Long time cornerstone UFC Welterweight Matt Hughes is irrefutably cocksure, as anyone who has seen as much as a snippet of one of his pre-fight interviews or Ultimate Fighter coaching turns will attest to, and this seems to rub a lot of folks up the wrong way. In certain people, this can acquaint to an intangible likeability, and right off the bat I have to admit to being something of a Hughes fanboy, as much for his understatedly unapologetic arrogance as his rugged, powerhouse fighting style…
Author: Stew Boyd
The UFC can attribute a sizeable chunk of it’s current popularity and momentum to the unabashed greatness that was Season One of The Ultimate Fighter. With a comparative lack of colourful characters plus a measly one fight (Jorge Gurgel vs Jason Von Flue) that touched the best in-ring stuff from the first run, Season Two fell some way short of matching it’s predecessor in the artistic success department, although I’d imagine the sponsorship windfall was gargantuan… dig it out and re-watch: product-placement fest, or what?
Sweet Mother of all that is good and pure! The reign of tyranny (or at least sprawl ‘n counterpunch repetition) endeth. Arise, Sir Quinton of Rampageville. Chuck Liddell seems like a cool guy… yet the integral elements of his fighting style which underpin(ned) his success have never particularly floated this writer’s boat…
13 July 2002 to 21 April 2007, old Blighty waited the best part of five years to get a second gander at the UFC Octagon up close, and nowadays it seems they can’t keep away. Ladies and Gentlemen, pleased to make your acquaintance are Messrs Taylor, Etim, Liaudin and Sakara aka the Continental Crew. Judging by the line-ups of the subsequent events on these islands, these boys are our designated regulars…
As a recent former member of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and one third of Zuffa LLC, Lorenzo Fertitta had retained enough internal stroke to swing state sanctioning in Nevada for the UFC in 2001. With the group newly positioned in Vegas, the move was critical in their evolution into modern-day mastodon: a higher profile environment in a state where gambling is legal, Zuffa were able to negotiate the UFC’s return to the schedules of the major pay per view providers to coincide with their Sin City inauguration…
To all things, however deficient, a beginning…. just when I thought I was out of the woods, Zuffa decide to unleash this duo of unnumbered events (not previously released, presumably because the dimwit element can handle ascending numbers but not chronological order, which might’ve knocked them out of synch to the degree that they stop handing over the moolah…. or something) for all we completists out here…
It was in the pages of Power Slam (or Superstars of Wrestling at the time- I forget) that this writer first came across the words “Ultimate Fighting Championship”. I vividly recall reading about the loosely familiar wrestling name Dan Severn, and how he would be competing in a No Holds Barred tournament against Boxers, Judokas and Karate practitioners. Intriguing, this surely was to a fourteen year old- grown weary of the cartoon-era WWF…
Part two of the early trilogy that would set the tone for a recurring theme in the UFC in 2007, Zuffa’s Texas debut on 7.4.07 layed on a closing visual guaranteed to bring a smile to the face, in the wake of an Ultimate Fighter credibility-affirming result that may or may not fall under the heading of “wet dream” for one Mr D White…
There’s no real intro that I can give to a review of UFC 68 – if you’ve any interest whatsoever in MMA, you’ve already seen it. Emanating from Columbus, Ohio’s Nationwide Arena on 3.3.07, the event registered the highest attendance for any UFC…
One of the new regime’s original intentions, it would appear, was to phase out the “numbering” of events, as throughout each of these two events, the card as an entity is referred to by subtitle only by Mike Goldberg et al. Didn’t last long, did it?