Remember Elite Extreme Combat, more affectionately called Elite XC? The little that company that could that had such stars as Gina Carano, Kimbo Slice and the entire roster of Strikeforce? That is, they could until they couldn’t and eventually flopped one fateful Fall day. It was a sad day for MMA as another organization collapsed under its own weight. But fret not, because Elite XC still exists! At least, according to a lazy (and probably overpaid) web designer.

While wandering around the Shwotime website, like all people with too much time should do, I discovered this neat little fact in their “About” page. According to them, Elite XC is still thriving and it’s not too late to watch them. The site states under their Showtime channel banner:

With critically acclaimed original series like Dexter™, Weeds, Californication™, Brotherhood®, The Tudors, The L Word®, This American Life™ and Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, the best shows are now on SHOWTIME! Also featured are Hollywood Hits No One Else Has®, Showtime Championship Boxing™, and mixed martial arts with EliteXC™.

But that’s not all! If you get Showtime 2 as well, you get twice the Elite XC!

Double your viewing options! In addition to box office favorites, SHO 2 is home to “catch-up marathons” of SHOWTIME Original Series and SHO Sports™ Presents, an exclusive series airing every weeknight at 10 p.m. ET/PT, which features the best of Showtime Championship Boxing™, ShoBox: The New Generation®, mixed martial arts (MMA) matches and the ShoXC: Elite Challenger Series™.

Lest we forget about Showtime’s bastard cousin, Sho Extreme!

Perfect for the action/adventure enthusiast, this channel features action and martial arts films, gangster movies, thrillers and westerns, plus select Showtime Championship Boxing™ and EliteXC™ events.

That’s three times the Elite XC action! You think a multi-million dollar company like Showtime would take the time to manager their website better, but I guess they are too busy promoting “Dexter” or… well, no, that’s really all they have. Don’t believe me and think the image above is a photoshop? Check out the link here on their current site to see this un-updated error!

The Fight Nerd, in conjunction with Tomopop.com, takes a look at Wave 2 of the UFC Deluxe Action Figures from Jakks Pacific. This wave includes new figures of Mike Thomas Brown, Nate Marquardt, and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, and re-releases of Chuck Liddell, Royce Gracie, Forrest Griffin, and improved versions of Rashad Evans and Brock Lesnar. Are they worth buying? Watch the video to find out!

E3 continues to bring us new goodies from the MMA gaming world. This time around, we get a glimpse of some of the gameplay footage of EA Sports MMA with the heavyweights doing battle. Digital versions of Randy Couture and Fedor Emelianeko do battle inside a Japanese style ring, and there must be a winner! Check out the video above to watch the action!

What are my thoughts on it? I think this game is looking pretty great, graphics and gameplay wise. I was very impressed with how THQ handled the UFC game in 2009, especially since I was used to playing the old versions that were essentially button mashers. EA Sports MMA seems to have upped the ante and found more efficient ways to do things and really adding a much deeper sense of understanding towards the sport over the UFC game. The front headlock alone is one aspect of it, how Randy fights to get his hooks in on Fedor’s back one leg at a time, this game captures the ground game in a very comprehensive manner and will make for a very competitive gaming experience.

I can not say which game is better just yet until it is in my hands, but everything I have seen so far from EA has done nothing but impress me. They have innovated a complicated sport that would not normally translate well into a video game, and made it as close to real as we have seen. Look for this in October, and a comprehensive review around the same time! What do you think of this gameplay footage?

Over on his excellent blog, Jim Genia has put together the most comprehensive list of failed loves in the MMA World. Rather than try to add to it, here it is in it’s entirety, give it a read and see if Jim missed any or caught a few you don’t remember or were not even aware of! I know I missed one of them!

Last week TMZ.com broke the news that the relationship between Tito Ortiz and Jenna Jameson had hit a speed bump – a speed bump forged of Oxycontin pills, domestic abuse charges and a relaxing stay in one of the Huntington Beach Police Department’s finest holding cells. A former UFC champ and an ex-adult film actress having relationship trouble? Unpossible! But alas, the pics of Ortiz behind bars, the press conference and Jenna’s arm in a brace made it all too real. Sorry kids, but MMA fighters engage in some epic relationship disasters just like the rest of us. Here, in no particular order, is a top five list of them.

