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MMA |OT3| When you lose you're a can, when you win you're unstoppable.
- Thread starter Heel
- Start date
There are bits of MGS 4 that you actually get to play it? All I remember are long cutscenes about war and nano machines.
Smh. Oh to be young again...its cool we will play MGS you enjoy minecraft (=
*edit* friends we are actively talking about games. Is this part 3 of 4 of 'the fall of mma gaf' prophecy?
polyh3dron
Banned
Probably Uncharted or GTA
^^^^ HOLY SHIT LOL it took me a few seconds to realize who that was! Imagine what he sounded like when he spoke back then lol
GSP needs to grow his hair back. Think about how angry the fighters would get getting completely dominated and laid on by a guy with that haircut.
He should grow his hair out now. Just for shits
Cism...wait, wat?
TheKaeptain
Banned
I wish I was that handsome.
Heh. I feel safer knowing i got an MMA nyugguh behind me. I havent been a 'regular' by any means but ive been in halo threads since 3.
*edit* you got my back right?
All UFC on FUEL TV 6 fighters to receive drug testing, no TUEs issued for event
lol who ya crappin? Giving notice that everyone will be tested? If they were serious about a crackdown they'd test randomly out of competition. You know, when guys are actually on something. Not that I mind, but this is clearly a charade to appear stringent.
lol who ya crappin? Giving notice that everyone will be tested? If they were serious about a crackdown they'd test randomly out of competition. You know, when guys are actually on something. Not that I mind, but this is clearly a charade to appear stringent.
Sure thing.
Just know that there's a fan of every feature that has ever been available in the Halo's in that thread. Loons reside.
TY..im in there. Period.
And independent Chinese drug lab probably.
polyh3dron
Banned
I got your back Gr1m, I'll be going hard with Halo 4.
A bunch of people here are GSP fans.
polyh3dron
Banned
You forgot Uncharted.
Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder.
dream
Member
When I first started with the UFC, at UFC 4, we didnt really have a good name for all of this. Some people called it NHB, for no holds barred, but I just called it fighting. But then Joe Silva reminded me of something I had said when I was broadcasting the UWFI events from Japan. They were like the UFC, but a work. My broadcast partner was Al Rosen, and he asked me what we would be seeing in the ring. I said all they were doing was mixing the martial arts. They were doing nothing illegal, everything was allowed under the rules of a martial arts discipline. That was even more true of the UFC. No one had ever combined the martial arts like this. I coined the phrase mixed martial arts and it stuck. I grabbed it, used it, and that was how we sold it. It wasnt NHB, which had a stigma. It was MMA.
Jeff Blatnick, in an interview for The MMA Encyclopedia
Whenever I hear the term, Mixed Martial Arts, in reference to the name of the sport, I will always think of Jeff Blatnick.
Blatnick passed away on 10/24 from heart failure, after complications from what was supposed to be a relatively minor heart operation, something where hed be in-and-out, at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, NY. He was 55.
The term Mixed Martial Arts in conjunction with the sport that now bears that name, was first used on May 15, 1998, in Mobile, AL, at the fighters meeting hours before UFC 17 started. Blatnick was just introduced as the new commissioner of the UFC. Blatnick told fighters that his goal was to improve the safety of the sport, prove to outsiders that it was a legitimate sport, work with athletic commissions to get events regulated and sanctioned. Blatnick said he also wanted to change the name of the sport from No Holds Barred to Mixed Martial Arts because he felt it was a better description, since there were moves and holds that were banned.
The UFC was in serious trouble at the time. In fact, it appeared at the time that it was most likely not going to survive. Virtually every cable system in the U.S. and Canada had banned airing the pay-per-views, which meant unless you had a satellite dish you couldn't see them. The next show was canceled, with them instead doing a show on the next scheduled PPV date featuring fights from the past and one fight taped on this show. The UFC ownership had always no sold problems, but on this show, they made several strong appeals to fans to call their cable companies, write letters, and complain about future shows being taken off.
Blatnick, due to his sports world credibility of overcoming cancer to win an Olympic gold medal, to almost anyone who had watched the 1984 Olympics, was considered a national sports hero. He was put in the spot because the idea was his credibility would help reopen all the doors that had closed on the company. He and current UFC matchmaker Joe Silva, along with referee John McCarthy, had worked together on the first UFC rule book, and on the original judging criteria. He was also the television announcer, a role he had since UFC IV in late 1994.
The show was over, and he came to me and said, "Don't refer to the sport as No Holds Barred anymore, it's mixed martial arts." NHB was the term all the reporters, which you could count probably on one hand at that time, used as the name of the sport, aside from some Brazilians who stuck to native terms like Vale Tudo or Luta Livre, or people from other countries who called it Cage Fighting, Freestyle Fighting or Hybrid Wrestling.
