Mike Goldberg welcomes us and starts hyping the main event and introduces us to Joe Rogan who says Patrick Cote has heart, balls, and gas(?). Standard pre-recorded introductions and rules follow.
Up first is Sean Sherk versus Tyson Griffin. This is a non-title fight scheduled for 3 rounds. As usual, Griffin enters to “Eye of the Tigerâ€. Randy Couture is in his corner for this fight. The announcers take a minute to pimp the upcoming Lesnar/Couture fight. Sherk comes in looking incredibly focused. I love Michael Buffer’s herky jerky pointing as he introduces the fighters. It’s always good for a quick laugh. David Smith is the referee.
Round 1 – Sherk take down of Griffin right away. Has back. Griffin is on his feet w/ Sherk on his back and shakes Sherk off. Sherk is the aggressor and seems to have the better striking. Another Sherk take down. Sherk is bleeding from the nose. Griffin up. Griffin lands a few shots. Punches in bunches followed by leg kicks from Sherk. Griffin landing a few of his own. Sherk stuffs a take down attempt and takes Griffin’s back. Back to striking to end the round. Good round with lots of action. I give the round to Sherk.
Round 2 – Sherk get s take down, but Griffin is back up quickly. Slower pace to start the round. Back and forth striking. No clear advantage to either fighter. Griffin looks a little sluggish. Griffin is getting pissed and “hulking upâ€. Sherk is landing more and better shots. Nice hard body shots and stiff jabs. Nice high kick attempts by Tyson. But nothing lands. Griffin seems to be gassing. Sherk is fresh and takes the 2nd round.
Miquel Torres is shown between rounds.
Round 3 – Lots of striking to start the round. Tyson rocked Sherk, rushed in, but Sherk recovered quickly amd started landing his own shots. Tyson looks a little desperate. Sherk throwing lots of kicks and landing most of them. Griffin is landing more shots at this point. Both guys finish swinging. Close round, but I’d give a slight edge to Griffin. I’d call it 29-28 for Sherk.
Strikeforce’s Mike Afromowitz sent out a press release with the information that their “Strikeforce on NBC” late night television show did its best rating ever last Saturday, doing 1.1 million viewers. The show featured the Trevor Prangley vs. Anthony Ruiz bout from the Playboy Mansion.
I’ve seen the show several times and what impresses me most about the show is that it’s put together tightly, and you don’t feel like you’re wasting a moment of your time when you watch it. It’s only 30 minutes long and for the most part, other than some introduction to the fighters, you get nothing but fighting. Also, if you have high definition, you should be able to find it on one of your high definition channels. In the Bay Area where I live, it comes on Universal HD.
This weekend is the premiere showing of Josh Thomson’s victory over Gilbert Melendez from the summer. Thomson won Melendez’s Strikeforce lightweight championship.
Rather than do a preview for UFC 90, where Anderson Silva defends his middleweight championship against Patrick Cote, I decided to put together something that my brothers at FGB helped me put together.
I posed a question to them that simply asked, who was better pound for pound between Anderson Silva and Fedor Emelianenko?
To me, it boils down to how well you dominate your weight class, the competition level, and how easy you make your wins look. There’s no question that both guys are dominating fighters. They haven’t been tested in years. From a competition level, Silva definitely has the edge (at least over the last few years), and while both guys make it look easy, Fedor wins in ways that make him look disgustingly better than anyone else across from him.
Big D thinks that while Anderson Silva is near unbeatable, he thinks that Fedor’s aura is that of someone who is even more unbeatable.
We are promised a Junie Browning fight, which should be pretty good.
Frank Mir asks Rolando Delgado about his black belt in jiu-jitsu. Most of Team Mir thinks he’s bullshitting.
Junie says he bought his black belt from McDonalds.
Mir says that he had to get his black belt by submitting Tim Sylvia.
Junie tells Rolando that if he gets out of the first round, he’ll tell Dana to give the fight to Rolando. Somewhere, I missed that this fight was definitely taking place.
Frank Mir makes it official. Junie throws a black belt at Delgado and Delgado playfully wraps it around him. Then Junie pushes him, puts the belt down and spits on it. Big Nog is never going to do this show ever again. Big Nog says he does it for attention. Anderson Silva says Junie did it because he was scared of Delgado and then tells him to kick his ass. Can you imagine being on a team with Big Nog and Anderson Silva?
E:60 did a nice feature on Brock Lesnar and he commented on why he left WWE, and also got up in a huff when the interviewer was going to start talking about steroids.
Also in the piece are Brett Hart, Bill Goldberg, and Dave Meltzer.
Apologies for the unexpected hiatus from this, but we’re back rolling with the final 2 names announced…. oh wait what’s that…. they announced 3 names??? What? But that means there’s 17 guys in the tournament. How do you have a tourney with 17 guys? PWG have come up with a nice little way it seems.
TJ Perkins
The former “Puma” is known in SoCal wrestling for being the youngest veteran in the business. Still in his early 20′s, TJ has been working the best part of 10 years (he started in his early to mid teens). After being somewhat out of the limelight in 2006 and 2007, this year has been a big comeback year for Perkins. He turned heel and formed an extremely entertaining team with Hook Bomberry (their team name is TJ Hooker in a stroke of greatness). A motivated and focused TJ Perkins is a scary prospect because the dude has so much talent. It’ll be interesting to see how he fares in BOLA.
Bryan Danielson/Low Ki
Yes, the final entrant is TWO MEN. PWG Commissioner Of Wrestling, Dino Windwood and PWG Commissioner Of Food & Beverage, Excalibur couldn’t agree on who should have the last spot so both men are in. In the next column I’ll look at how this plays into the bracketing which was also announced in the last few days, but for now let’s talk a little about each guy. Low Ki is the current IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Champion and former PWG Heavyweight Champion. He spent most of the year on the sidelines with an injury which forced him to vacate the PWG belt, but now he’s back and based on recent New Japan shows, is looking as good as ever. Ki is without question a favourite to win the whole thing.
Danielson, of course, also fits the bill of favourite. I’d be here all day listing the credentials of “The Best In The World”, so I won’t bother. I’ll just say that looking at this lineup, there are a ton of great potential matchups for Dragon that we don’t usually get to see (cough Yoshino cough). Hopefully he goes deep in the tournament and we get to see him used to his fullest.
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