Fedor vs. Rogers

I’ll say this straight up right now, Fedor Emelianenko is my favourite fighter and he has been for years. I’ll never pick a fighter to beat him but since I’m such a fan, when an opponent is a legitimate threat, I actually get nervous. I’ve always thought that Josh Barnett could potentially pull off the upset and I was pretty concerned about that fight. I still think that Fedor would come out victorious (as he always does), but if there’s anyone out there right now with the tools to beat Fedor, it’s Josh Barnett.

Unfortunately – or fortunately, however you want to look at it – that fight didn’t end up happening. Barnett got busted for steroid use (again), and that eventually lead to the downfall of Affliction as an MMA promotion. They scrambled to get a late replacement for Fedor and one of the options was Brett Rogers, but apparently Rogers wanted 800,000 for the fight. They then offered the fight to Vitor Belfort, who accepted, but due to a lack of interest, that idea was tossed away.

Looking back on it, and considering the dominating performance that Vitor Belfort put on against Rich Franklin, a Vitor Belfort vs. Fedor Emelianenko might have been more entertaining – and perhaps more competitive – than people expected. Well, it didn’t happen but at least now we’re getting the fight against Brett Rogers.

Rogers – who’s also undefeated (I don’t consider Fedor’s “loss” to be a defeat) – is coming off an impressive KO victory against Andrei Arlovski. Knocking out Arlovski in their last fights is a shared similarity between Rogers and Emelianenko. When he dropped Arlovski, Brett Rogers catapulted himself into the top 10 heavyweight rankings and with that, he’s getting the shot of a lifetime against Fedor.

Aside from Arlovski, Brett Rogers hasn’t fought any serious contenders. Now that’s not discrediting his ability as a fighter. Rogers has disposed of every challenger that he’s faced off against. As a matter of fact, he’s a perfect 10 for 10. That’s 10 fights, 10 wins and 10 finishes. He’s been on a tear and knocking everyone out.

However, there’s still so many question marks. He can strike, sure – we’ve seen that. But can he wrestle? How is his BJJ? Can he fight off his back? Can he defend submissions? He’s never been past the second round so how’s his cardio and most importantly, how’s his heart? He hasn’t really been into the deep waters and tested yet so it’s all a mystery at the moment.

Then there’s Fedor. He’s on a 30 fight win streak and despite what Dana White says, he’s knocked off some incredible, legit competitors along the way. He’s proven. He has the heart, he has the skill set – he can really do it all. He can out strike the best strikers (Crocop, Arlovski, Schilt) , out wrestle the best wrestlers (Lindland, Randleman, Coleman) and out grapple the best BJJ guys (Nogueira).

As a matter of fact, I don’t think Fedor has even lost a round since he fought Arona in the Rings promotion almost a decade ago. And even then, striking to the face wasn’t allowed so Fedor wasn’t able to utilize his devastating ground and pound tactics that he’s known for.

Fedor will be the heavy favorite in this fight. However, the mystery surrounding the abilities of Brett Rogers is what makes this fight so interesting. He could be 10-0 right now on his way to a 50-0 career. We just don’t know. He has the KO power to pull off an upset. But whether he can land that shot before he gets clinched up and taken to the ground is a different story. This will be a good one!

My New Home?

So I haven’t written an entry in a while and I apologize. To be honest, I just haven’t been motivated. I sprained my ankle a couple weeks ago and since then, I’ve spent most of my time in my room watching bootleg DVD’s. I want these entries to be timeless – something people can read in a year or two from now and still enjoy. I just didn’t think you guys wanted to read about how I watched “old school”, “American pie” and about twenty or so other movies – which I had already seen – all throughout the week. Some of you may have thought that the past caught up with me and one of those Pattaya girls ordered my “hit” here in Phuket. Fortunately that’s not the case.

While I’ve been watching movies, I’ve been multitasking and writing articles to submit to article directories. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been researching ways to earn money online and someone in the message boards turned me on to “article marketing”. To sum it up, you basically research highly searched, yet non-competitive keywords in Google, write an article on the topic emphasizing those keywords and submit it to the article directories. Somewhere within the article (usually at the bottom), you insert a link to a product you’re promoting. The goal is obviously to get your article listed on the first page in Google. If you can manage that, you can potentially get a lot of page views and as a result, you increase the likelihood that the reader will follow the link to whatever product you’re promoting and make a purchase – as you then earn a commission.

It doesn’t take much to live here in Thailand. The cost of living here is about 4 times less than what it is back in Canada. To put that in perspective, if you earn 50 dollars a day while living here, your lifestyle will be similar to the lifestyle you would have back home if you were earning 200 dollars a day. The reason I’m even mentioning this is because I know a lot of you guys are considering coming out to Thailand to train at some point. If you were to generate some sort of income while you’re here, you could then stay longer – because trust me, you’re not going to want to go home. I know I don’t!

