I really hope Lorenzo Fertitta is calling Dana White right about now, starts off with a huge sigh of disappointment and says:

"I should have quit my casino job about a year ago. --another sigh-- I just watched Affliction's , as you called a T-Shirt company's, PPV event and I gotta ask you Dana, W..T..F... Better yet, How TF did you F that up? Why wasn't this a UFC card? Crazy Russians you said? Who cares if they wanted a few bum Red Devil fighters bundled with Fedor? So what? We have bums fight all the time in UFC! I mean, take tonight for example! I wish you didn't have that black mail on me, so I could Fn get rid of your rude "personality" and non existent negotiation abilities. Did you see Arlovski? Did you see Barnett? Did you see Fedor? WTF Dana!"

Anyways, as of now I only caught the few last fights of the event and in short it was awesome!

• John McCarthy is one of the most elloquent commentators/interviewers ever and who comes with the unmatched experience of being "in" the most fights ever. He was always good in interviews, but he was great as a commentator. Why didn't UFC add him on their commentating team?
• Production Quality - who cares!? It's about the fights for me, but I liked the whole "boxing like" atmosphere and the production was pretty good for a first event.
• Celebrities - Affliction by far beat UFC Fight night in this category. UFC had like what? Usher and some basketball dude who was texting instead of watching fights. PFFFFT! Affliction had like a whole part of the show where they showed Donald Trump and announced like over ten+ other celebrities. Say what you will Dana, but "T-Shirt" companies do pretty good with celebrities cause they like "all the cool kids are wearing it" t-shirts.
• Josh Barnett is one the top guys at heavy. It was a pretty good fight and he knocked Pedro Rizzo out cold with a hook ala Roman Zentsov, in a sense that Rizzo fell the same way after a hook. After the fight he said he wanted to avenge his loss to Rizzo from 7 years ago, I don't believe it though. Come on, Rizzo used to be tough, used to. He had way too many knock outs in recent years and since this event was Barnett's return to US and a big deal, he played the revenge angle to get an easy fight. No matter, he'll take other top competition after this warm up.
• Andrei Arlovski was awesome in his third round TKO victory over Ben Rothwell. Arlovski was the agressive fighter he used to be during his UFC heavyweight champion days. He did it all, flurries of puches, kicks, flying knees and leglock attempts. Rothwell did ok for a while but Arlovski kept a fast pace. Rothwell did have a good chance to do some damage after Arlovski's failed leglock attempt, but didn't take full advantage of it.
• Donald Trump is a pimp and I'm glad he's somehow involved in Affliction's  or WAMMA's or whatever event. He was all up Lennox Lewis during last apprentice because he likes fighting. So hopefully he can make an impact in MMA too, especially if this event was any indicator of what may happen in the future.
• Many thousands of Afflictions shirts in one place was making me dizzy. I hope they can scale back on requiring everyone to wear them, especially Fedor's old coach. It was just wrong.
• Fedor Emelianenko is freakin awesome! He yet again proves everyone why he is the number one heavyweight fighter in the world! Cause he is Fedor, that's why. Again when everyone is doubting his chances against an ugly huge and dangerous monstrocity in Tim Sylvia, an effective UFC representative in this case in my opinion, Fedor comes out and punches Tim Sylvia with such ferocity and speed that Sylvia falls where Fedor follows up  to punch him some more, take his back and choke Sylvia out! Fast, furious and easy. About 30 seconds is all it took to dispose of Dana's boy. Dana's next best boy is Noguera who Fedor already beat 3 times!

The stars lined up for Affliction's event tonight, the fights turned out great and they shut Dana's big mouth up with Barnett, Arlovski and Fedor having awesome performances. I don't know who else they have on payroll as far as fighters go, but I'm willing to bet there will be many fighters trying to get involved with these guys. I hope Affliction made good money or please investors to do another event or more.