I had known the term mixed martial arts from Japanese pro wrestling matches in the 1970s, the most famous of which was were the 1976 matches with Antonio Inoki vs. Willem Ruska and Antonio Inoki vs. Muhammad Ali, and the 1986 classic with Akira Maeda vs. Don Nakaya Neilsen. Others have said that while Inoki popularized the term in 1976 in Japan, it had been used for both worked and shoot judo vs. karate matches after World War II involving Masahiko Kimura. A 1978 English language documentary on Inoki, purporting his matches to be real, and building up an Inoki vs. Andre the Giant match as the ultimate struggle, and showing Inokis matches against the fighters from other sports, used the term Mixed Martial Arts for Inokis matches instead of pro wrestling.
Blatnick's main role was, among other things, to get the sport regulated by the major athletic commissions as a prelude to getting it back on pay-per-view, which was the main revenue stream. Without it, the sport had no hope of surviving at any kind of professional level in this country.
He explained the difficulties with the key people in the cable television industry, who had started banning UFC between 1996 and 1998, taking what had been a flourishing pay-per-view product and putting it on the edge of extinction. No Holds Barred, he said, gave people a bad connotation of what it was, and felt it was a negative to the perception of the sport. Mixed Martial Arts, the idea of combining techniques from all the various martial arts
forms with that of wrestling, was really what the sport was, he would say. Blatnick had so much respect from everyone in what soon became the MMA business that it was a quick and painless transition.
Unfortunately for Blatnick, being UFC commissioner was like he was constantly hitting his head on a wall. No matter what he said, it was never good enough for the cable television industry. He could explain that it was safer than boxing and kickboxing due to the grappling involved, cite the lack of serious injuries, and it didn't matter.
It was one thing to send John McCarthy or Frank Shamrock to defend the sport to legislators, commissions and television executives. While McCarthy and Shamrock well spoken with their arguments, nobody from that generation knew who they were. Blatnick was a genuine national sports hero, who had been personally appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Presidents Counsel on Physical Fitness and Sports at a Rose Garden ceremony. If there was the ESPY awards back then, hed have won Most Inspirational Athlete in 1984 in a walk. No matter how powerful anyone was in the television industry, they would all talk to him since he was Jeff Blatnick. But nobody would listen.
A few months earlier, Blatnick and Frank Shamrock, who at the time was UFCs biggest star and draw were invited to a dinner to honor Leo Hindery, the President of TCI and UFCs most powerful political opponent with the exception of Arizona Senator and future presidential candidate John McCain.
Blatnick spoke to Hindery about what it would take to get UFC PPVs available. Hindery told him that he didnt consider UFC a sport, and that while he respected Blatnick, he told him that he was only a television announcer and had no power to make changes that would change UFC into something the cable industry would be okay with. It was that conversation that was the impetus in making him commissioner.
The usual answer he was given was to get the sport regulated in Nevada first, and then well talk.
It's funny looking back at this period. Marc Ratner, a current UFC Vice President, was the Executive Director of the Nevada commission at the time. Ratner was an opponent of the sport at first, and even was involved in a television debate, teaming with Arizona Senator John McCain against UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz and his top star, Ken Shamrock, on the Larry King show. But by 1999, Ratner had largely come around. Lorenzo Fertitta, the current UFC co-owner and CEO, was a voting member. Another voting member was Glenn Carano, a former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who spent his career as the back-up for the legendary Roger Staubach. He was dead set against it. At the time, he had a 16-year-old daughter at Trinity Christian High School who was a star basketball player, who a year later led her team to winning the Nevada state championship. A couple of years later, after going to college and gaining weight, his daughter went to her boyfriends Muay Thai gym, and after being called fat, decided to start attending classes to get in shape.
The next time I saw Glenn Carano was more than seven years later, at a hotel in San Jose, he was in a conversation with my wife, who had become friends with his daughter, who was by herself in a city she had never been. Gina Carano was fighting Elaina Maxwell the next day at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.
Blatnick's work did result in the sport getting regulated in New Jersey in 2000, where the current unified rules came into play. With a few modifications, such as banning knees to a downed opponent, that was not in the Blatnick-written rules, it was largely the same rule book Blatnick had put together a couple of years earlier. A few months after that, Lorenzo Fertitta and brother Frank, along with Dana White, purchased UFC from Semaphore Entertainment Group in early 2001 for $2 million. With Fertitta's connections, Nevada voted to regulate the sport later in 2001. It got back on pay-per-view everywhere later that year, even though the UFC was forced to sign a deal so one-sided that it was helping bleed them dry in the early years.
At about that time, the new owners decided to go in another direction with the announcing, and had their own direction. Blatnick was first part of the inner circle but shortly thereafter was no longer part of the promotion. At times he expressed some bitterness, but as time went on, he understood what they were doing, and Blatnick had solidified his own role in the sport. He sometimes announced smaller shows, worked as a referee, but mostly was one of the most respected judges, working shows all over the country for every major promotion. He also worked in training judges for the New Jersey Athletic Control Board. He had just gotten licensed in the state of Washington and was to be part of the judging team for the UFC show on 12/8 in Seattle on FOX.
