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Raquel Pennington did not agree with just about anything Sean Strickland said before UFC 297, but she did her best not to get caught up in all the drama.

In the main event of UFC 297, Strickland put his middleweight title on the line against Dricus du Plessis, with Pennington facing Mayra Bueno Silva for the vacant women’s bantamweight title in the co-main event. But on fight week, the two title fights quickly took a backseat to drama surrounding Strickland when the then-champion showed up to media day wearing a shirt that read, “A woman in every kitchen, a gun in every hand,” and delivered a number of homophobic comments.

Speaking with Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour, Pennington, who is openly gay and has a daughter with fellow UFC fighter Tecia Torres, discussed the intense fight week leading up to the event, saying that while Strickland’s comments were ugly, she tried to stay focused on herself and her goals that week.

“At the end of the day, people are going to talk,” Pennington said. “They’re always going to have their own opinions. You’re allowed to have your own opinion, but at the end of the day, you’re not going to affect my life. What you do with your life doesn’t affect me. I just think it was disgusting on his part to even be concerned about us as human beings and our lifestyle, and just the comments he was making.

“At the end of the day, MMA has grown a ton. The women are here. We’re here to stay. The divisions are growing. You have tons of up-and-coming talent, so to criticize female athletes, I don’t agree with any of that. But I can’t control that, and that wasn’t my focus. My focus was to go out there and accomplish my goal.

“Dana [White] and Hunter [Campbell] came in before the press conference, and they asked me how I was doing with everything. It was just one of those things, you take it as a grain of salt, and you dish it out. It’s not going to affect what I’m here doing. At the end of the day, you want to talk, but we’re still your co-main event fight.”

But while Strickland was happy to make comments to the media on such matters, that did not apply to personal interactions. Though the two were around each other a fair amount as the marquee fights for the pay-per-view, Pennington said Strickland never interacted with her personally.

“Every time he came around, we both turned the other direction,” Pennington said. “I stared at him a couple times, and he would just turn the other direction. He’s out there, he’s a great athlete, he’s selling his fights, running his mouth, he’s being — freedom of speech, doing whatever — but no, he didn’t say anything. Interesting character.”

Ultimately, Pennington accomplished her goal, claiming the vacant title with a unanimous decision victory over Bueno Silva, while Strickland lost his belt by split decision. Following the event, White announced he would not take any action against Strickland for his inflammatory comments.

Again, while Pennington doesn’t care for Strickland’s views, she supports White’s stance on how to handle things.

“At the end of the day, that’s why the world is the way it is,” Pennington said. “People are constantly attacking different things. At the end of the day, you should be focused on just yourself, but it’s always going to be that way. I think it’s important for people to stay true to who they are and focus on the things they can control. You can’t control other people, and when you’re letting these other people impact your life, it’s only going to drag you down. It’s going to hold you back from what you want. …

“I don’t know. I respect Dana and Hunter for giving their concern. I also respect the fact that they give freedom of speech and they give their athletes the platform to be who they are and they just don’t care. A lot of people are constantly criticizing things and attacking Dana and saying different things but he does care about his athletes. He is there, and he did check in on us to make sure things were OK. He was like, ‘I have your back with this situation,’ too. But for me, it’s just one of those things where if I was took focus on it, it was only going to have a negative impact for me.”

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Newly crowned women’s bantamweight champion Raquel Pennington captured the title by defeating Mayra Bueno Silva in the UFC 297 co-main event.  On Tuesday, Pennington revealed that she was sick during the championship bout.  

“I woke up super sick that morning.  I kind of questioned everything,” Pennington told UFC Unfiltered.  “I had a great fight week.  Things were going alright, going well.  When we first started to travel to Canada I started getting a little sick and I was like, okay.  So I called the UFC and asked them when I could take and stuff to kind of get things under control.  I think just going through the weight cut and breaking down my body I woke up so sick.

“The morning of the fight I was actually on the treadmill sprinting.  I felt like I had razor blades in the back of my throat, so I was really nervous to go into a five-round fight,” continued Pennington.  “I’m prepared.  I’m conditioned but then having a cold on top of that, not really able to breath, so much pressure in my sinuses already.  Waking up and having a headache.  To think of going into a fight with a headache really freaked me out.” 

“Rocky” entered the fight not feeling well, but was able to win via unanimous decision and take home the vacant belt.    

“My muscles felt really fatigued.  You know how like you’re starting to get sick and you have like those body aches and everything going on,” she explained.  “I told my coaches, ‘this is going to hurt.’  I had the body aches and stuff going on and I’m getting ready to go get into a fight.  I don’t know how many times I told them, ‘this is going to hurt.'”

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Payton Talbott and Cameron Saaiman will meet in a battle of bantamweight prospects at the UFC Fight Night card set for March 23 at the UFC APEX in Las Vegas.

Multiple people with knowledge of the promotion’s plans confirmed the matchup to MMA Fighting on Wednesday. Verbal agreements are in place from both fighters.

Undefeated with a perfect 7-0 record, Talbott will make his second UFC appearance after dispatching Nick Aguirre in impressive fashion with a third-round rear-naked choke submission this past November. That served as Talbott’s UFC debut after he scored a unanimous decision win over Reyes Cortez on the promotion’s Contender Series.

As for Saaiman, the 23-year-old South African fighter seeks to get back on track following the first loss of his career after falling to Christian Rodriguez back in October 2023. That loss stopped Saaiman’s undefeated run, which included three wins in the UFC with a pair of finishes along the way.

