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BKFC President David Feldman isn’t giving away too many details from a recent meeting with UFC CEO Dana White, but it appears he’s made a new friend in combat sports.

Following the conclusion of BKFC 57 on Friday night, Feldman addressed a recent photo posted that showed him standing alongside White after sitting down to chat. BKFC has been rapidly expanding in recent months, which includes sanctioning pushes in California and Nevada.

California has already approved bare-knuckle fighting in the state; BKFC recently announced KnuckleMania IV for Los Angeles on April 27.

“It was more of just creating an ally,” Feldman told MMA Fighting about the meeting with White. “That’s really all I have to say. It was great meeting, he’s a great guy. He’s doing his thing with UFC, and we’re going to do our thing with BKFC. We’re going to be the biggest combat sport on the planet.”

Feldman has often said he doesn’t really view the UFC as competition to his business because bare-knuckle fighting isn’t the same as MMA. Of course, BKFC remains one of the only major combat sports promotions regularly selling tickets to events, including over 8,000 sold in Utah when BKFC 56 landed there this past December.

As far as doing business with the UFC in the future, Feldman wasn’t opposed to the idea, especially if there was a chance for cross-promotion deals that could allow fighters from the UFC to compete in BKFC and vice versa. BKFC previously did that when Bellator MMA allowed Michael “Venom” Page to compete in a bare-knuckle fight against Mike Perry.

“We want to grow our sport,” Feldman said. “We want to make our sport the biggest it can be. If that means teaming up with other promotions, we have nothing against doing anything like that, because we think that it’s just going to make the sport grow and the company grow and the business grow. So anything that’s going to make it grow, we’re down for it.”

Feldman also revealed a recently meeting with RIZIN president Nobuyuki Sakakibara and welcomed dignitaries from Abu Dhabi to the BKFC 57 card on Friday. That all plays a part in BKFC’s plans for global expansion; the bare-knuckle show previously held events in loctions like Thailand and the U.K.

“We had people from all over the world in attendance tonight,” Feldman said. “They all loved it, and we’re going to expand everywhere.”

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Cory Sandhagen still needs a more time before he can fight again after two surgeries. But he believes his return could include a bantamweight title shot.

Following a dominant win over Rob Font this past August, Sandhagen revealed he had suffered a torn triceps during the fight, and the injury dramatically affected his performance. Afterward, he went under the knife to repair the damage and then he had a second procedure to clean up some issues with his elbow that played a part in his initial injury.

Several months removed now, Sandhagen, 31, anticipates he’ll be ready to fight again in approximately three to four months. He has his sights set on the winner of the UFC 299 main event featuring reigning 135-pound champion Sean O’Malley and Chito Vera.

“I kind of haven’t given up hope on being able to fight for the title next,” Sandhagen said on The MMA Hour. “So [the injury] hasn’t taken too much wind out of my sails. It was a bummer. I hate to talk about and feel like I’m giving a ton of excuses about the last fight but it was a real bummer I had to navigate an entire fight on a really big stage with such a significant injury in the fight, which was just not fun. I know in this sport you want one big fight going into the title fight so that there’s some momentum. The UFC wants that. I want that and just due to an injury, I wasn’t really able to do that at that level of performance.

“All that set aside, that’s something completely out of my control. If I could go back and do it again, it would be tough but you’ve got to just walk away with the win in some situations and when you have to fight with one arm, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

Despite his layoff, Sandhagen still remains near the top of the rankings in the bantamweight division. Overall, he enjoys a three-fight winning streak. He also dispatched Vera in fairly lopsided fashion when they met in March 2022, which he believes gives him an advantage when arguing for a title shot sooner rather than later.

“I still see a lot of argument for me fighting for the belt,” Sandhagen explained. “I beat Chito less than 365 days ago. Me and O’Malley is definitely one of the most exciting fights you can certainly make, maybe in [all] the UFC, in the top five, top 10 most exciting matchups that could potentially happen.

“You have two guys in their prime that have really exciting styles. That would be an awesome matchup, so I have a lot of hope. I feel like the fans really want to watch me and O’Malley fight if he comes out with a win. If Chito wins, that’s an easy argument for myself, too, being that I [beat] him less than 365 days ago.”

As far as whom he believes will win, Sandhagen leans more toward O’Malley. But he admits the five-round main event could look like a “soccer match” with both competitors approaching the fight with extreme caution.

“I think O’Malley checks the boxes of what a better striker is, just as far as athleticism goes,” Sandhagen said. “Defensively, he just checks more of those boxes. It’s not going to be a grappling and wrestling match, so those two just completely cancel each other out almost fully, and I think O’Malley checks more of the boxes of what a good striker is.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle standing in Sandhagen’s way of a title shot is fellow bantamweight contender Merab Dvalishvili, who faces Henry Cejudo at UFC 298 in February.

Dvalishvili currently sports an impressive nine-fight winning streak, and he would move to 10 in a row with a win over Cejudo. Even Sandhagen confesses it would be tough to leapfrog Dvalisvhili in that situation, so that might require him to become part of Cejudo’s cheering section for at least one night.

“Merab’s done a lot,” Sandhagen said. “He’s been working really hard. The kind of only arguments I have over Merab, if Merab were to win, is that I just beat Chito not too long ago, and then me and O’Malley is just a banger of a fight. A really exciting fight. But I do completely understand that from Merab’s point of view.”

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Optimal Aljo
| BJPenn.com

UFC

Miscommunications and messages from God were part of a confusing decision for Sage Northcutt to pull out of his fight with Shinya Aoki at last weekend’s ONE event in Japan

Strange things were afoot at ONE 165 when the long-awaited Sage Northcutt vs. Shinya Aoki fight fell apart at the last minute.