He and I had many talks before shows about problems with judging, him saying the problem was too many unqualified judges, me saying it was both unqualified judges and a scoring system that needed minor modifications.
Few knew about Blatnicks heart in the early years. He became close friends with Joe Silva. Silva was working for Semaphore Entertainment Group at the time and not making much money. Blatnick in the past sent him money so he could buy groceries, and actually paid for Silvas first computer so he could go on the Internet.
Unlike many who were part of the original UFC, owned by Bob Meyrowitz and run by Campbell McLaren, faded away after being discarded in the evolution process of a world where people come and go, he stayed around, because he really believed in the sport. He continued being part of the fight to get it legalized, and worked on smaller and larger shows in a variety of capacities, whether it be as an announcer or a judge, and even a referee.
Blatnick was one of the major news stories coming out of the 1984 Olympics, but his start in wrestling was different than most.
He was born July 26, 1957, and grew up in Niskiyuna, a town in upstate New York, not far from Albany.
In the fall of 1972, Jeffrey Blatnick was a sophomore at Niskiyuna High School. Already almost 6-foot-2, he had played basketball during the previous winter as a freshman, and was planning on going out for the team again.
Jeff Blatnick was a 190-pound ninth grader who had played football, basketball and ran cross country, said then-Niskiyuna High School wrestling coach Joe Bena. He was a good athlete and we got him out for wrestling as a tenth grader. It turned out to be something he both liked and a had a lot of success with. You could see him starting to believe in himself.
I had no one in my room that weighed over 200 pounds, said Bena, now 74, an area coaching legend who started his career in 1966, is still coaching, and is believed to be the winningest high school sports coach in the history of New York state. I came up to this big kid and said, `I need someone who weighs above 200 pounds and you look like youre there. You could be our varsity heavyweight wrestler. And he looked at me and said, `I dont like wrestling.
I was persistent. I always joked with him later, `You did a nice job for a guy who didnt like wrestling.
In 1975, as a senior, Blatnick went undefeated, and won the New York state heavyweight championship.
He was the NCAA Division II heavyweight wrestling champion in 1978 and 1979 at Springfield College in Massachusetts,. He had placed second in 1977, the year his brother David died in a motorcycle accident.
He went to the Division I tournament three times. He placed sixth in 1978, losing 11-4 to eventual champion Jimmy Jackson of Oklahoma State, (who had a short run as a pro wrestler for Mid South Wrestling after college), the dominant heavyweight of the era. In 1979, he had gone undefeated against both Division I and Division II competition and was the rare example of a Division II athlete being ranked No. 1 in the nation in Division I going into nationals, and was the favorite going into the tournament. He scored two pins before meeting University of Oklahoma freshman Steve Dr. Death Williams in the quarterfinals, losing 6-5. He came back from that loss to just destroy four opponents in one-sided fashion, including a 12-0 win over Jack Campbell of Clarion, who had just eliminated Williams from the tournament in his previous match, to take third place overall.
He ended up being one of the three most famous sports figures to ever come out of Springfield College. Dr. James Naismith, a teacher at the school in 1891, invented the sport of basketball. John Cena, the 1998 football team captain, was a first-team All-American center.
While in college, he began specializing in Greco-Roman wrestling, a sport in which at that time, no American had ever won an Olympic medal in. The closest was four years earlier, when 220-pounder Brad Rheingans placed fourth.
In 1980, with Rheingans as a favorite to become the first American wrestler in history to medal in Greco-Roman wrestling, Blatnick, who at the time about 235 pounds, moved up from what would have been the weight class his size indicated, to become an undersized superheavyweight. He had a banner year, running through American competition and making the Olympic team. He had hopes of medaling after capturing the silver medal at that year's World Cup. But that was when President Jimmy Carter called for an Olympic boycott, since the games were in Moscow, Russia, and many countries pulled out over the fact Russia had invaded Afghanistan.
Rheingans left amateur wrestling after the boycott robbed him of his shot at a medal, and signed with Verne Gagne and become a wrestler in the AWA. Blatnick dropped to the 220 pound weight class, and won the national championship in Greco-Roman in 1982.
But shortly after nationals, in 1982, his career was seemingly over and his life was in jeopardy, as he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to remove his spleen and his appendix, and he underwent radiation therapy.
Somehow, he battled back, and went to nationals in 1983, at 220 pounds, but only placed third, behind Sgt. Greg Gibson and future pro wrestler Dennis Koslowski. With Gibson figured as the star of the team going at 220, he moved up to super heavyweight and won the Olympic trials over, among others, a 310-pounder cutting to 286 named Gary Albright.
Its no wonder he was so dead-set against the changes in recent years in Greco-Roman wrestling, with shorter time limits and rules and a scoring system that emphasized brute force over technical skill.