Oh, ya, I almost forgot a minor happening at the event.  Fedor Emelianenko vs Randy Couture does actually look like a possibility, cause Fedor said he's interested and Randy came out to say he is too and called Fedor a TOVARISH. He messed it up, but at lease he tried. Respect was the aura of that face off. I can't wait for it and will definitely be buying it. If you consider yourself an MMA fan YOU should too, even if you split it with your buddies that's ok too.

Check out and learn Fedor's MMA style from his book: Fedor: The Fighting System of the World's Undisputed King of MMA

So the whole world is buzzing about Microsoft bidding 44 billion dollars to buy Yahoo. All the cool kids are blogging about it, so I thought I have to blog about it too.  Yahoo's been doing pretty bad business wise and show very poor results in this past quarter earnings. There has been talks of Microsoft looking to scoop up Yahoo and actually become a competitor to Google if it'll be able to pull resources of both together, but it's been all talk till yesterday. Microsoft saw an opportunity to come in and put an unsolicited bid for struggling Yahoo. I think this is great for Microsoft and will help them establishing at least some type of competition for Google and forcing both to come out with better products and offerings. I know not a lot of people pay attention but Microsoft has come out with some better offerings than Google recently, for example, Microsoft's maps.live.com and their "bird's eye view". There is more, but this isn't a technology blog is it?

What does this have to do with MMA? Not too much really, for now that is, except for the Kevin Iole and his incredibly incompetent MMA "journalism" and delivery of UFC propaganda scoops directly from Dana White's mouth. Even since he started covering MMA topics at Yahoo Sports' boxing new section, MMA bloggers and fans alike who had a clue consistently called him on being consistently inaccurate and incompetent at covering MMA.  Kevin also established him as the online voice/mouth of Dana White propaganda hype machine. Kevin has, it seems, a unique and exclusive access to Dana White who hates all online media but doesn't ever bother to ask or question Dana on what news or "inside scoop" that Dano feeds him. It's quite bizarre. Why doesn't Dana just come out and say it that Kevin Iole is his personal public relations guy?!?

Kevin's recent reporting related to UFC 81 is really getting attention of being just plain bad with painfully obvious UFC Party Line (as in communist party) bias. I'm not the only one noticing this. FightOpinion has written about it, MMA Analyst wrote about it, BloodyElbow has written about it, Fightlinker wrote about Iole numerous times in the recent past. Here is a lovely example with "comic" to boot.

Yahoo was going to lay off a bunch of people, then Microsoft decides to bid for it. If Microsoft does end up buying Yahoo, there may be even more layoffs. So Microsoft, please, get rid of the hack of an incompetent MMA "journalist" that Kevin Iole is. He is feeding hundreds of thousands new MMA fans something he obviously knows very little about and just regurgitating Dana White's propaganda.

Not all Yahoo Sports MMA coverage is bad though. They do bring lots of good live coverage of weigh-in for example and UFC's press conference calls. Plus they recently hired Dave Meltzer who's been around for a while and knows his stuff, so check out his stuff.

I'm way behind on this stuff, but I'm not going to be much of a news regurgitator blogger (yet). I'm thinking I'll be writing my takes on major events, happenings in MMA and UFC (WEC, CageRage) for now and will pick up my pace some time soon. Trying to write something good turns out to be quite an effort. May be I'm just trying too hard and shouldn't. Anyways...

Ultimate Fighter 6 Finale on Spike TV was a GREAT show. It was one of the better events UFC lucked out with this year. I, for the most part, agree with the idea of lots of young, hungry guys fighting on the undercards for a little more famous ones. Just like in this show, most of the TUF'ers fought hard and impressed. With that said, here are some notes on the fights.

Matt Arroyo vs John Kolosci - nice submission game from Arroyo, but dammit, I officially put Kolosci in the high ranks of "real ultimate fighters" Abbadi's, Monsta Lobsta's. You know, those guys that that are either convinced by their friends and parents that they've got talent for MMA. Those guys reek with the smell of 99% of American Idol hopefuls. As soon as they fight, it's like WTF!?!... How did you get on this show? The good part about American Idol is that they actually have people who screen the candidates before the make it on the actual show.

