Issue 063

June 2010

Your monthly guide to what’s been going on in the world of MMA.


Chuck thinks Toney fight would be “hysterical”

Former light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell has added his name to the growing list of MMA fighters who would be happy to ‘welcome’ James Toney to the Octagon.  

“I’d love to fight him if they offered it to me,” said ‘The Iceman’. “The way he’s talking about the sport, I hope they put him in with someone good. I hope they don’t do what some of these other organizations have done and put him in there with someone that’s not a high-quality fighter. Give him a high-quality opponent and see what happens to him.”  

Liddell went further by suggesting that the UFC pair the former heavyweight boxer with a grappler. “Give him anyone that can wrestle,” he said. “They’ll take him down and smash him. Have him fight someone like Cain [Velasquez] – that’d be hysterical.”  



Couture: Fedor is no longer No. 1

Randy Couture has echoed the opinion of many in the MMA industry by claiming that Fedor is at risk of losing his status as one of the best heavyweights in the world if he does not face better competition.  

“I think at some point Fedor is going to have to step up and be willing to fight top-level guys again,” said Couture. “I don’t know what’s going on with him or why he’s not willing to do that. To be considered the top pound-for-pound fighter in the world, he’s going to have to face tougher opponents.” 


Lessons learned from fighting Fedor 

When Andrei Arlovski was asked what lessons he learned from his loss to top heavyweight fighter Fedor Emelianenko, the former UFC heavyweight champion laughed and simply said: “Keep my hands up and don’t try the flying knee.”  


GSP: There are two types of UFC fan

Welterweight champion GSP has revealed he thinks there are two types of UFC fan: One who wants to see a brawl, and one who enjoys a technical match. “I think for the fans who know what’s going on – I’m talking about the technical aspect – I think they would appreciate that kind of fight,” he said, referring to his heavily criticized yet dominant display against Dan Hardy. “The thing is, sometimes the fight doesn’t go the way we want to. In my last fight, two times I tried to finish Dan Hardy and I came very close. If I would have gotten the finish nobody would have said anything about it, it would have been, ‘Oh, Georges is great.’”  

  

Trash talk doesn’t bother Shane Carwin 

Heavyweight behemoth Shane Carwin is one tough dude, but the engineer-cum-fighter claims to have thick skin as well as heavy hands. When heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar did his best to rile him after his fight with Frank Mir at UFC 111, Carwin says the words meant nothing to him. “When they get to start talking trash and stuff, quite frankly I laugh at it,” he said recently. “They asked me at a UFC press conference, ‘Why is that?’ I said because when I played ball on the football field, the stuff that was said out there, people would cry if they ever heard about how bad it is compared to the trash talk these guys talk.”  






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