Thursday, October 29 2:00 pm PT: So maybe 15 meals a day is a little much: Jeff Monson has informed Fighters.com that he’s considering a move to 205 lbs. in order to better adapt his 5’9” frame to competition. (Monson, you may recall, once fought 6’8” Tim Sylvia. It looked something like this.)
Out of the three primary body types -- ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph -- Monson is classified as the brickwallmorph, with the kind of mass you’d expect to find only in cartoons. He will probably appreciate the lessened size differential, but it’s not as though light heavyweights are particularly short: Jon Jones is 6’4”. The deflated Monson is expected in Strikeforce sometime in 2010.
Thursday, October 29 9:49 am PT: I don’t fish and can barely remember the rowboat expeditions I took as a kid, but I know the look: the oxygen-starved vacant stare and the flapping mouth.
Matt Mitrione and Scott Junk, while two indisputably tough guys, looked like dying carp on Wednesday’s episode of “The Ultimate Fighter.” The first round was haymaker central, which both men paid for in the second. If the UFC ever invites either one to compete in Colorado, they should run the other way. (But pace themselves.)
Thursday, October 29 5:50 am PT: Expectations are relative: beating Ben Rothwell didn’t do so much for Andrei Arlovski, but it helped propel Cain Velasquez into the Sherdog.com list of the sport’s top ten heavyweights. Velasquez makes the move after going to 7-0 last Saturday, delivering a beating to the former IFL contender that made him look like -- a former IFL contender.
What the sudden postponement of the Brock Lesnar/Shane Carwin bout does for Velasquez’s immediate future is TBD: the soonest he’d get a title shot would probably be in late spring or summer, assuming Carwin/Lesnar happens in January or February. If he fights before then, he risks that placement. On the other hand, he might want another bout before trying his luck against two guys that could palm a swiss ball.
Thursday, October 29 3:56 am PT: The excellent Marcelo Alonso was first in the line to receive Lyoto Machida’s comments regarding his controversial UFC 104 contest with Mauricio Rua. And it will surprise, shock, and seize you to discover that Machida -- the winner -- believes the decision was justified.
“I had the opportunity to see the fight again and I thought I won four rounds and Shogun took the last one,” he said. “Some people say he won the fourth and fifth round, but for sure I won at least the first three rounds. The American commentators were pretty much biased. If you see the fight without audio, you will probably see a different fight.”
Machida added that he felt he was the one closer to ending the fight, having “put him in danger” multiple times during the 25 minutes Rua threatened him. Unless a fighter is noticeably staggered -- prior to the afterparty -- it’s virtually impossible for judges to take that into consideration. But if head strikes should count more than kicks or strikes to the body, the rules need to articulate that. An MMA town meeting is long overdue.
