Ahead of his massive symbolic BMF championship fight with Max Holloway next weekend at UFC 300, former interim lightweight champion, Justin Gaethje has promised a “violent” fight with the Hawaiian, predicting a doctor’s stoppage finish.
Gaethje, the current number two ranked lightweight contender and former interim titleholder, has been sidelined since he turned in an hellacious second round high-kick KO win over common-foe, Dustin Poirier back in July at UFC 291, landing the symbolic BMF crown.
Mandatory Credit: Zuffa LLC
And as for Holloway, the former dominant featherweight gold holder turned in his second straight win at UFC Singapore last summer, stopping Chan Sung Jung with a brutal walk-off knockout win, which followed a decision success against Arnold Allen.
Justin Gaethje plots doctor’s stoppage TKO win over Max Holloway
Sharing his thoughts on his symbolic title fight with the fan-favorite next weekend on the main card of UFC 300, Gaethje claimed a “violent” clash was in store for onlookers in ‘Sin City’ – predicting a doctor’s stoppage win over the former featherweight champion.
“No one steals the show quite like ‘The Highlight’,” Justin Gaethje said during the UFC 300 promotional release. “Carnage, chaos, probably some blood and adrenaline coursing though the veins, that is what you are going to get from me. My ability to create damage is second to none. Max Holloway is a legend, probably the only person on the UFC roster that checks every single box of being a BMF so I have a lot of respect for him.”
“However, this is my job and I’m going to try and f*ck him up,” Justin Gaethje explained. “I will finish Max, he may not go away the traditional way, but I think I will inflict damage to where the doctors need to stop it [the fight]. We are about to paint a violent picture and no two better guys to go out there and put on a show.”
Mandatory Credit: Cooper Neill – Zuffa LLC
Who wins at UFC 300 next weekend: Justin Gaethje or Max Holloway?
Photo by Matt Davies/PxImages/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Liz Carmouche had mixed feelings when she found out Bellator sold to PFL.
When the sale completed, Carmouche was barely a month removed from her third straight title defense as Bellator flyweight champion. She anxiously awaited her next assignment, but rather than moving forward in the new version of Bellator, the 40-year-old veteran shifted to the PFL to join the upcoming season-long tournament that kicks off Thursday.
“The excitement, the potential, especially for a female, to make the most money you could ever make in your career, that was super exciting,” Carmouche told MMA Fighting about her move to PFL. “To have another belt in another promotion. Again, really excited.
“But also wanting to defend the belt that I earned and have a chance to keep going on and having successful title defenses — I’ve talked to other fighters like Ilima [Lei-Macfarlane] who discussed the idea of having a season and knowing when you’re going to fight, to be able to get another belt, just sounded so exciting.”
As part of the PFL season, Carmouche could potentially compete four times in 2024, which would serve as her most active year since debuting with six fights in 2010. Adding in the $ 1 million prize awarded to the winner at the end of the season was also a welcome bonus.
But what about her Bellator title?
Truth be told, even Carmouche has no idea about that question.
“I don’t know either,” Carmouche said with a laugh. “My answer is we’re both still in limbo. It’s weird, but at the same time it’s kind of fun. You get a clean slate every year. I treat every title defense like it’s not my belt and I’m going for that belt every single time, so this legitimately is exactly what I’m doing. I don’t have to pretend and tell myself that.”
If her unknown status as Bellator champion wasn’t confusing enough, Carmouche also found out she’ll be kicking off the 2024 PFL season with a familiar foe as her first opponent.
Rather than pit her up against any of the other fighters in the tournament, Carmouche was matched up with ex-Bellator champ Juliana Velasquez, who she’s already faced and defeated twice.