Going into the Olympics, he was not considered one of the stars on the American team. Most of the publicity in regard to wrestling going into the Olympics went to a pair of wrestling brother combinations who had dominated the college ranks over the previous few years. Twin brothers off the University of Iowa wrestling team, Ed and Lou Banach, had five NCAA titles between them. The Schultz Brothers, Mark and David, from Palo Alto, CA, and the University of Oklahoma, had six NCAA titles between them. David, who ended up more famous for his death, being murdered by wrestling sponsor John Du Pont as he was training for the 1996 Olympics (a major movie, Foxcatcher, is being filmed right now on that subject), was one of the countrys greatest wrestlers in history, considered the best all-around since Dan Gable. And even though all ended up winning gold medals, some in more dominant fashion, it was Blatnick who came out of the Olympics as the biggest star.
Blantick made it to the Greco-Roman finals, on August 2, 1984, where he was giving away at least 35 pounds to Thomas Johansson of Sweden. The match itself wasn't all that memorable. Blatnick was being pushed around for most of the first round, but defended well enough to keep the match scoreless. Eventually, with a little more than a minute to go in the final round, Johansson started tiring and Blatnick scored two takedowns to win the match, 2-0. The heat at the Anaheim Convention Center was off the charts, comparable to a Bruno Sammartino vs. Superstar Graham match in Madison Square Garden with deafening chants of USA in the final minute and an explosion and loud standing ovation when the buzzer sounded to end the match.
He, and 198-pounder Steven Fraser, a day earlier, had become the first two Americans to capture gold medals in a sport that our country a few years earlier was considered novices in.
He sunk to the mat and said a prayer, thanking God for giving him this moment and rushed to embrace his coach, Rheingans, at the time a pro wrestling star in the AWA. Moments later, when being interviewed, in what became an embedded memory to many of the tens of millions watching at the time, he said,Im happy dude, as he broke down and cried. Blatnick also said the medal should be broken up into different pieces because Rheingans and Dennis Koslowski, his training partners, both deserved a piece of it, before going on the medal stand.
Because of his story, he was one of the most covered athletes coming out of those Olympics, and the most popular among the athletes themselves. The U.S. team voted to have him carry the flag at the closing ceremonies. After the games, he was getting a lot of work as a motivational speaker, particularly speaking with victims of cancer, a community in which he became a hero.
He could have retired on top at that point. While the gold medal may have led most people to believe he was the best in the world, it didn't tell him that. Few would ever taint his story of overcoming cancer to putting the asterisk on his win by saying some of the best Greco-Roman wrestlers weren't there that day. But in his mind, he hadn't proven he was really the best. He would freely admit, long after he retired, without the subject being brought up, that he didn't believe he was really ever the best in the world, or one of Americas all-time greats in wrestling. When people on the Internet would knock his accomplishments decades later, saying there were better wrestlers both at the time and since who never got the recognition, only that he won a gold medal in an easy field, there was a sense of hurt. But he would also admit there was some truth to that point, that there were better wrestlers who never got the same amount of recognition. He would talk about names like Danny Hodge or Chris Taylor, who had never won Olympic gold medals, and never considered himself at the level of wrestler they were. With the exception of Kurt Angle, who gained his real fame as a pro wrestler, Gable, because hes Gable, and possibly Rulon Gardner, because of his win over the unbeatable Alexander Karelin in what is ranked as the biggest upset in the history of the Olympics, there probably wasnt a more famous American Olympic wrestler than Blatnick, even though people like John Smith, Bruce Baumgartner, Cael Sanderson, David Schultz and Kenny Monday, within wrestling circles were considered a level above him.
And he would also admit there were better Greco-Roman wrestlers in the world than the ones he beat on that day.
He would only claim he won the tournament over the people who were there at the Olympics on that given day. But he was training to prove that he was in 1988.
Unfortunately, the cancer returned, requiring him undergoing chemotherapy treatments throughout 1985 and 1986. He missed two seasons of competition, but he won the real battle, beating cancer a second time. And he came back to wrestling once again, although weakened. He still competed at the world class level in 1987. Still, that year he was destroyed in a match by a 19-year-old Russian with the strength of no mere mortal man named Alexander Karelin. He wasn't able to make the Olympic team in 1988, with his training partner, Duane Koslowski, winning the Olympic trials. Instead, he got his start at the Olympics as a broadcaster. Even healthy, it was more than a huge longshot he could have won given that was the beginning of the Karelin dynasty.
He also later survived an airplane crash.
In 1999, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He also served on the Board of Directors for USA Wrestling, and was an analyst for NBC for four different Olympics. He also worked with the American Cancer Society and the New York chapter of the Special Olympics.
After the Olympics, he became a fixture announcing wrestling at the Olympic games through the 90s. He also regularly broadcasted the NCAA tournament for ESPN, as well as other amateur wrestling events.
His entry into UFC came because he had done a stellar job announcing pro wrestling on PPV for UWFI in Japan. Blatnick was never a fan of pro wrestling, but he had respect for it as a business. He used the term mixing the martial arts on the broadcast. UWFI had used mixed martial arts as a term for some boxer vs. wrestler matches it had promoted, most notably Nobuhiko Takadas bout with former heavyweight boxing champion Trevor Berbick.