5 – Tito Ortiz vs. Jenna Jameson: As the saying goes, “Lay down with porn stars, wake up with restraining orders” – which is exactly what Ortiz did when he had twins with Jameson, thereby signing on for the long-term plan of “crazy” and “erratic”. Did he really assault her? Is she really addicted to Oxys, which he claimed in his post-pokie press conference? With yesterday’s New York Daily News reporting that Jameson wants the Huntington Beach Bad Boy back, does it even matter? Heck no! Like a recurring staph infection that antibiotics just can’t get rid of or a case of genital herpes caught on the set of “Debbie Does Everyone Everywhere”, “Jennito” promises to be the gift that keeps on giving for as long as these star-crossed lovers share the warm embrace of passion and insanity.

Hit the jump to see the rest!

4 – Randy Couture vs. Kim Couture: Like Yoko Ono and the Beatles, Kim managed to brand herself as “that chick that made Randy ditch his wife and leave the UFC”, and in the Land of People Will Hate Whomever They Want”, it doesn’t really matter if any of that’s true or not. What does matter: that Randy resigned as the UFC’s heavyweight champ, then spent nearly a year fighting the organization in court over money and contracts and blah, blah, blah. In the end, Randy lost the legal battle, returned to the Octagon, and served Kim divorce papers. It’s quite possible that more people cheered over the divorce than did over “The Natural” stepping back into the cage.

3- Jason “Mayhem” Miller vs. ex-girlfriend: If you think Miller’s nickname stems from his uncanny ability to enter a Strikeforce cage and start a riot, think again. The host of MTV’s “Bully Beatdown” has been earning that nickname over and over again for years, with his 2005 beatdown of an ex-girlfriend’s current beau just another installment of “How the Mayhem Turns”. Although the details are somewhat fuzzy, what we do know is that the incident was a 6:00am session of “kick in the door and fight”, and the cops in Hawaii charged him with burglary and assault. Ultimately, Miller was found not guilty, but the damage was done: his Hallmark Cards sponsorship was history.

2- Bobby Hoffman vs. newlywed wife: In 2001, Hoffman was a top-level heavyweight with a bright future, and if you had to describe him, the formula would go something like this: 40% punching power, 30% fighting ability, 20% skill and 85% crazy. In his last trip to the Octagon – at UFC 34 – Hoffman fought and lost to soon-to-be-champ Josh Barnett. He then went up to his hotel room and beat his newlywed wife, a turn of events that landed him in the slammer for a long enough period of time that his name to fans went from Bobby Hoffman to “Bobby who?”

1 – Gina Carano vs. Kit Cope: It takes a special kind of ex-boyfriend to wait until you make it big to announce to the world that he has a sex tape featuring you, but Kit Cope – a Muay Thai champ and mid-grade MMA fighter – is one such ex-boyfriend. Carano had just turned in a gritty performance as the American Gladiator “Crush, had done well for herself on a CBS/Kimbo fight card, and had the biggest fight in female MMA history (against Cyborg Santos) looming, so of course it was the best possible time for Cope to come forward. For shame on you, Cope, for trying to capitalize on her fame. Also, for shame for not actually having a sex tape.

Tim Waid, certified instructor of the Pekiti-Tersia Kali System, demonstrates an advanced unarmed knife defense technique with Simon Burgess of the Five Points Academy in NYC.

Does strategy make for boring fights?
BY MATTHEW KAPLOWITZ

Let’s just be blunt about it. Shogun should be the UFC Light Heavyweight champion. The CSAC disagrees with us since leg kicks are worthless according to them, despite being a proven method to end fights. Despite all of that, the bigger picture is that the fans were robbed of seeing what we expected to be an explosive match-up between two distinctive striking styles. Instead, we got 30 minutes of standing that, according to fightmetric.com, tallied up to a grand sum of 265 standing strikes, 124 of those landed. That averages to 53 strikes thrown each round between the two of them. If you were a judge in that fight, how do you even begin to score that?

Let’s throw numbers out of the equation, since I am The Fight Nerd and not The Mathemagician. As much as we enjoy the occasional sloppy school yard brawl from our cage fights, we also enjoy watching the living chess match that is MMA unfold with technique and grace. The dilemma is sometimes a tactical match can be as fun as watching grass grow. This is where Machida VS Rua comes in the debate.

One could argue that their recent match at UFC 104 was as dull as watching paint dry, while others will retort that it was great because it was pure strategy and that we do not appreciate their abilities. So does that mean that any fight that involves tactics and strategy is going to be automatically boring? For that matter, does strategy make for boring fights or is it just the fighters who make the fight hard to watch?