“[I was] 150 percent surprised,” Carmouche said of her reaction to the booking. “I thought it was going to be Taila Santos. To me, she seems to be the most dangerous person in there, she’s probably going to be my first-round matchup. Great, let’s get the toughest one out at the beginning and then we can kind of go in order backward. Then. for whatever reason, not having seen Velasquez fight since our last fight, she just didn’t even go on my radar as a possibility of being in the tournament. Of course she is, but I just didn’t think about it.
“So [they told me] ‘it’s going to be Velasquez,’ and [I said], ‘What, no, I think that you got that wrong. What?’ It’s not who I thought it was going to be.”
As tough as it was to understand the logic behind the matchmaking, Carmouche promises she’s found plenty of motivation to beat Velasquez for a third time.
“She feels like — and a lot of people feel like — that first fight was controversial and that she didn’t actually lose it,” Carmouche said. “I don’t see how when you don’t move your head and you don’t do any defense and you get elbowed with one minute left, I don’t see how that’s not a loss. Then the second one, without a doubt [I won]. To me, that just makes her that much more dangerous.
“To me, at this point, she’s willing to do anything to get a win, to get back in the win column and advance in the tournament. Even if it’s something illegal. If anything, as much as that isn’t the one I expected or the one I wanted, to me she and Taila Santos are the two most dangerous people in this tournament in this moment.”
Carmouche also acknowledges that fighters are notoriously their own worst critics. so there’s always room for improvement. Even with two wins over Velasquez — one by TKO and one by submission — Carmouche expects to do better when they meet again on Thursday.
“Even when I beat [Kana] Watanabe and it was a matter of 37 seconds, something like that, I still was not happy with how I performed,” Carmouche said. “Yes, I beat her and it was a quick and easy finish, but technically-wise, I was not happy with my performance. Same thing with Velasquez. Our first time, I feel like I gave her too much respect and let her kind of instill her way, and I wasn’t happy with how it went down and that there weren’t any doubts. I wish I broke her face, sliced her open, and then we’d have no doubts. That second fight, there’s technical things that look super sloppy that I wasn’t happy with.
“Opportunity No. 3, I get to clean that up. Would I much prefer a challenge of somebody I’ve never faced before and doing something different? Absolutely. But again, when I know that she’s looking to get to that $ 1 million, it’s not just a third rematch. It’s a rematch to get to a million dollars.”
UFC flyweight Maycee Barber is recovering after a nine-day stay in the hospital, and she is thankful to be alive.
“The things that we put our bodies through, it’s no joke, all this stuff on the backside [of a fight],” said Barber, who was hospitalized days after beating Katlyn Cerminara at UFC 299. “I would have never thought that I would be in a hospital for nine days feeling like I was gonna die.”
Doctors still don’t know what made Barber so sick. They suspect she may have contracted Streptococcus pyogenes, a serious form of strep throat, and a staph infection. She also contracted pneumonia and her blood pressure dropped to dangerous levels.
“I ended up … being on oxygen, having the blood pressure monitored, and everything being monitored at all times, and being stuck with like a bunch of different needles,” she said. “But we don’t have a definitive answer on what it was. From the moment I went into the hospital, they started giving me antibiotics, and giving me stuff to try to bring it down or figure it out.
“As they were doing that, they were also testing, they’re like, ‘We’re giving her this to help with it, but we’re also trying to figure out what it is.’ So they never really got a true answer as to what it was. But the antibiotics that I’m on now are slowly starting to clear it up. So I’m hopeful that it just stays gone and stays away, because for a minute there, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.”
The ordeal started just three days after UFC 299. Barber saw a red spot on her leg “like someone took a baseball bat to my shin” and began to swell rapidly. She suffered severe pain in the limb and contacted staff the UFC Performance Institute, who advised her to go to urgent care.
“It progressed so fast, and I end up going to the ER, and they ran tests, and tried to figure it out, and couldn’t figure it out, and then they were going to send me home that night,” she said. “I still had a pretty high fever. [My temperature] was like, like 102, 103 [degrees]. I went home, went to bed, woke up the next day, and I was like, 105, 106.