Blatnick did have the amateur wrestling mentality that it bastardized the sport he trained so hard in when I first met him, although he softened his stance, some say greatly, over the next few years. Over the years, we talked pro wrestling fairly often, but it was always about business, or about how people like Kurt Angle or Brock Lesnar were doing.
Jeff Blatnick, in an interview for The MMA Encyclopedia
Whenever I hear the term, Mixed Martial Arts, in reference to the name of the sport, I will always think of Jeff Blatnick.
Blatnick passed away on 10/24 from heart failure, after complications from what was supposed to be a relatively minor heart operation, something where hed be in-and-out, at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, NY. He was 55.
The term Mixed Martial Arts in conjunction with the sport that now bears that name, was first used on May 15, 1998, in Mobile, AL, at the fighters meeting hours before UFC 17 started. Blatnick was just introduced as the new commissioner of the UFC. Blatnick told fighters that his goal was to improve the safety of the sport, prove to outsiders that it was a legitimate sport, work with athletic commissions to get events regulated and sanctioned. Blatnick said he also wanted to change the name of the sport from No Holds Barred to Mixed Martial Arts because he felt it was a better description, since there were moves and holds that were banned.
The UFC was in serious trouble at the time. In fact, it appeared at the time that it was most likely not going to survive. Virtually every cable system in the U.S. and Canada had banned airing the pay-per-views, which meant unless you had a satellite dish you couldn't see them. The next show was canceled, with them instead doing a show on the next scheduled PPV date featuring fights from the past and one fight taped on this show. The UFC ownership had always no sold problems, but on this show, they made several strong appeals to fans to call their cable companies, write letters, and complain about future shows being taken off.
Blatnick, due to his sports world credibility of overcoming cancer to win an Olympic gold medal, to almost anyone who had watched the 1984 Olympics, was considered a national sports hero. He was put in the spot because the idea was his credibility would help reopen all the doors that had closed on the company. He and current UFC matchmaker Joe Silva, along with referee John McCarthy, had worked together on the first UFC rule book, and on the original judging criteria. He was also the television announcer, a role he had since UFC IV in late 1994.
The show was over, and he came to me and said, "Don't refer to the sport as No Holds Barred anymore, it's mixed martial arts." NHB was the term all the reporters, which you could count probably on one hand at that time, used as the name of the sport, aside from some Brazilians who stuck to native terms like Vale Tudo or Luta Livre, or people from other countries who called it Cage Fighting, Freestyle Fighting or Hybrid Wrestling.
I had known the term mixed martial arts from Japanese pro wrestling matches in the 1970s, the most famous of which was were the 1976 matches with Antonio Inoki vs. Willem Ruska and Antonio Inoki vs. Muhammad Ali, and the 1986 classic with Akira Maeda vs. Don Nakaya Neilsen. Others have said that while Inoki popularized the term in 1976 in Japan, it had been used for both worked and shoot judo vs. karate matches after World War II involving Masahiko Kimura. A 1978 English language documentary on Inoki, purporting his matches to be real, and building up an Inoki vs. Andre the Giant match as the ultimate struggle, and showing Inokis matches against the fighters from other sports, used the term Mixed Martial Arts for Inokis matches instead of pro wrestling.
Blatnick's main role was, among other things, to get the sport regulated by the major athletic commissions as a prelude to getting it back on pay-per-view, which was the main revenue stream. Without it, the sport had no hope of surviving at any kind of professional level in this country.
He explained the difficulties with the key people in the cable television industry, who had started banning UFC between 1996 and 1998, taking what had been a flourishing pay-per-view product and putting it on the edge of extinction. No Holds Barred, he said, gave people a bad connotation of what it was, and felt it was a negative to the perception of the sport. Mixed Martial Arts, the idea of combining techniques from all the various martial arts
forms with that of wrestling, was really what the sport was, he would say. Blatnick had so much respect from everyone in what soon became the MMA business that it was a quick and painless transition.
Unfortunately for Blatnick, being UFC commissioner was like he was constantly hitting his head on a wall. No matter what he said, it was never good enough for the cable television industry. He could explain that it was safer than boxing and kickboxing due to the grappling involved, cite the lack of serious injuries, and it didn't matter.
It was one thing to send John McCarthy or Frank Shamrock to defend the sport to legislators, commissions and television executives. While McCarthy and Shamrock well spoken with their arguments, nobody from that generation knew who they were. Blatnick was a genuine national sports hero, who had been personally appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Presidents Counsel on Physical Fitness and Sports at a Rose Garden ceremony. If there was the ESPY awards back then, hed have won Most Inspirational Athlete in 1984 in a walk. No matter how powerful anyone was in the television industry, they would all talk to him since he was Jeff Blatnick. But nobody would listen.