Anyway, I’m still in Phuket and as you can see from the photo – it’s beautiful. I’m actually still living at Tiger Muay Thai and aside from the injury, things are going well. There’s no new crazy Thai girl stories since there really isn’t any girls around. Chalong – where the camp is located – is a very uneventful area. Me and my buddy went to “Chalong circle” the other night to get some food and we came across the “nightlife” area. It’s nothing but a few raggedy bars with a bunch of old, ugly ladies hollering at you when you walk by. Did I mention how old they are? It’s so bad that it’s almost laughable. For me though, that’s a good thing. There’s absolutely no temptation to go out and get involved with anything other than work and training.

And Speaking of my Training

Even though I injured my ankle, I’ve still been doing what I can. I obviously can’t kick so I’ve been doing some western boxing. The trainers have all been really good about working around my injury. However, today – for the first time in 2 weeks – I was able to throw a kick. I can only kick with my right leg (as my left foot is injured), but when you’re living on-site and you constantly see people kicking the pads – it’s just a frustrating reminder of what you can’t do! Needless to say, my workout today felt good.

However, one of my workouts last week didn’t feel so good. Not because I got hurt physically – although I do have quite the black eye – but rather, it’s the ego blow that hurt more than anything. I was paired off with the biggest guy at the camp for sparring. This guy is about 6’7 or so and weighs about 270lbs. It was just light sparring and nothing was taken overboard (luckily for me). I usually do well when sparring against people my own size but against this guy, I just couldn’t get by his reach. I basically ate jabs for 3 rounds. It certainly makes me appreciate fighters that are able to overcome their opponents reach advantage like Mike Zambidis and even Fedor Emelianenko in his last couple fights.

Speaking of professional fighters, Jon Fitch is here – but I’m sure I already mentioned that. Here’s a video of him doing his early morning padwork (I was most likely trying to sleep in the room to the right of the motorbike when this video was shot.)

As you can see from the video, the pad-holders here are incredible. I’ve worked with about 4 of them now and they’re all amazing. It certainly beats the group Muay Thai classes back at home where your pad-holders are your fellow students.

Anyway, now that I’ll be spending more time training and less time watching DVD’s now that my foot is getting better, hopefully I’ll have a lot more to write about.

Also, if you want to learn more about that internet marketing stuff that I’m trying (start of the entry), check out these two resources.

Fat Cat Blueprint
- To this day, the “fatcat” blueprint is considered to be the best guide on the Google Adsense program that was ever released. This is extremely detailed and it’s helped me out a lot. Highly recommended!

Warrior Forum
- This is the biggest internet marketing forum and it’s free. Any time you have a question about anything, just throw a post up in here and you’ll have an answer within minutes.

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The Pound for Pound Debate

So Fedor and Anderson Silva just ran through their opponents without even getting hit. Georges St. Pierre just racked up another impressive victory over Jon Fitch, who before facing St. Pierre, was riding a 15 fight win streak (8 straight UFC wins). Then there’s BJ “The Prodigy” Penn. Every time I watch BJ fight I’m impressed. Some of the things you see BJ Penn pull off in his fights leave you scratching your head in amazement.

So, right now we have 4 fighters that are seemingly untouchable within their divisions. I don’t see BJ Penn losing at lightweight, nor do I see GSP losing at welterweight. Anderson Silva has basically torn through the entire UFC middleweight division and Fedor, well, Fedor seems to be in a league of his own – he just doesn’t lose.

Every time any one of these fighters win (which is pretty much every time they fight), the forums explode with people convinced that fighter-X is the best pound for pound fighter. To be honest, I doubt that 80% of the people making the claims even know what “pound for pound” means.

The term “pound for pound” refers to a fighters strength and skill-set in relation to his size. If for example, BJ Penn (currently fighting at 155 lbs) is considered to be the worlds best “pound for pound” fighter, it does not mean that he can beat Fedor Emelianenko (who fights at approximately 230 lbs).

So who’s the best “pound for pound” fighter? Honestly, who cares? Fedor is the undefeated heavyweight. If you had to class only one man as the “baddest dude on the planet” – it’s Fedor. All four fighters (Fedor, Silva, GSP and Penn) possess nearly perfect skill sets. When the technical skills, cardiovascular conditioning and determination (heart) of two fighters is equal, the decisive factor is almost always size and strength.

But just for the sake of the argument, let’s analyze the fighters and determine who takes the “pound for pound” crown.