Northcutt said his coaches were deported because they didn’t have working visas, and he was unwilling to fight without them. An unhappy Aoki would end up fighting John Lineker, beating the UFC vet with ease. Suspicious MMA fans wondered if there was more going on, considering Lineker weighed in for no apparent reason leading into ONE 165.

Now Northcutt’s coach Urijah Faber is clearing the air (somewhat) on the events surrounding that cancellation.

“There’s a lot of misinterpretation there,” Faber said in an interview with MiddleEasy (via BJPenn.com). “I think if you watch Chatri’s interview he kind of said the way it was: there was a last-minute hiccup in the visas of Fabio Prado and Mr. Mark Northcutt, Sage’s dad.”

“So, 10:30 at night in Japan, we learned that they were not gonna be able to be in the corner. I got a message around 11:30 from Mark that Sage was not gonna fight, and I talked to him face-to-face and kinda got the lowdown on what was going on. There was a lot of miscommunication and things like that. I was cleared to corner, I was cleared to be in the corner if Sage did wanna fight.”

“I didn’t actually get to talk to Sage face-to-face until about one o’clock in the afternoon on fight day,” Faber continued. “And the general consensus was that he did not feel comfortable fighting with a couple of different things that had happened. He is a very big man of faith, he has a relationship with God, and the holy spirit and felt like things weren’t adding up for him and he didn’t feel like fighting.”

“I said ‘Are you sure?’ There are a lot more details on the nuts and bolts of the conversations that we had leading up to that happening, and they felt like they were misled and expected to go in there last minute. When they said he wasn’t going to fight, I booked a flight home.”

A lot of miscommunications in there, along with Sage feeling ‘misled.’ Who knows exactly what kind of shifty business went down, but in the end it seems like nobody is happy with ONE over the way this fight shook out.

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Three Asian standouts punched (and choked and armbarred) their way to UFC contracts Saturday in Las Vegas.

At the Road to UFC season finale, Rongzhu, Yizha, and Rei Tsuruya all joined the UFC roster after finishing their opponents inside the distance. For Rongzhu and Yizha, this is their second shot at octagon glory, while Tsuruya is now set to make the walk to the world-famous cage for the first time.

Watch video of the finishes below.

Rongzhu (China) and Shin Haraguchi (Japan) closed the show, battling for three rounds until Rongzhu locked in a tight rear-naked choke in the final Round. A fading Haraguchi had no choice but to tap, ending the fight at the 3:06 mark of Round 3.

In his previous UFC stint, Rongzhu won just one of three fights, sandwiching a TKO of Brandon Jenkins with losses to Ignacio Bahamondes and Rodrigo Vargas. He has now won four straight fights since his loss to Bahamondes in February 2022, including three Road to UFC bouts.

Yizha (China) also technically has a UFC fight under his belt, but that came in a 2023 Road to UFC final last February. He lost a split decision to South Korea’s Jeong Yeong Lee and had to fight his way back to a tournament championship opportunity. This time, he would not fall short as he caught countryman Kaiwen Li in an armbar as the two grappled on the canvas.

The official time of the stoppage was 3:03 into Round 1.

Tsuruya (Japan) almost ran out of time to find a finish in the opening round of his contest with Jiniushiyue (China), but he was relentless with his ground-and-pound and forced the stoppage with a second remaining in the frame.

Rongzhu won the season’s lightweight tournament, while Yizha and Tsuruya are featherweight and flyweight tournament winners, respectively. A fourth winner was to be crowned in the bantamweight division, but that final has been postponed after Xiao Long forced to withdraw from his fight with Chang Ho Lee due to an injury.

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Joe Rogan inked a new multi-year deal with Spotify to keep his popular podcast — The Joe Rogan Experience — on the platform for years to come.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the deal is worth a reported $ 250 million. Under the new agreement, Rogan’s popular show — which has been exclusively available on Spotify since 2020 — will now be available on other audio platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

In a deviation from his first deal with the company, which was worth more than $ 200 million, Spotify will sell ads for and distribute Rogan’s show in a video format on YouTube, the Journal noted.

The Joe Rogan Experience has been racking up listeners since it debuted on the podcasting scene in 2009.

“I think podcasting is an art form and I definitely sucked at it when I first started,” Rogan said in an interview with Spotify. “I was curious, but I didn’t understand how to make a conversation flow. I didn’t know when to shut up and listen, and I didn’t know how to make someone comfortable so that you can get the most out of their perspective. I’ve learned how to assist the conversation’s flow instead of waiting for my turn to talk. I learned how to be fully locked in with what the other person is saying. 

“A lot of what helps is that I’ve done it for so many hours and learned how to do it better over trial and error, but also that I only have people on the show that I’m genuinely interested in talking to. I never do a podcast just because a person is popular. It’s always from a place of ‘I think it would be cool to talk to that person.’‘”

Joe Rogan’s Run on Spotify Has been loaded with controversy

Despite ranking as the No. 1 podcast in the world, the show has often been a point of contention among listeners. Rogan’s choice of provocative guests aside, Spotify and the show itself were the subject of an all-out boycott after the longtime UFC commentator made controversial anti-vax comments and regularly called into question the legitimacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Multiple music artists, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Indie Arie, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, pulled their libraries from the platform in protest of Rogan’s content. Unfortunately, the controversy didn’t stop there.

In February 2022, Spotify pulled 70 episodes of JRE in which the host had uttered the N-word, creating another string of backlash.

“I’ve also learned so much—not just from all the episodes themselves—but also from all the audiobooks I’ve listened to, articles and books that I’ve read, and documentaries I’ve watched either for the show, or because of the show,” Rogan added. “I always feel like, in starting this podcast, I stumbled into this fantastic accidental education just by being interested in talking to people, and being fortunate enough that people want to listen.”

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