A few months earlier, Blatnick and Frank Shamrock, who at the time was UFCs biggest star and draw were invited to a dinner to honor Leo Hindery, the President of TCI and UFCs most powerful political opponent with the exception of Arizona Senator and future presidential candidate John McCain.
Blatnick spoke to Hindery about what it would take to get UFC PPVs available. Hindery told him that he didnt consider UFC a sport, and that while he respected Blatnick, he told him that he was only a television announcer and had no power to make changes that would change UFC into something the cable industry would be okay with. It was that conversation that was the impetus in making him commissioner.
The usual answer he was given was to get the sport regulated in Nevada first, and then well talk.
It's funny looking back at this period. Marc Ratner, a current UFC Vice President, was the Executive Director of the Nevada commission at the time. Ratner was an opponent of the sport at first, and even was involved in a television debate, teaming with Arizona Senator John McCain against UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz and his top star, Ken Shamrock, on the Larry King show. But by 1999, Ratner had largely come around. Lorenzo Fertitta, the current UFC co-owner and CEO, was a voting member. Another voting member was Glenn Carano, a former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who spent his career as the back-up for the legendary Roger Staubach. He was dead set against it. At the time, he had a 16-year-old daughter at Trinity Christian High School who was a star basketball player, who a year later led her team to winning the Nevada state championship. A couple of years later, after going to college and gaining weight, his daughter went to her boyfriends Muay Thai gym, and after being called fat, decided to start attending classes to get in shape.
The next time I saw Glenn Carano was more than seven years later, at a hotel in San Jose, he was in a conversation with my wife, who had become friends with his daughter, who was by herself in a city she had never been. Gina Carano was fighting Elaina Maxwell the next day at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.
Blatnick's work did result in the sport getting regulated in New Jersey in 2000, where the current unified rules came into play. With a few modifications, such as banning knees to a downed opponent, that was not in the Blatnick-written rules, it was largely the same rule book Blatnick had put together a couple of years earlier. A few months after that, Lorenzo Fertitta and brother Frank, along with Dana White, purchased UFC from Semaphore Entertainment Group in early 2001 for $2 million. With Fertitta's connections, Nevada voted to regulate the sport later in 2001. It got back on pay-per-view everywhere later that year, even though the UFC was forced to sign a deal so one-sided that it was helping bleed them dry in the early years.
At about that time, the new owners decided to go in another direction with the announcing, and had their own direction. Blatnick was first part of the inner circle but shortly thereafter was no longer part of the promotion. At times he expressed some bitterness, but as time went on, he understood what they were doing, and Blatnick had solidified his own role in the sport. He sometimes announced smaller shows, worked as a referee, but mostly was one of the most respected judges, working shows all over the country for every major promotion. He also worked in training judges for the New Jersey Athletic Control Board. He had just gotten licensed in the state of Washington and was to be part of the judging team for the UFC show on 12/8 in Seattle on FOX.
He and I had many talks before shows about problems with judging, him saying the problem was too many unqualified judges, me saying it was both unqualified judges and a scoring system that needed minor modifications.
Few knew about Blatnicks heart in the early years. He became close friends with Joe Silva. Silva was working for Semaphore Entertainment Group at the time and not making much money. Blatnick in the past sent him money so he could buy groceries, and actually paid for Silvas first computer so he could go on the Internet.
Unlike many who were part of the original UFC, owned by Bob Meyrowitz and run by Campbell McLaren, faded away after being discarded in the evolution process of a world where people come and go, he stayed around, because he really believed in the sport. He continued being part of the fight to get it legalized, and worked on smaller and larger shows in a variety of capacities, whether it be as an announcer or a judge, and even a referee.
Blatnick was one of the major news stories coming out of the 1984 Olympics, but his start in wrestling was different than most.
He was born July 26, 1957, and grew up in Niskiyuna, a town in upstate New York, not far from Albany.
In the fall of 1972, Jeffrey Blatnick was a sophomore at Niskiyuna High School. Already almost 6-foot-2, he had played basketball during the previous winter as a freshman, and was planning on going out for the team again.
Jeff Blatnick was a 190-pound ninth grader who had played football, basketball and ran cross country, said then-Niskiyuna High School wrestling coach Joe Bena. He was a good athlete and we got him out for wrestling as a tenth grader. It turned out to be something he both liked and a had a lot of success with. You could see him starting to believe in himself.
I had no one in my room that weighed over 200 pounds, said Bena, now 74, an area coaching legend who started his career in 1966, is still coaching, and is believed to be the winningest high school sports coach in the history of New York state. I came up to this big kid and said, `I need someone who weighs above 200 pounds and you look like youre there. You could be our varsity heavyweight wrestler. And he looked at me and said, `I dont like wrestling.
I was persistent. I always joked with him later, `You did a nice job for a guy who didnt like wrestling.
In 1975, as a senior, Blatnick went undefeated, and won the New York state heavyweight championship.
He was the NCAA Division II heavyweight wrestling champion in 1978 and 1979 at Springfield College in Massachusetts,. He had placed second in 1977, the year his brother David died in a motorcycle accident.