“They brought me back into the ER and started running more tests, and then that progressed into a nine-day course of, ‘We think it’s sepsis. We think it’s staph, we think it’s MRSA, we think it’s a blood clot.’ All these different things. They thought it was Strep A – is another form of strep – and then they were like, ‘We’re not sure.’”
By day four of her hospital stay, Barber’s condition had gotten so bad, she thought it might be fatal.
“I was in the bed, and my mom was staying the night with me, and for whatever reason, there was something that they had given me, it was like a painkiller, but it was also a narcotic that brought my blood pressure down too low after it was already extremely low,” she said. “I think that that like it was a mixture of that, mixed with pneumonia and not being able to breathe – I legit could not breathe at all. So when they had me on the oxygen, and the blood pressure was dropping, I just started crying. I looked over at my mom, and I just started crying.
“I didn’t want to tell her that, but I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it. I genuinely was scared, and I was like, ‘Damn, all the people that I’m seeing in the hospital right now might be the last people that I talked to.’ I called my friends, and I was like, ‘I don’t know…’ . It was tough, it was a scary experience, and I hope that I never have to go through that. But also I feel like it’s a testament to a lot of fighters that have had to go through something similar.”
Staph infections and MRSA are rampant in MMA gyms where fighters grapple and sweat on the mats. Several fighters have had close calls that required hospitalization; tiny cuts have led to gruesome injuries that required intravenous antibiotics.
In Barber’s case, there was no such injury that led to the infection. That only added to the mystery of her body’s response.
“The antibiotic that I was on is for severe skin treatments,” she said. “One of the things that I feel like was should have happened way sooner was, the doctors that they had working on me, they didn’t have answers. So then they had to bring in an infectious disease doctor from another hospital. That’s the guy that started to really have the answers for us.”
Barber’s energy is slowly returning; she played basketball on Tuesday after taking brief walks to test her strength. At the peak of her illness, she couldn’t walk upstairs without losing her breath.
She isn’t sure whether her illness was present for her fight with Cerminara, but she suspects it may have sapped her of her aggressiveness in the cage.
“The whole camp was a little bit tough, but I felt off in the sense of, I should have finished Katlyn,” she said. “I know in my heart that I could have finished her. I just didn’t have that little extra bit.”
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is holding a special pre-fight media day this afternoon (Weds., April 3, 2024) for the upcoming UFC Vegas 90: “Allen vs. Curtis 2” mixed martial arts (MMA) event on ESPN+, scheduled for this Sat. night (April 6) inside the promotion’s APEX facility in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The LIVE video stream gets underway promptly at 2 p.m. ET.
Fighters scheduled to appear include:
Brendan Allen – No. 6 UFC middleweight Chris Curtis – No. 14 UFC middleweight Alexander Hernandez – UFC featherweight Damon Jackson – UFC featherweight Morgan Charriere – UFC featherweight Chepe Mariscal – UFC featherweight Court McGee– UFC welterweight Alex Morono – UFC welterweight
Note: Times and availability subject to change.
MMAmania.com will deliver LIVE round-by-round, blow-by-blow coverage of the entire UFC Vegas 90 fight card RIGHT HERE, starting with the ESPN+preliminary card matchups, which are scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. ET, then the remaining main card balance (also on ESPN+)at 6 p.m. ET.
To check out the latest and greatest UFC Vegas 90 news and notes be sure to hit up our comprehensive event archive right here. For the updated and finalized “Allen vs. Curtis 2” fight card and ESPN+ lineup click here.
Bruno Silva will appeal the loss to Chris Weidman | Ed Mulholland-USA TODAY Sports
Bruno Silva is still recovering from the injuries he sustained in his fight with Chris Weidman at UFC Atlantic City.
Silva returned to Curitiba, Brazil, after facing the former middleweight champion in New Jersey this past Saturday. He visited an ophthalmologist to check on his eyes after getting poked in both eyes by Weidman. He said the doctor compared the test results to his most eye exams and noticed a clear decrease in vision caused by the eye pokes.