BJ Penn: BJ has looked incredible in this last 3 fights. It appears as if he’s really taking his training and conditioning seriously now and to quote Dana White, “an in-shape BJ Penn is a scary dude”. Unfortunately, we can immediately eliminate BJ from the pound-for-pound contention (at least for now) seeing as how Matt Hughes put him in a crucifix pounded his head repeatedly into the octagon canvas like he was violently dribbling a basketball. And of course, he lost to GSP. We’ll see how the re-match turns out now that Penn determined and back in shape.

Georges St. Pierre: Sherdog just posted a similar article profiling the pound-for-pound contenders and the author awarded GSP the crown. Not surprising. I mean, he’s the latest to fight. Like I said before, people seem to get pretty excited when these fighters win and everyone starts making the “Oh my god, (insert fighter name here) is the best ever!” claims.

I can’t completely knock the article though. I mean, the author did bring up some legit points. George St. Pierre has torn through some tough competition with ease. He’s lost twice, but he’s avenged both losses in convincing fashion, so technically, he’s beat everyone that he’s ever faced.

He’s extremely well rounded. He’s been out-wrestling the divisions top wrestlers and passing the guards of BJJ black belts like butter. His stand-up is crisp and on top of all that, he’s freakishly strong. He’s got it all. GSP is a perfect fighter.

Anderson Silva: Anderson’s stand-up skills are just scary. What’s most impressive to me is the way he switches in and out of his fight stances. For someone to be able to transition between a southpaw and conventional stance the way Anderson can – it’s just amazing. With a guy like Anderson, you’d figure the game-plan would be to get the fight to the ground as quickly as possible, but that’s not even much of an option – he’s got a BJJ black belt from the Nogueira brothers.

If there’s any weakness, it’s his wrestling. If a decent wrestler wanted to take him down (as we saw with Henderson), they wouldn’t have any problems taking the fight to the ground. By the same token, if Silva was being out-struck (which doesn’t exactly happen), he would likely have difficulties securing a takedown on anyone with decent takedown defence.

You really have to respect Silva’s decision to fight in both the 185 and the 205 division. The fact that he moved up in weight rather than down just shows what a warrior he is. Brandon Vera made the cocky claim that he would be the first UFC fighter to hold titles in two weight divisions at the same time and it doesn’t exactly look like that’s going to happen for him anytime soon. But for Silva on the other hand, it’s a definite possibility.

Fedor Emelianenko: When you’re at the top, you’re bound to have haters. Everyone is constantly criticizing Fedor’s level of competition. If you back-track and analyze his past fights, his opponents weren’t pushovers at all (for Fedor maybe, but not to the average MMA fighter).

When Fedor fought Lindland, Lindland was, at the time, the top ranked middleweight fighter in the world (sort of like how Anderson Silva is right now). People dismissed him as legit competition saying that he was 2 weight classes below Fedor (even though they were within 10lbs of each other when they fought). Fedor won and people claimed that it was because he grabbed the ropes (he did NOT grab the ropes!).

Before Lindland, Fedor fought Mark Hunt, who again, people dismissed as legit competition. I don’t understand how fighting someone who has almost a 100lb weight advantage and has victories over MMA’s elite in Mirko Cro Cop and Wanderlei Silva gets dismissed as a “can”. Fedor wins again – people still criticize.

After Lindland, Fedor fights Hong Man Choi who while inexperienced, is a threat to anyone. Choi is an accomplished K1 level kickboxer and although he only had 1 MMA fight prior to his fight with Fedor, that one fight that he had ended with a devastating first round knockout. Do I think that Choi deserved a shot at Fedor so early in his MMA career – absolutely not! But do I think that Choi is an easy win for most heavyweights out there – absolutely not.

In his latest fight, Fedor dispatched of multi-time UFC heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia in quick, devastating fashion. If you go through all of Fedor’s fights, you’ll see that Fedor is always just a little bit more technical, quicker and smarter than his opponents. It’s almost as if he’s on an entirely different level. His only loss, back in 2000, was due to a cut from what was actually an illegal strike. He later avenged that “loss”.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think Fedor has even lost a round in the last 8 and a half years. Not since his fight with Ricardo Arona in the Rings promotion. It should also be noted that in Rings, Fedor wasn’t allowed to implement his “ground and pound” techniques that he’s known for. If the rules had been different, who knows, perhaps Fedor never would have even lost a round to date.

So all things considered, who’s the best pound for pound fighter?

Everyone is going to have their own opinion on this. It’s not one of these questions that has a concrete answer. It’s all a matter of opinion. I’m writing this article so I’ll say that in my personal opinion, I think that Fedor Emelianenko is not only the best overall fighter in the world (weight not being a factor), but also, I think he’s the best “pound for pound” fighter as well.

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and state your case for who you believe is the best..