GSP is one fighter who some people, myself included, think is the pound for pound best MMA fighter out there right now. Others will argue he is boring and lays and prays (James Rowe, my friend, I am looking at you). GSP is the perfect mix of strategy and excitement, you need to look no further than his rematch with Matt Serra. As opposed to the feinting tactics of Machida and Rua, GSP instead took an aggressive strategy of constantly mixing up his attack pattern, going from wrestling to grappling to striking in one seamless combo. Some of GSP’s less exciting fights include his UFC 94 beatdown of BJ Penn and his recent outing against Thiago Alves, where he spent much of the fight taking his opponents down and pounding them out. Nonetheless, there was a game plan and that was engagement and domination, not allowing his opponents to use their strengths and capitalizing on their weaknesses, mentally breaking them down while doing it physically. Clearly, GSP is employing some smart moves in his fight plan and sticking to them and is the antithesis of boring.

Many old school fighters were strategists too, that is what made them a threat as opposed to others who just came out of the gate and simply wanted to fight. Guys like Ken Shamrock, Bas Rutten, Jeremy Horn, and Randy Couture to name a few. I would say the father of a more tactical strategy in MMA would be Pat Miletich. By the time he made his way in to the UFC, he had a record of 17-1. His fights were often criticized for being boring in the early days of UFC, especially since he was keen on counter striking and clinch work. But when given an opponent who pushed him like Carlos Newton, Shonie Carter, or Kiyoshi Tamura, Miletich worked and showed the fans he had the ability to change and adapt to a fighters style, which does not always work in ones favor but shows willingness to adapt an aggressive stance every now and then to goad his opponent into doing something. It is a common thing for a fighter to have general ideas and expectations and work with those, but those are only based on past performances, and once that opponent does something different, you are left with your fundamentals to fall back on.

Let’s take a look at a boxer for a moment, so stay with me here, I am going somewhere with this! Muhammed Ali was known for more than his charismatic personality, he had the in-ring skills to say whatever he wanted! A lot of fans remember him for his classic “rope-a-dope” strategy, where he essentially put himself in a bad position on the scorecards that eventually added up to a victory. Ali would let opponents wail on him and simply lay against the ropes, blocking the blows as the other fighter would inevitably allow himself to become fatigued and frustrated. This opened up an opportunity for Ali to capitalize and score a knockout blow to the tired fighter. Let’s take a look at rounds 6-8 of Ali VS Foreman to see the rope a dope in action:

Now imagine watching the first 5 rounds before that and tell me you could handle that in one sitting? Ali was employing a counter-striking strategy that meant for quite some time, Ali just sat back on the ropes and did nothing. He knew Foreman would be pushing the pace and trained to absorb the blows while picking an occasional shot and then unload everything towards the end of the fight. Any joe schmoe off the street can tell you about the rope-a-dope strategy, but try having them actually watch the fight start to finish. Good luck!

The reason I present to you this boxing match is to show another example of a strategy of attrition rather than aggression. It is a matter of mental survival as much as it is physical in this fight and Ali had the sharper mind and body by round 8. I would say that Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira could be the Muhammed Ali of MMA, and these days you could argue Kazushi Sakuraba is that man. Do we call these fighters boring? With MMA involving more techniques beyond punching, rope-a-dope can be employed to allow a submission fighter to catch an opening and attack a limb, but the down side is they must absorb some brutal punishment before securing that bodypart. This fight tactic can be boring but on the positive side, the plan allows their opponent to do a lot of the work and still engage the fight and keep the audience happy (even if it is at their expense and unintentional).

So with that said, it is clear to me that strategy does not necessarily equate to a boring fight. However, when a fighter is using the strategy of attrition over aggression, it can begin to turn sour. If both fighters have this same game plan in mind, it’s time to take that trip to the bathroom and go out and get some more beers from the bodega after.

I want to end this with a quote from Dan Severn, who said this on my podcast in regards to his UFC 9 match with Ken Shamrock, which most consider one of the most boring matches in MMA. I told him I thought it was boring and his response was: “If you look at alot of Ken’s matches prior to that, he is more of a counter attacker and I said if I do the same thing and no one engages each other, it would be a boring match, crowd is not going to like this… Garbage was thrown into the ring itself. Big John McCarthy stopped the match and gave us a verbal chewing out… and I said, ‘John, take your shirt off and we’ll make this into a triangular death match.’ I wasn’t about to change my strategy for the crowd or anybody else. I have a gameplan and I will stick to my gameplan.” What does this quote mean? You decide but for me, it means a win is a win no matter how you get it, fans be damned.

Strategy does not make for boring fights, inactivity and attrition do. If you have a loosely structured gameplan based on a few aspects of tape-watching, I would hope there is a level of adaptability beyond that. I am not a pro fighter, simply a critic, and I do not know what it is like to have that adrenaline rush when the cage door closes, but I can say at some point, if your strategy is not working, it is time for a change. A win is a win, but a dull win is not the same as an exciting win, and the fans and sponsors know the difference.

