to him and good luck with everything he's doing at the UFC. Rami Gannauer was great as well. Really interesting blend

of different guests on today's show. I enjoyed it very much. And check out They're the great program that they're doing for charity over at Fightmetric.com. King Moe was fired up. He returns to action on November 2nd, Belatorre's pay-per-view, Long Beach, California. Great fight against Emmanuel Newton. And Mike Pierce, thank you so much to him,

and hope he feels better. And thank you very much to Juno Santos. So he gets ready for Canevalescus this Saturday, MMAFighting.com will be there beginning Wednesday. Can I wait for it? The trilogy will be completed. Until it was a little piece, so many. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

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