What was I talking about? Oh ya.. Kolosci. Come on, why's everyone so high on him? Cause he, while looking scared and lying about not being scared, took the fight with Mac Danzig? What did he do with that nice opportunity to come back and have another go? Absolutely nothing!! It was such a half ass attempt at may be possibly landing a lucky shot. Danzig beat him up good the first time and probably took his warrior spirit from his young fighting career. Guess what? His fight with Arroyo was just was crappy. He did nothing when he took the fight to the mat. Bleh... more on shitty efforts and Dana Whites and Joe Rogans giving WAY too much credit for just showing up - remember you actually have to fight in fights.

Troy Mandaloniz vs Richie Hightower - well, I'm almost taking Richie off the "real ultimate fighters" list, almost. Despite to what I wrote about Richie earlier, he fought a good fight and I was actually kinda sorta rooting for him to win. He started off really good, hitting Mandaloniz pretty good a few times and taking him down, but ran out of gas and got knocked down by a stiff jab while moving in with a looping hook. A win for Mandaloniz, but Richie actually showed promise of getting off the shitty tough talking fighters.

Ben Saunders vs Daniel Barrera - Barrera was very impressive with his athleticism and work ethic while on the TV show, but his fighting was very disappointing. He has the physical tools and ability it seems, but his game plan for this was all wrong. Ya, he go Saunders down and did nothing. Props to Saunders for playing good defense and doing enough to win a very important fight. Most boring fight of the night.

Jon "War Machine" Koppenhaver vs Jared Rollins - What a fight! The nasty angry elbow outburst from Rollins was a first of it's kind. I mean few people used elbows successfully from the guard, Bas Rutten vs Kevin Randleman and may be Joe Riggs vs Chris Lytle, but not like this they didn't. I bet Bas Rutten wishes he saw this fight before fighting Randleman, he could have used the "elbow outburst" move to win more convincingly.

What a come back by WarMachine! He was rocked hard by Rollins, but pulled a nice, probably the most under-used sweep from the guard in MMA, and finished the fight with some vicious strikes. In Goldies words, this is what MMA is all about.

Mac Danzig vs Tom Speer - there is no question Tom Speer is a tough farmer guy. In most of his fights on the TV show he was in some type of trouble, but was very resilient and toughed out of some close calls. Admittedly not doing much training, except for strength/conditioning on the farm, for this fight he must have counted on his toughness one more time.  Mac Danzig came in with George St. Pierre'esque game plan and took the wrestler down and after softening him up abit easily submitted him. Good for Danzig, he'll be a nice addition to 155 division. Speer didn't lose too much with this fight in my opinion, except for affliction wearing TUF noobs for his farm comment, but oh well, he just may turn out the next Matt Hughes.

Roger Huerta vs Clay Guida  - a kick ass fight it turned out to be. Did I already say in Goldies words that this is what MMA is all about? I'm saying it again! Lots of standing exchanges, take downs, take down defense, transitioning on the ground all the while striking, knockdowns. This fight had it all. Mayweather vs Hatton the same night had hype and no fight. There was good hype coming into the fight. Lots of people written off Huerta and predicted Guida to win.  After one of the better fights this year, people said Huerta was exposed and got lucky. I disagree.

Here is my take on it. Clay Guida is tough and a very active fighter. He took it to Huerta for two rounds, but only had him in trouble at the end of round two. Huerta got a real good test there, but they key here is that he passed and Guida failed at finishing up. When Huerta hurt Guida, Guida didn't recover and was submitted.

Guida was exposed for not being able to finish a very hurt fighter and not being able to recover when in trouble.

Huerta weathered the storm and finished when needed.  Great win for Huerta to finish up a very active year. The news of Roger taking some time off is good to hear. He's doing a smart thing to take some time to rest and wait for a good fight.

On a related note, UFC gets credit for making the pay for hard fighting a little bit better.

What did you think of the event? Ya, I know it's a late. If you didn't see it yet, as an MMA fan you must.