News and notes from around the MMA world …

- There is a fantastic piece on The Smashing Machine Mark Kerr, who was the focal point of an excellent documentary several years ago. Written by Kenny Rice for NBCsports.com, Kerr talks a lot about the drug issues in sports today.

- Last week, Dana White was interviewed by ESPN.com and talked about Frank Shamrock (with a reply by Shamrock), PPV in 2008, HBO, and the possibility of heavyweight star Fedor Emelianenko coming into UFC, among many other things.

- Todd Martin writes about the number two MMA company in the US (a very distant second place), Elite XC.

- Sam Kaplan has a Q&A with free agent and former UFC Heavyweight champ, Josh Barnett.

- After talks with Wanderlei Silva broke down for a fight with Chuck Liddell, Dana White and Joe Silva scrambled to put a fight together with the “Ice Man” and Keith Jardine according to UFCmania.com.

- Sherdog reports that UFC 75 will be televised on Spike TV rather than on PPV.

Talking Points

Rather than go with a more proven box office draw in Forrest Griffin, UFC decided to put Keith Jardine in the match with Chuck Liddell. I haven’t really heard why they avoided Griffin, but it would be the bigger match. Griffin can talk and he’s very well liked and better known based on his contract winning fight after the first Ultimate Fighter with Stephan Bonner and even more recently in losing a match against Tito Ortiz that many people thought he won. But the fight goes to Jardine, who beat Griffin last December decisively, but also lost to little known Houston Alexander in his last fight. Matching Jardine with Liddell seems like more of a best case scenario than a well booked fight. But it stems from losing out on the possible juggernaut fight that they were trying to put together between Wanderlei Silva and Chuck Liddell. Silva’s camp wanted a later date than the proposed September date, but UFC didn’t want to postpone the fight. They could still do that fight at a later date.

You’d expect Liddell to be a heavy favorite and maybe it’s not the right time for Griffin to be in there with Chuck. There might be other reasons to not do the fight. But a fight with Griffin would be at least twice as marketable as this one with Jardine. In any case, Liddell is still the star of the promotion, and the fight will be big enough, just based on him being involved.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS