Author: mmafighting
Andre August played it cool for most of fight week, but he finally came alive in his final staredown with Jake Paul before their clash on Friday in Orlando, Fla. Paul and August each made weight for their eight-round cruiserweight contest, which takes place at Caribe Royale Orlando and streams on DAZN, coming in respectively at 199.4 and 198.6 pounds. After hitting the scales, Paul bear-crawled up to August and went face-to-face, doing a throat-slitting motion and talking as August played right back. “Andre August is going to sleep and he don’t need a Celsius to wake him up,” Paul…
UFC 296’s welterweight opener is off after Randy Brown was forced to withdraw from a fight with Muslim Salikhov. The ESPN+ pay-per-view card is down to 12 bouts after an undisclosed illness forced Brown to withdraw from the event, which takes place Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. It’s the second hiccup in less than 24 hours for the UFC, which lost its pay-per-view opener when Ian Machado Garry fell ill with pneumonia and was forced to withdraw from his fight with former training partner Vicente Luque. A featherweight bout between Josh Emmett and Bryce Mitchell was promoted to…
Phumi Nkuta thought his career was over. Following a win over Jason Eastman in Cage Fury FC back in 2021, the 28-year-old prospect, who trains alongside former UFC bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling and top contender Merab Dvalishvili, dealt with a broken hand that required surgery and months of rehabilitation to recover. While the injury itself wasn’t all that uncommon, Nkuta revealed that the timing is what ultimately doomed him to announce his retirement from the sport. “That hand injury, if I could show you a picture, it was very gruesome,” Nkuta told MMA Fighting. “I had to wait, like, two…
With Ian Machado Garry vs. Vicente Luque cancelled, the featherweight fight between Josh Emmett and Bryce Mitchell has been bumped up to the UFC 296 main card. The switch comes after Machado Garry was forced off the card after contracting pneumonia upon arriving in Las Vegas for fight week. UFC CEO Dana White announced on Wednesday that Machado Garry had the flu but his symptoms eventually worsened and he was diagnosed with pneumonia, which prevented him from competing. With Machado Garry out, Luque attempted to find a last-second replacement in fellow UFC welterweight Kevin Holland, but the fight didn’t come…
Vicente Luque still hopes to fight at UFC 296. The welterweight veteran was scheduled to fight Ian Machado Garry this Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, but that bout was cancelled due to Machado Garry contracting pneumonia. Just days away from the event, it seems that Luque will have to wait until next year to step back into the octagon, but the always active Kevin Holland has offered to step in and keep Luque on the card. On Wednesday, Holland took a shot at Machado Garry on social media while suggesting in an accompanying caption that he would step…
Ciryl Gane and Alex Pereira won’t be fighting inside the octagon anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean fans can’t have some fun imagining how that matchup might go down. The UFC stars did their part to provide fantasy fodder as they squared up at an Ares FC event in France on Thursday, though obviously neither man took the faceoff too seriously. Watch Gane and Pereira face off below, courtesy of La Sueur. Gane, a former interim heavyweight champion, and current UFC light heavyweight champion Pereira were in attendance to take part in a Q&A. The event took place before the…
Sam Alvey really takes the whole glass half full thing to a new level. Rarely seen without a smile on his face — thus the reason for his nickname, “Smile’n” Sam Alvey — the 37-year-old veteran said goodbye to his UFC career just over one year ago but hasn’t slowed down since then. He picked up a win in his first post-UFC fight and then scored a knockout in his Karate Combat debut. Those victories put Alvey back on track after suffering through a four-year, nine-fight winless streak that marred his final run with the UFC. As disappointing as it…
Daniel Rodriguez’s saga with his Noche UFC drug test is finally over. The veteran UFC welterweight on Thursday accepted a three-month suspension from USADA after testing positive for trace amounts of ostarine and LGD-4033 in an out-of-competition drug screening prior to his planned Sept. 16 bout against Santiago Ponzinibbio. Rodriguez’s suspension is retroactive to the date of his failed test, which was collected on on July 28, meaning it has already expired. However, Rodriguez’s USADA sanction also runs in tandem with the previous six-month suspension the 36-year-old received from the Nevada Athletic Commission, which permits Rodriguez to compete again on…
Alexandre Pantoja has a unique approach to rear-naked chokes in MMA. Seven of Pantoja’s 10 submission wins have come via the technique — plus one neck crank — and he’s so used to attacking from his opponent’s backs, he prefers to do it with both eyes closed. Pantoja makes the first defense of his 125-pound title on Saturday at UFC 296 when he faces Brandon Royval in a rematch of a bout Pantoja won with a rear-naked choke in 2021. That victory, which Pantoja described as “a work of art,” saw the Brazilian champ hunt for the fight-ending sequence without…
With UFC 296 just a few days away, the storylines are aplenty heading into the UFC’s final fight card of the year, including the welterweight championship main event between Leon Edwards and Colby Covington. Where does Edwards go with a win? Where does the division go if Covington claims his first undisputed championship? On an all-new edition of Between the Links, it’s a special fan Q&A edition as MMA Fighting’s Mike Heck and Jed Meshew discuss the potential fallout of Saturday’s championship headliner. Additionally, the panel will answer questions such as Ian Machado Garry being scratched from his matchup with…