Fighters Only

Issue 070

December 2010

Catch the latest news and hot interviews on the website, updated daily by our worldwide team of reporters.

NEWS: FITCH LEANING TOWARD FUTURE MIDDLEWEIGHT MOVE

Jon Fitch has dropped strong hints that suggest a move to the middleweight division increasingly weighs on his mind. As a welterweight fighting out of the American Kickboxing Academy, he counts Mike Swick and Josh Koscheck as teammates, and is loath to fight either. Now – with the prospect of Koscheck winning the UFC welterweight title from Georges St Pierre later this year, and Fitch having climbed to the top of the contender’s pile – the UFC could be on the verge of bringing heavy pressure on Fitch to fight his teammate. “We have a philosophy at our gym that it would be much better to have three belts at AKA than to have two belts, and then send two guys to fight for the same belt. So I feel like I can beat Anderson Silva, too, and GSP,” he said.

INTERVIEW: ROUSIMAR PALHARES Q&A

FO: Can you address the issue of holding the submissions too long? You have been accused of this in the past, that you do not let go of the hold quick enough. Is there a reason to wait until the referee steps in before letting go of the submission hold?

Palhares: “Murilo [Bustamante] always told me to wait until the referee stops the fight. He had problems with [fake taps] in the past and Anderson [Silva] almost had the same problem in his last fight. It’s not that I want to hurt anyone but I am trying to be fast with my submissions so the referee needs to be fast as well – to stop the fight. My opinion is that the referee in my last fight was too far away and took too long to stop the fight. If he had been closer then he could have stopped it right away and then we would not even be having this conversation at all.”

FEATURE: TRIANGLES: THE POLYGON IN THE OCTAGON

By Kieran Bamford

After dominating Anderson Silva for 23 minutes, Chael Sonnen had the UFC middleweight title within reach. Two more minutes of the same strong wrestling and strikes from the guard and all the trash talk would become prophecy. But his chance was quite literally squeezed out of him when Anderson Silva’s long legs secured a triangle choke almost instantaneously and Chael Sonnen relinquished his opportunity with a single tap. That BJJ staple had done it again. The triangle choke’s roots are grounded in judo, it’s thought, with Tsunetane Oda cited as creator. However, it’s been adopted, and put to phenomenal use, by the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community.