At Cage Warriors 74, at the Copper Box Arena in London’s Olympic Village, two Ulsterman crossed the Irish Sea to fight in Cage Warriors, Europe’s leading MMA promotion. Onlookers were at first mystified as to why tough featherweight Steve McCombe verbally submitted to Nathaniel Wood.
A replay revealed the gruesome cause – Wood’s tibia proved to be stronger than McCombe’s radius and ulna combined, an unfortunate fact of fighting.
HOLY F@$%ING $#!* = The Heart of MMA
Lorenzo Fertitta, then the co-owner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), was once asked by The Atlantic magazine to explain what makes mixed martial arts so compelling. He said it came down to three words, two of which aren’t fit for publishing.
“… there’s the holy s*** factor. Actually, they said ‘the holy f***ing s*** factor.’ It happens at every fight, explained Fertitta. At least one or two times in every UFC show, whether you say it out loud or you say it to yourself, you go, ‘holy s*** did that just happen?’ I mean, you might see somebody do a flip, get kicked in the head, get knocked out with a punch. At some point, you’re going ‘whoah, did that just happen? Did I really just see that?’ That’s the nucleus of what our product is.
MixedMartialArts.com scours the sport to find those HOLY F@$%ING S#!* moments from across the globe, and bring them to you, like this one:
Content re-published with permission from the copyright holder.
***CHECK OUT ALL THE HOLY F@$%ING $#!* STORIES***
About The UnderGround at MixedMartialArts.com
The UnderGround was launched in August of 1998, when mixed martial arts was so new it didn’t have a name, by Kirik Jenness, David Roy, and Gabriel Smallman. In the beginning, it was primarily a vehicle to market The Fighter’s Notebook, the first book on MMA, authored by Jenness and Roy. A message board was added as an afterthought, but it quickly became the centerpiece of the site.
The UG became a place for fighters, coaches, fans, all of us, to virtually hang out, and the site grew and grew into an online community. Ultimate Athlete magazine named it the 8th most important thing in the history of MMA, saying, if not for The Underground … the sport might have died, as PPV buys had sunk to such abysmal levels.
The URL changed from SubmissionFighting.com, to MixedMartialArts.com, to MMA.tv, and finally back to MixedMartialArts.com. The site expanded in a number of directions. It offered for a time the second-largest instructional DVD effort, with titles by Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, among dozens of others. A full line of UnderGround fight gear thrived for years. In 2008, it was selected by the Association of Boxing (and Combative Sports) Commissions as the official records and suspension keeper for the sport, a role that continues to this day, and has expanded into administering the rankings for the UFC, Bellator MMA, and BKFC.
Eventually, the social network arose, an easier way for fighters to connect with fans. Luckily, we know jiu-jitsu – how a smaller entity can use leverage to survive against a larger adversary. We built up a robust social network, over 5,000,000 followers in all, so site traffic remains robust. That’s likely how you found this.
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About Cage Warriors Fighting Championship
Cage Warriors is Europe’s longest-running MMA promotion, having staged over 150 events in 14 countries since its founding in 2002. It’s home to some to some of the biggest stars of MMA’s past, presentm and future. Further, in addition to promoting and staging events throughout the year, Cage Warriors is also investing in the future of mixed martial arts through its Cage Warriors Academy.