New York’s Underground Combat League
PHOTOS AND STORY BY MATTHEW KAPLOWITZ

All names were used with permission from the people involved. Some names have been altered to protect the identity of the person.

I had heard about the underground fight show in New York the moment I began to cover MMA. I had even seen a segment about it on a local news channel, but of course it only focused on the brutality of the sport and not on the real issue at hands, which was the lack of MMA being sanctioned in New York.

Finally, I earned my invite to check out one of the shows in person recently. Each show was in a different location in each of the five boroughs, and this time it happened to be in a non-descript boxing gym in an unsuspecting small neighborhood where you would never expect to find it.

A burly man with a thin goatee stopped me at the door, cutting off any peek of what was happening inside. I told him whom I was with and he told me to stay put. When a man that size tells you to not move, you do what he says. Moments later, a man came over in a green jacket and baseball cap, and invited me in. That man was Peter Storm, the owner of the Underground Combat League, and we had just set foot into his baby.

The origins of the UCL are quite humble. “Seven years ago I saw that there was a need for MMA,” Peter explained. “It wasn’t popular back then but I was familiar with the sport and I knew it was going to be big. Being a promoter and also a martial artist, I decided to put what I like to task.” Since then, Storm has put on close to 20 shows and gave many big names their first chance to put on the 4 oz. gloves, including Frankie Edgar and Bryan Vetell, and is also the subject of a documentary called “Welcome to the Underground.”

Despite there being only 50 or 60 people in the gym, the stinging odor of sweat was still present as the small audience was huddled around a 20×20 ring. A trained medical staff was on hand in case any fighters suffered an injury, so this was far from some bareknuckle street fight organization. This is the kind of show where everyone in the audience knows someone fighting or they are simply in the know, otherwise there is no way they would even be at the show. Advertising is purely word of mouth and if you don’t know someone, you are not getting in. When I asked Peter how people found out about these shows to attend, he responded, “Well, how did you find out?”

For that, I thanked Jim Genia of Full Contact Fighter, who discovered the league in 2004 purely because he knew a trainer of one of the fighters. “I paid my admission and covertly took pictures and wrote notes and then published an article about it. Storm read it and liked what I wrote and ever since, I have been getting invites.”

I missed the first two fights and they sounded exciting. The curtain opener ended when one of the fighters quit from an accidental eye-poke, and the second match ended when one of the fighters fell out of the ring during a takedown and injured his shoulder. I walked in during the third match which was a back and forth affair between two UCL veterans. As I patrolled around the ring looking for a good place to shoot, a fighter who had recognized me from Facebook stopped me.

John Beckett, a native of Staten Island, had been training MMA for about two years and had heard about the shows and was able to get hooked up to fight in one. A Columbia University graduate with a Masters in Education and Technology, John had no desire to turn pro but really enjoyed the amateur scene. This was his debut and just as he was greeting me, he jumped into the ring for his fight.
The UCL uses the unified rules we see all in other MMA shows, but in addition to that also holds matches with Submission Grappling rules and Pankration matches, which eliminates head strikes, elbows, and knees, and were the rules that John was competing in. Sadly, his match was quick as he was taken down and submitted before the first round ended. After tapping out, he looked up at the ref, asking if that was it. With his pre-fight jitters gone now, John was a disappointed by his performance, but was ready to jump back in and give it another shot.

“I was nervous but I wanted to go more all out. I definitely wanted to keep on going.” When Beckett isn’t training, he works with disabled children, and wants to stay in Education. Turning pro is not on his list of priorities, but his interest in fighting remained despite his sour debut. “I think you have to get it out and now I just want to do it again.” After saying those words, John looked up and saw his opponent. “Hold on, I’m gonna’ ask him if he wants a rematch sometime.” And with that, John darted off to see if he could find retribution or perhaps a new training partner.

After Beckett hopped out, a heavyweight named Kevin Wall was next on deck. Wearing two-toned TapouT shorts and a jaw chiseled from stone, Kevin was a former boxer and stick fighter who had worked his craft all across the world. He began to get into Judo and Jiu-Jitsu, got deeper into MMA and has since began teaching, but it is not easy to stay content when you have the itch to fight. “Teaching’s fun, but you get rusty and it becomes boring. So here I am.”

This was Wall’s third fight in the UCL and has been fighting with other amateur leagues for about a year and a half. His opponent, Xavier, seemed tentative and rightfully so. This seemed to be a mismatch just from the initial appearance, with Xavier’s self-conscious decision to wear two rashguards over his bulbous physique, while Kevin flexed his muscles and glared at the intimidated fighter across from him.

To be continued in Part two!