CombatSports.org

Sean Strickland fully acknowledges that he’s probably going to rub some people the wrong way and you can definitely add musician Machine Gun Kelly to that list.

Back in February, the former UFC middleweight champion met the rapper and rock star, whose real name is Colson Baker, at a Power Slap event when they were introduced by mutual friend and Monster Energy ambassador, Luke “The Dingo” Trembath. The encounter almost immediately turned volatile with Strickland later claiming that he “almost hit a vampire,” while calling the Cleveland native a “goth South Park character.”

The incident didn’t sit well with UFC CEO Dana White, who later said that the altercation wasn’t Kelly’s fault but rather “you can’t bring Sean Strickland around any other human beings.”

While Strickland has addressed the incident numerous times, Kelly finally gave his side of the story about the run-in with the former UFC champion when appearing on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast.

“I don’t know this guy from a crumb of bread, right?” Kelly said. “I didn’t know who he was when I met him. I got hip afterwards that he’s like insanely racist and homophobic and just not my type of guy. So I would have never even wanted to shake hands with him in the first place.

“But he is also just a representative of every person who’s too scared to just be themselves. Because if you’re comfortable as yourself, you don’t care who anybody else is and how they are.”

Prior to Kelly’s comments, Strickland gave his latest version of the encounter while speaking to Xtreme Couture head coach Eric Nicksick on his podcast, Verse Us.

“He’s wearing like a f*cking vampire trenchcoat, has a f*cking purse, painted nails and ‘Dingo,’ you know me, dude. Why would you do this?” Strickland said. “Why would you set me up? I just look at him, like my brain I’m trying to process. I’m looking into the void and I think I just said ‘what the f*ck?’ Are you a f*cking gay vampire?

“Then the way he looked at me, it wasn’t funny. Like if you would have said something funny like ‘oh yeah, you look like a white trash hillbilly,’ I would have been like [yeah], I drive a Tesla, that’s gay. He looked at me with such f*cking disgust, there’s this little voice in my head said ‘we’re fighting.’ Then my girl got involved and broke us up.”

There was no physical altercation but clearly Strickland still harbors ill will towards Kelly after the incident went viral.

For his part, the 34-year-old musician isn’t losing any sleep over the incident but he did offer Strickland some friendly advice about how to handle himself moving forward.

“He’s so dumb that I’m going to tell him right now you should not keep saying stuff because it just makes me look better but you’re going to keep saying stuff,” Kelly said to Strickland. “So I know that you’ll react and say more things but you just shouldn’t as a person who’s just giving you big bro advice.

“Learn this — shut the f*ck up and don’t speak on me anymore and live your life. But you won’t and I’m going to continue laughing at you because you’re a f*cking idiot.”

Of course it didn’t take Strickland long to respond just like Kelly expected would happen.

“Getting lectured by a guy who drinks blood and wears a purse,” Strickland wrote. “Dawg you had a mid life crisis and tattooed your entire body. The “the x community of intolerance.” Ya’ll I’d hang out with you toxic trolls any day over this c*nt. Go back to cutting yourself you f*cking weirdo.”

MMA Fighting – All Posts

UFC commentator Laura Sanko is responding to fans’ comments on YouTube. A compelling thumbnail has sparked some interesting thoughts from fans, and Sanko is certainly enjoying some of them.

Laura Sanko MMA

Prior to her announcing work in the UFC, ‘Fancy’ Laura Sanko was a professional MMA fighter. She had an extensive amateur career. As a pro, she racked up one win via submission before calling it quits for a career in broadcasting. She competed in Atomweight, which is not a division offered in the UFC. She would have been far too small to compete in any of the UFC’s weight classes.

Laura Sanko Reacts

With experience in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Sanko likes to give instructionals on YouTube. Her bicep sliver video has become highly popular due to its curvaceous thumbnail. Sanko said, “The first few comments are from the “Bicep Slicer” video, which has been by far the most popular on my page, thanks to a compelling thumbnail my team picked out.”

