UFC 243 is upon us. Robert Whittaker and Israel Adesanya look to unify the Middleweight title in front of 50,000 fans in Australia. The biggest fight in Oceania history.
Exactly 50 UFC PPVs ago at UFC 193, Robert Whittaker was in the middle of the main card in an exciting striking oriented match up with Uriah Hall.
Sabina Mazo is a Colombian fighter with a 6-0 record making her UFC debut vs. Maryna Moroz on April 30th, 2019. She has already fought the full 25 minutes twice in her career and her opponents have a combined record of 29-10. That is an unusually strong strength of competition for the still developing regional women’s MMA scene.
She first made headlines with back to back headkick knockouts:https://youtu.be/Vor6987oBO0 and has since become LFA Champion.
Quick stats:
Date: APRIL 7 2019
10th Planet
BJJ Kunoichi / TEAM YUASA
This is only counting UFC rankings from Feb 5, 2013 when they began. I’m not going to include rankings before this time to keep it simple. This is an imperfect list since many fighters having big wins before the rankings were introduced, top fighters outside the UFC (Mousasi, Rory, Bader etc) and of course some controversial fights that require context. But it’s still an interesting look at the last 6 years.
I looked at fighters that have a lot of hype behind them due to activity and/or win streaks like Khabib, Holloway, Cerrone and Ferguson as well as listed the guys that had 5+ Top 10 wins like Werdum and Cormier.
Lomachenko vs. Linares
Date: Saturday, May 12
Time: 8 p.m. ET
Location: Madison Square Garden — New York City
In front of 10,429 in attendance, Lomachenko survived a knockdown in round 6 to win via TKO in round 10 after a perfectly placed liver shot to claim the WBA (Super) and The Ring lightweight titles. In doing so he became the fastest fighter ever to win titles in 3 different weight classes (only 12 professional fights) shattering the previous record of 20 fights, which was held by Jeff Fenech.
This new promotion is called Quintet. The first event will be called “Quintet.1” with the tag line “Team Grappling Survival Match” and features a host of notable names all across the MMA and combat sports scene. It’s stylized title may remind you of defunct Japanese MMA promotion Dream stylized titles. This event will be broadcast on UFC Fight Pass.
THE EVENT AIRS APRIL 11 530AM ET / 230AM PT
So here’s a bit of the the backstory, at the 2017 UFC Athlete Retreat the UFC had brought out special guest speakers to give their own little “Ted Talks”. One of those guests was Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers, and one of the UFC athletes to attend was Leslie Smith (currently 2 fight win streak since fighting Cris Cyborg, exploded ear, 5 FOTN bonuses – 4 in Invicta – 1 in UFC). And Leslie Smith asked him about Unions.
What They Are Fighting For whether or not they unionize:
“The UFC can choose to either pay into our needs and respect us as employees with a say in all decisions affecting us.”
or
“Treat us like the independent contractors that we are being called and lighten up with the USADA supervision, uniforms and restrictions.”
“We need to have either the autonomy of being independent contractors like the UFC claims we are or we need to get benefits and a seat at the table as employees since the UFC treats us like employees.” – http://www.projectspearhead.com/
All this can be found on their website neatly under the “Why Associations” tab.
Next, is the process, which is also concisely explained and outlined on the website for Smith’s fellow fighters.
