In case you missed it, one of the big fights happened Saturday, November 7, 2009 – Fedor Emelianenko versus Brett Rogers! The other big fights for me (as I only get free TV and I am too cheap to buy pay-per-view) was Cyborg vs Carano and Mir vs Lesnar (I saw this over the Internet).

Strikeforce is one of the more visible organizations. They used to have kickboxing and moved to MMA. Strikeforce took over the EliteXE and aired fights on Showtime. I like that they are still having some fights on CBS.

In this post I’ll highlight some videos (not sure how long they will stay up) and talk about this fight and the middleweight championship Sheilds vs Miller.

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One of the best fights I saw during the Summer was Faber vs Brown 2 for the WEC Featherweight title! For those of you not familiar with the WEC featherweights, Urijah Faber had it for a while. When I first started watching Faber a couple of years ago, he was the kind of fighter that always won by submission. It was kind of fun to watch his fights because often he would give up his back and then pull a reversal and win the match!

Urijah showed off his standing game (for the first time I saw) in the first Jens Pulver fight. Faber has a kind of karate distance - lunging punch that can bridge the distance easily but it packs a wallop! The main move I love is his elbows (which you will see a lot of in this fight).

In this post I will first show the video of the fight and then contrast it with the moves that I normally see from Faber. By the way the previous time Mike Brown took the WEC Featherweight belt decisively – Faber was taken down and he seemed to recover a bit too quickly (bounced right up) and he bridged the gap with a crazy elbow! Brown hit Faber with a right hand and easily followed up for the win! What I was most hoping to see in this fight was Faber not losing the match but each fighter duking it out to see who was the best fighter. Here is the full fight (if it slows down – pause it for a minute)

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In the much anticipated match of the summer, Chris Cyborg won decisively over Gina Carano! Cyborg turned out to be the better striker as well as better ground fighter. Carano held her own the first half of the first round and escaped a couple of submission attempts but she (Carano) could not hang with Cyborg’s pace.

I was impressed with one other match of Showtime’s Strikforce event; Babalu Sobral vs Gegard Mousasi for the light heavyweight belt. I will highlight both videos in this post but first, here is Cyborg vs Carano.

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There have been many great fighters and fighting arts that use similar moves but throw them differently. Kung Fu kicks look different than Tae Kwon Do and Muay Thai kicks look different than Karate kicks. Which way of throwing a kick is best?

What am I talking about? Well one example I am going to talk about is a wheel kick, also known as a round house kick. There are significant differences from style to style on how to throw this kick. I’ll talk about some of the rationals and what you have to consider when throwing a wheel kick. Here is one way to throw the round house kick from Bas Rutten.

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For those of you who watch the WEC on Versus TV, the fight of the year is happening Sunday, June 6th! Mike Brown is defending his title against Urijah Faber. Faber lost the title last year in a surprise upset.

The WEC is still airing free on Versus TV and thankfully there are some good competitors in this league. Miguel Torres is another exciting champion in the WEC. My guess is eventually the WEC will go to PPV like the UFC but I really hope not too soon. In  this short post I’ll briefly talk about my expectations in this fight. Here is a recent promo video I found.

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Imagine that you grew up in the 60′s (some of you did) and your dad used to watch boxing! Boxing was an ideal martial art (even though it was not widely thought of as martial arts) because anyone could learn the basics and then defend themselves against a larger attacker! What you might be thinking? Don’t you mean karate? Well karate was in its infancy in the 60′s but boxing had a large audience.

If one knew how to jab, right cross and hook – he could take almost anyone bigger that was just trying to tear your head off and make them look silly! Karate kicked like girls did so it was not too popular with some men at first. Later when pioneers like Bill Wallace, Joe Lewis, Ron Marchini, and Chuck Norris started to make the sport of karate more popular there was still a dominant question at the time, what was better, karate or boxing?

In this post I will attempt to answer that question somewhat but before I do I will go into some history and note the differences between the two martial arts. Here is a video I found of the debate between boxing and MMA for some of the issues. MMA as many of you know is the most popular form of striking and submission sport that is watched today.

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Carano vs. Cyborg is one of the fights I am waiting to see but for now I found a video game with Gina as Natasha. The game is called Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 and has a web page here. According to Wikipeda’s page here, the game is set in an alternate universe where Albert Einstein has been removed (so no nukes).

Carano seems to be good for the part as she was already bigger than life as Crush in the American Gladiator TV series. This is a short post about Gina Carano’s recent history and role in this video game. I found this video promotion for the game.

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