He went to the Division I tournament three times. He placed sixth in 1978, losing 11-4 to eventual champion Jimmy Jackson of Oklahoma State, (who had a short run as a pro wrestler for Mid South Wrestling after college), the dominant heavyweight of the era. In 1979, he had gone undefeated against both Division I and Division II competition and was the rare example of a Division II athlete being ranked No. 1 in the nation in Division I going into nationals, and was the favorite going into the tournament. He scored two pins before meeting University of Oklahoma freshman Steve Dr. Death Williams in the quarterfinals, losing 6-5. He came back from that loss to just destroy four opponents in one-sided fashion, including a 12-0 win over Jack Campbell of Clarion, who had just eliminated Williams from the tournament in his previous match, to take third place overall.
He ended up being one of the three most famous sports figures to ever come out of Springfield College. Dr. James Naismith, a teacher at the school in 1891, invented the sport of basketball. John Cena, the 1998 football team captain, was a first-team All-American center.
While in college, he began specializing in Greco-Roman wrestling, a sport in which at that time, no American had ever won an Olympic medal in. The closest was four years earlier, when 220-pounder Brad Rheingans placed fourth.
In 1980, with Rheingans as a favorite to become the first American wrestler in history to medal in Greco-Roman wrestling, Blatnick, who at the time about 235 pounds, moved up from what would have been the weight class his size indicated, to become an undersized superheavyweight. He had a banner year, running through American competition and making the Olympic team. He had hopes of medaling after capturing the silver medal at that year's World Cup. But that was when President Jimmy Carter called for an Olympic boycott, since the games were in Moscow, Russia, and many countries pulled out over the fact Russia had invaded Afghanistan.
Rheingans left amateur wrestling after the boycott robbed him of his shot at a medal, and signed with Verne Gagne and become a wrestler in the AWA. Blatnick dropped to the 220 pound weight class, and won the national championship in Greco-Roman in 1982.
But shortly after nationals, in 1982, his career was seemingly over and his life was in jeopardy, as he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to remove his spleen and his appendix, and he underwent radiation therapy.
Somehow, he battled back, and went to nationals in 1983, at 220 pounds, but only placed third, behind Sgt. Greg Gibson and future pro wrestler Dennis Koslowski. With Gibson figured as the star of the team going at 220, he moved up to super heavyweight and won the Olympic trials over, among others, a 310-pounder cutting to 286 named Gary Albright.
Its no wonder he was so dead-set against the changes in recent years in Greco-Roman wrestling, with shorter time limits and rules and a scoring system that emphasized brute force over technical skill.
Going into the Olympics, he was not considered one of the stars on the American team. Most of the publicity in regard to wrestling going into the Olympics went to a pair of wrestling brother combinations who had dominated the college ranks over the previous few years. Twin brothers off the University of Iowa wrestling team, Ed and Lou Banach, had five NCAA titles between them. The Schultz Brothers, Mark and David, from Palo Alto, CA, and the University of Oklahoma, had six NCAA titles between them. David, who ended up more famous for his death, being murdered by wrestling sponsor John Du Pont as he was training for the 1996 Olympics (a major movie, Foxcatcher, is being filmed right now on that subject), was one of the countrys greatest wrestlers in history, considered the best all-around since Dan Gable. And even though all ended up winning gold medals, some in more dominant fashion, it was Blatnick who came out of the Olympics as the biggest star.
Blantick made it to the Greco-Roman finals, on August 2, 1984, where he was giving away at least 35 pounds to Thomas Johansson of Sweden. The match itself wasn't all that memorable. Blatnick was being pushed around for most of the first round, but defended well enough to keep the match scoreless. Eventually, with a little more than a minute to go in the final round, Johansson started tiring and Blatnick scored two takedowns to win the match, 2-0. The heat at the Anaheim Convention Center was off the charts, comparable to a Bruno Sammartino vs. Superstar Graham match in Madison Square Garden with deafening chants of USA in the final minute and an explosion and loud standing ovation when the buzzer sounded to end the match.
He, and 198-pounder Steven Fraser, a day earlier, had become the first two Americans to capture gold medals in a sport that our country a few years earlier was considered novices in.
He sunk to the mat and said a prayer, thanking God for giving him this moment and rushed to embrace his coach, Rheingans, at the time a pro wrestling star in the AWA. Moments later, when being interviewed, in what became an embedded memory to many of the tens of millions watching at the time, he said,Im happy dude, as he broke down and cried. Blatnick also said the medal should be broken up into different pieces because Rheingans and Dennis Koslowski, his training partners, both deserved a piece of it, before going on the medal stand.
Because of his story, he was one of the most covered athletes coming out of those Olympics, and the most popular among the athletes themselves. The U.S. team voted to have him carry the flag at the closing ceremonies. After the games, he was getting a lot of work as a motivational speaker, particularly speaking with victims of cancer, a community in which he became a hero.