Sanko continued:

“If there’s any way I’d like to go out, this is it. God bless this man.” That comment got 2,800 thumbs up, so it seems a lot of you agree!

In another response, she said:

“I love these little demos, so fascinating. Thanks, guys, your efforts are always appreciated.” That’s very kind, but what I really love is the comment right underneath it that says, “Don’t you mean face-sit-nating?” I see what you did there… we’re just going to skip past that.”

Laura Sanko with Nina Drama

Nina Marie Daniele, or Nina Drama, is an influencer who works closely with the UFC. Laura Sanko and Nina Drama did some work together which sparked a viral reaction. Sanko explained, “Video I did with Nina, who is awesome, and I love her. We shot for about 12 hours—no joke—so there’s a lot of footage … I think Nina has brought a levity to MMA media that was missing for a long time. I love her.”

What made her shut down the conversation was:

“And then… Lance Thrust 9488: “Who wears the strap-on?” Okay, we’re just going to move on.“

Lastly, Laura Sanko’s chair had some thoughts:

““Hi, Laura’s chair here. I love my job.” Okay, guys, y’all are wild.“

LowKickMMA.com

For the first time in his MMA career, Israel Adesanya finds himself coming off the back of consecutive defeats inside the Octagon.

This doesn’t tell the story of both the fights that took place a year apart, because though he didn’t get his hand raised on either occasion, the story of the fights were completely different.

“The Last Stylebender” didn’t look himself at UFC 293 where he was shockingly upset by Sean Strickland before taking a year off to return at UFC 305.

Despite not reclaiming the title against Dricus Du Plessis, Adesanya appeared somewhat back to where he was before and looked to be gaining momentum in the fight until Du Plessis was able to capitalize on a few mistakes to earn a submission win in the fourth round.

Adesanya’s head coach at City Kickboxing, Eugene Bareman, gave his thoughts on the fight during a recent interview with Combat TV.

He came away feeling a lot more positive after this loss compared to the one from last year because they were able to learn from clear and obvious mistakes that will only lead to improvements, unlike UFC 293 which left the team scratching their heads.

“He made some mistakes which you can only, in my opinion, put down to fatigue and the fatigue, you can put down to the work that Dricus was able to do so you can’t do nothing but applaud that. It was a loss but you know, it was a good loss. Me and Israel can walk away from that loss and it’s measurable, it’s tangible. You can put that down, this is why this happened, this is why that happened. The Strickland fight is just a bit unexplainable to us. That’s much harder to get over cuz it’s like well what happened there.”

Eugene Bareman Gives Credit To Dricus Du Plessis For An Aspect Of His Game That They ‘Didn’t Anticipate’

Bareman agrees with the common consensus that heading into the fourth round, it looked like the momentum was swinging towards Adesanya in the later rounds.

However, it was Du Plessis’ finishing ability that ended up deciding the fight after he was able to wobble the former champion on the feet and take his back for the rear-naked choke win.

As he previously stated above, Bareman puts these crucial mistakes down to Adesanya being fatigued and while this is something they worked on during his training camp, the City Kickboxing boss revealed that he was surprised by how effectively the champion is able to weaponize his conditioning.

He said that Du Plessis may not be a perfect fighter but he’s always making his opponents work hard to try and capitalize on his weaknesses.

“It looks like he has some holes in his defense, he also makes you work to take advantage of those holes, you know what I mean. It’s tough work out there. Yeah, the holes are there but it’s tough work to find them and it just fatigued Israel and fatigued Israel and fatigued Israel and it slowly, slowly got to Israel to the point where he was so fatigued, Dricus was able to take advantage of it. That was probably something I didn’t anticipate happening as much as it did and I just had an expectation that Israel would be able to push through that.”

Read also: Sean Strickland Responds To Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘Big Bro Advice’ As Rapper Wanted UFC Star To Not Talk About Him Anymore

Continue Reading Israel Adesanya’s Coach Says Du Plessis Defeat Better Than ‘Unexplainable’ Strickland Upset: ‘It Was A Good Loss…’ at MMA News.

