Dudes Punching Each Other in the Balls
UFC Fighters Want to Get in Bed with the Swoosh
Junior dos Santos, the current UFC heavyweight champion, is reportedly in talks with Nike about an endorsement deal. The Nike deal would be great for dos Santos for any number of reasons, and not all of them monetary.
Lyman Good Will Eat Your Soul if He Feels Like It
Bellator is the second-biggest fight promotion around, Lyman Good is its star, and watching him fight is like seeing someone hold back from eating another guy's soul.
Bloody Detachment
Moments like the Evan Dunham-TJ Grant fight, when an injured fighter leaks blood all over the cage but keeps fighting like nothing happened, are litmus tests for MMA interest. Casual fans will recoil, brutes will be delighted, but deep-down MMA fans...
Secret Fighting in the Bronx Is as Cool as You'd Think
Strip the glitz from an MMA fight and add wannabes, devout martial artists and psychos, and you’ve got Underground Combat League, a series of underground fights in New York for coming on ten years, and which you can only attend if you're on a list or...
Family First?
"My gym is my family” is a classic trope in the world of MMA. It’s one of those lines that affords the hardscrabble fighting life some nobility, but it also means fighters who should be fighting each other don’t, and messes things up worse than an...
Rising Up, Rising Down in MMA
MMA fighters can be on top of the world one minute and in purgatory the next. One bad run can send you to the regional circuit, condemned to toil in feeder promotions like the Titan Fighting Championship, where young fighters learn their trade...
Fortune Favors the Bolt
Women's soccer overtakes the Olympics and almost gets ruined by referee-beef, terrible preseason football ruins Twitter, Stephen Strasburg's innings ruins mid-Atlantic baseball, and more from this past week in sports. Plus, Dwight Howard is traded and...
New York’s MMA Prude Bob Reilly Finally Retires
Bob Reilly’s reign of old-codger squeamishness is finally coming to an end.