Talbott vs. Saaiman joins a growing lineup headed to the UFC APEX on March 23, with flyweights Rose Namajunas and Amanda Ribas set to serve as the five-round main event.

Mike Heck contributed to this report.

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Could it happen?
| BJPenn.com

UFC CEO Dana White recently announced the welterweight headliner between 170-pound veterans Sean Brady and Vicente Luque, targeted for the UFC Atlantic City MMA event on Sat., March 30, 2024 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, NJ.

Unfortunately, Brady was dealing with an injury at the time and never signed the contract, according to a report from MMA Junkie (first reported by Harry Mac). It is unclear if Luque will remain in the lineup or be reassigned for a future card.

Brady, 31, spent most of 2023 on the sidelines (because of this) but managed to heal up in time to capture a submission victory over Kelvin Gastelum last December. This marks the second straight opponent lost for the 32 year-old Luque.

UFC Atlantic City will feature the return of former middleweight champion Chris Weidman, who trades leather with Brazilian bruiser Bruno Silva. Elsewhere on the card, Erin Blanchfield and Manon Fiorot hook ‘em up at 125 pounds.

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Kayla Harrison understands a lot of the questions surrounding her debut at UFC 300 won’t center around her skills or abilities but rather how she’s going to look setting foot on a scale at 135 pounds.

As she prepares to take on Holly Holm on the historic card on April 13, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in judo, who earned those titles competing at nearly 172 pounds, admits that she’s not a big fan of weight cutting. In fact, Harrison revealed she actually didn’t walk around much bigger than 155 pounds when she fought at lightweight in the PFL because she didn’t want to torture her body with extreme weight cuts.

But the UFC doesn’t have a lightweight division or even a featherweight division any longer so if Harrison wanted to fight there, she had to make the choice to compete at 135 pounds.

”There’s a misperception out there that I walk around at like 180 pounds or something,” Harrison told KevinIole.com. “I have walked around most of my MMA career at 165, 160, because I don’t like cutting weight. I don’t believe in cutting weight. I don’t think it sends the right message to kids. That being said, I don’t agree with this but sometimes you have to show up and do things you don’t agree with in order to make your dreams come true.

“The whole time I was [in the PFL], I walked around at 165, maybe 160 and so not only was I usually the smaller fighter with less experience, I was getting in the cage with girls who were getting in there at 180, 175 pounds. Now, that’s not going to be the case.”

In order to prepare for the move to bantamweight, Harrison not only went through a test cut down to 135 pounds but she went through the necessary steps for recovery as if she was fighting the next day. Harrison then engaged in a fight simulation that allowed her to see how her body would react after cutting that much weight and then performing afterwards.

It was that entire process that gave Harrison the confidence she needed to know fighting at bantamweight in the UFC was not only possible but she would find success there.

“I wouldn’t have made the move if I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it,” Harrison said. “We did a test cut. Everything was measured, from my heart rate to my blood pressure to my blood sugar. We did a test recovery. We did a test simulated fight. Everything has been dialed in and everything has been tested.

“I’m really confident in my team and I’m really confident in myself. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but the things in life that are worth having are usually not easy [to obtain].”

Despite her 16-1 record with every fight taking place at lightweight minus two, Harrison knows she still gave up size to a lot of her opponents. She hopes that might change now that she’s competing as a bantamweight in the UFC.

Of course, the UFC didn’t give her a pass for her debut because Harrison has to go through a former champion in Holm, who holds a vicious knockout over another Olympic medalist in judo after she demolished Ronda Rousey back in 2015.

“I’m going to be the bigger, strong, faster and, in a lot of cases I believe, the more experienced fighter,” Harrison said. “It’s a case, I think, that I started off backwards, beginning [at the higher weight] but I was able to be successful because of my pedigree and the skill set that I brought to MMA. But now I have experience and now I am seasoned.

“The weight [cut] part’s going to suck, but it sucks for everyone, and I’m not special.”

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Justin Gaethje disagrees with Rafael Fiziev’s assessment of their entertaining clash at UFC 286.

During a recent interview with John Hyon Ko for The AllStar, Fiziev reflected on his fight with Gaethje and accused ‘The Highlight’ of only finding success during their scrap due to an eye poke that severely affected his vision for the remainder of the bout.

“He ran away from me for two rounds!” Fiziev said. “He started to (beat) me only after eye poke, because my eye (couldn’t) see anything. There was a big white circle on my right eye all fight. I didn’t see anything with my right eye. He fought only good after the eye poke and round three when I started to tire.

“But he ran away two rounds. He run, run, run. Yeah, maybe my gameplan was sh*t and I did a lot of sh*t in this fight; didn’t listen to my corner, didn’t follow my gameplan. But still, he ran away for two rounds.”

Gaethje, who walked away from the fight with a majority decision victory and snapped Fiziev’s six-fight win streak, recently reacted to the comments, suggesting that he hit ‘Ataman’ so hard that he forgot the facts of the fight.

“Not a good look here,” Gaethje wrote in response to the clip on X. “I hit him so hard he forgot which eye got poked. Your right eye got torched by my right hand kid.”

Rafael Fiziev came up short in his follow-up fight against Mateusz Gamrot after suffering a leg injury in the second round in September. On the flip side, Gaethje earned a second-straight victory via a highlight-reel-worthy KO of Dustin Poirier at UFC 291 to claim the BMF title.

He puts the bragging-rights belt on the line at UFC 300 on April 13 when he meets featherweight fan favorite and former world champion Max ‘Blessed’ Holloway.

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