MMA News

submitted by /u/e-rage [link] [comments]

MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

UFC

submitted by /u/e-rage [link] [comments]

MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Mental Warfare
| BJPenn.com

UFC

Bringing you the weird and wild from the world of MMA each and every weeknight!

Welcome to Midnight Mania!

It doesn’t seem like Merab Dvalishvili is ever going to be one of UFC CEO Dana White’s favorite employees.

The surging Bantamweight contender is less than three weeks away from the biggest fight of his life, a 25-minute title clash opposite Sean O’Malley that headlines the UFC 306 fight card from inside the Las Vegas Sphere. White has invested a ton of money into the event, and one half of his main event can’t stop doing weird s—t.

A week ago, White buried Dvalishvili for getting cut in training camp and then posting about it online. Seven days later, it’s time for those stitches to come out, and “The Machine” has taken matters into his own hands with a massive pair of scissors. What could go wrong?!?

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s episode of Contenders Series, White was asked about Dvalishvili’s latest antics online. This time, White couldn’t really muster any anger. Instead, the baffled CEO largely laughed it off. “Isn’t he awesome,” White replied when asked about the video of Dvalishvili removing his own stitches. “I think he’s just f—king with me now to be honest with you.”

“Do what you want,” White continued after admitting that he hadn’t spoken to Dvalishvili. “Did you ever see the scissors they take stitches out with? They’re tiny, and they have that thing on there so you don’t cut yourself. They can slide ‘em up under the stitches, you don’t cut yourself. This dude had like f—king bush shears that he was using, trim your bushes with that gardeners use. Whatever, good for him.”

Ultimately, as long as Dvalishvili makes it to fight night, all’s well that ends well?

Insomnia

The Ruotolo brothers are splitting their CJI money.

Demetrious Johnson rolling with top-notch grappler and fellow One Championship athlete, Mikey Musumeci.

Two nice examples of Jack Della Maddalena throwing multiple combinations with the same hand:

Is the shoulder roll on the rise in MMA? Ilia Topuria uses it well, and he’s a new champion likely to terrorize the Featherweight ranks for years to come.

I enjoyed Darren Stewart’s UFC career and wish him “The Dentist” the best in retirement.

Henry Cejudo thinks Bo Nickal would beat Israel Adesanya RIGHT NOW … which would be quite the jump.

There’s less than three weeks for UFC to move almost 3000 tickets for The Sphere. Think it sells out?

Two excellent Featherweight grapplers collide — think we get a kickboxing match?

Slips, rips, and KO clips

This cage side view of Randy Costa’s knockout over Jason Knight is NASTY!

1-2 same side high kick is a beautiful response to a clean body kick landing.

This uppercut was perfectly timed.

Random Land

Street art on the go.

Midnight Music: Soul, 1974

Anecdote of the week: This didn’t quite feel relevant enough to include in the main story section, but I thought I’d share a quick story down here at the bottom. After winning a fight in Tampa and getting a bit busted up in the process, the local ER put a single staple on the top of my head. The woman who stapled my skin together was ex-military and transitioning into civilian care. She advised that it wouldn’t hurt at all and that I could remove the staple myself in about a week, no need to return to a hospital.

Neither statement turned out to be particularly true. A week or so later, I’m sitting on the floor of my bathroom with my girlfriend (now wife), who’s prying on that staple with a pair of tweezers, pliers, and an iPhone flashlight. As she tries to wiggle it free, I can feel my entire scalp moving left and right with her yanks. I eventually am able to detach one half via brute force and then smoothly slide the other hook out.

The cut doesn’t open significantly in the process, so I suppose the tech was right in the end?

Sleep well Maniacs! More martial arts madness is always on the way.

MMAmania.com – All Posts

submitted by /u/e-rage [link] [comments]

MMA: Mixed Martial Arts