“[Weidman] poked both my eyes, and the exam showed I lost 30 percent of my vision in one of the eyes,” Silva told MMA Fighting. “But the doctor doesn’t think it’s permanent, he thinks it will come back fast. I’ll have to go back there next week for another test.”
The fight initially was ruled a TKO victory for the American. Then it was overturned to technical decision despite the fact Weidman’s finishing sequence started with blatant pokes to both eyes.
Silva’s team intends to appeal the decision with the New Jersey Athletic Control Board, which oversaw the event. He hopes to overturn the loss to a no-contest.
“The referee was bizarre,” Silva told MMA Fighting the day after the fight. “He f***** up, and then f***** up on top of that, the least they could do is a no-contest. No way. He put his finger inside my eye.”
“We think it’s hard for Chris Weidman to accept a rematch, but the no-contest would be fair,” he added. “Let’s see what the UFC does. I just want things done the right way, the fair way. I went there and fought and you didn’t see any malice from my part.”
The complete interview with Bruno Silva is featured on this week’s episode of MMA Fighting’s Trocação Franca podcast.
Combat sports legend Mark Coleman is headed to UFC 300.
The promotion’s first-ever heavyweight world champion nearly lost his life in a devastating fire last month. Awaken by his pet dog in the middle, Coleman heroically carried both of his parents to safety, suffering smoke inhalation in the process. Fortunately, the two-time UFC Hall of Famer pulled through that and a subsequent bout with pneumonia before being given a full bill of health.
To honor ‘The Hammer’ and his heroic efforts, Dana White and Co. will host Coleman and his daughters for UFC 300 on April 13 in Las Vegas.
“I’m so excited today,” Coleman wrote in a video caption on Instagram. “The UFC is bringing me in giving me and my daughters tickets to the biggest show ever UFC 300 in Las Vegas. So stoked let’s go. The BMF belt that’s the one I’m excited about. The main event is huge as well. The whole card is sick. See you there. What a great day to be alive. Be the best version of yourself you can be you never know when you’re gonna need it. Sober is cool, carnivore diet, nine ancestral tenants, hammer House for life.”
In the video itself, Coleman said he’s feeling so good that he’ll step up and be the backup for any and every fighter on the card.
“What’s up everybody,” he said. “Good afternoon! I’m so excited. UFC is bringing me into UFC 300. I’m in training. I’m the backup for every fighter. Let’s go!”
Max Holloway wants Mark Coleman to present the BMF title at UFC 300
While we don’t expect to see the 59-year-old legend strap on the four-ounce gloves ever again, BMF title challenger Max Holloway suggested that Mark Coleman be the one who straps the bragging rights belt around the winner’s waist at UFC 300.
“The only correct answer is Mark Coleman,” Holloway told MMA Junkie when asked who should present the BMF title at UFC 300. “Especially with what he went through recently with his dog and his dog waking him to go save his stuff and he goes in there and runs for his dog? The guy’s a G. That’s a real life BMF. That would be sick if he did it. It would be an honor to get him to do it.”
Between 1996 and 2010, Mark Coleman competed against some of the biggest names in combat sports during his time in PRIDE and the UFC, including Gary Goodridge, Don Frye, Fedor Emelianenko, Mirko Cro Cop, Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua, and Randy Couture. In 2008, he was inducted into the Pioneer Wing of the UFC Hall of Fame. Eight years later, he would receive a second induction, this time into the Fight Wing for his classic clash with Pete Williams at UFC 17 in May 1998.
For all his accomplishes in the world of mixed martial arts, Coleman will forever be remembered as the UFC’s inaugural heavyweight champion, winning back-to-back tournaments at UFC 10 and UFC 11 before submitting Dan Severn with a scarf hold at UFC 12 to etch his name in the history books.
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