The Sherdog Radio Network was live Tuesday afternoon with new efforts from Jordan Breen and Bruce Buffer.
"The VOTO" was joined by poker player Phil Hellmuth. Nicknamed "The Poker Brat" Hellmuth shared stories from his poker career and how he is going through a personality transformation.
Jordan Breen took to The SRN with his normal Tuesday formula of listern calls and emails. Follow the link below to check out the broadcasts of today.
Tomorrow on "Beatdown" Jack, Lotfi and myself will be joined by UFC on Versus headliner Jon Jones as well as UFC title challenger Dan Hardy.
Tuesday, March 16 2:09 pm PT: Content pirates are not really pirates in the sense that they have any kind of reasonable defense in the event they get caught. Real pirates can fetch automatic weapons; Internet stream owners tend to be less formidable.
An illegal pay per view site is currently being sued out of existence by Zuffa in U.S. District Court. The complaint alleges site operators were freely advertising their ability to pass along a UFC 111 feed. (Because what you want to do in the event you’re a criminal is, of course, put up public notices about it.)
The UFC’s ability to shoot fish in a barrel that actually come up for air is not contestable: where they will continue to have trouble is in locating, identifying, and prosecuting the sites that operate far under the radar of a conventional Web presence. The really guarded probably hide IP addresses and shift their base of operations around; their viewers are probably sub-casual fans who wouldn’t pay for a show otherwise. (If they were obliging fans with money woes, they’d probably just go to a bar.)
The UFC had six of the ten highest-grossing pay per views of 2009; boxing continues to tick off record buys. As problems go, piracy runs a distant second to fighter pensions, insurance, or any number of productive ways you could spend the money lawyers devour.
Whether you find the safety precautions already installed in mixed martial arts sufficient depends on your expectations. Relative to the groin-biting of the mid-1990s, it’s an amusement park. Relative to the damage still possible in a poorly-regulated fight, things have a long way to go.
I’m sure Massachusetts believes in the idea of a double weigh-in -- once 36 hours prior to the event, once the day of to make sure no athlete has gained moiré than 6.25% of their contracted weight. Fighters, particularly in heavier weight classes, have been known to come in 10-20 pounds heavier than what the scale records.
This is unfair if a couple of guys do it. Fortunately, virtually everyone does it.
The policy has nice ambitions, but it’s blithely ignorant of how foolhardy athletes can be. Few will actually be warned off enough to consider going up a weight class: instead, they’ll dry up some more on the evening of the fight and potentially enter the arena with lethargy and increased concussion potential because their body is crying out for water. Cutting weight is not safe, and perhaps some athletes wind up having an edge, but the solution is to put them in less danger, not more. And the compounding problem is that not all states will adhere to this, or any, policy --Thiago Alves might be promoted to fight as a welterweight in one state and a middleweight in another.
If Massachusetts is serious about doing radical alterations to weight classes, a better idea would be to conference in the Association of Boxing Commissions and petition for a uniform change across the board. The state does not operate in a vacuum, and there is little sense in policy varying so widely across the country.
For all the armchair-promoting directed at Strikeforce, it’s getting harder to find fault with some of the cards being assembled. (Get past Herschel Walker if you have to, but January’s Nick Diaz vs. Marius Zaromskis fight was worth whatever Showtime charged you.)
At 2-0, Gracie is nowhere near that scene, but he displayed what he could do against a monolith wrestler in Ron Waterman back in 2006. Randleman, dangerous when he chooses to be, may indicate how Gracie reacts to real violence in the ring. And after the disappointment of Rolles Gracie in the UFC and the disappearance of Daniel Gracie from competition, how far a heavyweight from that family can go is still an open discussion.