He could have retired on top at that point. While the gold medal may have led most people to believe he was the best in the world, it didn't tell him that. Few would ever taint his story of overcoming cancer to putting the asterisk on his win by saying some of the best Greco-Roman wrestlers weren't there that day. But in his mind, he hadn't proven he was really the best. He would freely admit, long after he retired, without the subject being brought up, that he didn't believe he was really ever the best in the world, or one of Americas all-time greats in wrestling. When people on the Internet would knock his accomplishments decades later, saying there were better wrestlers both at the time and since who never got the recognition, only that he won a gold medal in an easy field, there was a sense of hurt. But he would also admit there was some truth to that point, that there were better wrestlers who never got the same amount of recognition. He would talk about names like Danny Hodge or Chris Taylor, who had never won Olympic gold medals, and never considered himself at the level of wrestler they were. With the exception of Kurt Angle, who gained his real fame as a pro wrestler, Gable, because hes Gable, and possibly Rulon Gardner, because of his win over the unbeatable Alexander Karelin in what is ranked as the biggest upset in the history of the Olympics, there probably wasnt a more famous American Olympic wrestler than Blatnick, even though people like John Smith, Bruce Baumgartner, Cael Sanderson, David Schultz and Kenny Monday, within wrestling circles were considered a level above him.
And he would also admit there were better Greco-Roman wrestlers in the world than the ones he beat on that day.
He would only claim he won the tournament over the people who were there at the Olympics on that given day. But he was training to prove that he was in 1988.
Unfortunately, the cancer returned, requiring him undergoing chemotherapy treatments throughout 1985 and 1986. He missed two seasons of competition, but he won the real battle, beating cancer a second time. And he came back to wrestling once again, although weakened. He still competed at the world class level in 1987. Still, that year he was destroyed in a match by a 19-year-old Russian with the strength of no mere mortal man named Alexander Karelin. He wasn't able to make the Olympic team in 1988, with his training partner, Duane Koslowski, winning the Olympic trials. Instead, he got his start at the Olympics as a broadcaster. Even healthy, it was more than a huge longshot he could have won given that was the beginning of the Karelin dynasty.
He also later survived an airplane crash.
In 1999, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He also served on the Board of Directors for USA Wrestling, and was an analyst for NBC for four different Olympics. He also worked with the American Cancer Society and the New York chapter of the Special Olympics.
After the Olympics, he became a fixture announcing wrestling at the Olympic games through the 90s. He also regularly broadcasted the NCAA tournament for ESPN, as well as other amateur wrestling events.
His entry into UFC came because he had done a stellar job announcing pro wrestling on PPV for UWFI in Japan. Blatnick was never a fan of pro wrestling, but he had respect for it as a business. He used the term mixing the martial arts on the broadcast. UWFI had used mixed martial arts as a term for some boxer vs. wrestler matches it had promoted, most notably Nobuhiko Takadas bout with former heavyweight boxing champion Trevor Berbick.
Blatnick did have the amateur wrestling mentality that it bastardized the sport he trained so hard in when I first met him, although he softened his stance, some say greatly, over the next few years. Over the years, we talked pro wrestling fairly often, but it was always about business, or about how people like Kurt Angle or Brock Lesnar were doing.
dream
Member
With all the notoriety he got from winning the gold medal and his notoriety coming out of the 1984 Olympics, he could have easily gone into American pro wrestling, but said that was something he would never do, feeling it was selling out everything he had worked for.
He did say after seeing Japanese pro wrestling, because it was more sports oriented and also because it would be in Japan and not the U.S., that he would have been open to doing that.
On April 4, 1998, when Antonio Inoki had his retirement match against Don Frye at the Tokyo Dome, at the time the biggest money live pro wrestling event of all-time, New Japan and Inoki invited a number of celebrity guests. To show how impressed Inoki and the Japanese were with Blatnicks real-life story, he was one of only two men, the other being Muhammad Ali, invited that were not pro wrestlers, and Ali had the historical link with Inoki. He did have offers from Japan, but the scheduling never worked out.
In 2000, a consortium from New York that was looking to buy World Championship Wrestling, brought him on board to be a public face of the organization, but the deal never got to where negotiations were significant.
Blatnick was hired by UFC since they felt they needed someone who knew wrestling in the broadcast booth to be an analyst and also they wanted someone with the sports world credibility he brought with him. UFC was looking at having people credible in the sports world endorse their product, as the first few shows they featured Jim Brown, a sports icon from a prior generation as one of the greatest NFL running backs of all-time, in the broadcast booth. Plus, the idea of UFC intrigued him. A few years after he won his gold medal, people would always ask him who would win a fight between himself and Mike Tyson, and as most wrestlers of that era would think, he figured hed take a non-wrestler down instantly and with ease, and the boxer would be rendered helpless. Everyone but wrestlers in that era thought differently and hed get those, Whatever looks while hed explain, If I stood there toe-to-toe with him, Id get killed, but Id win every single clinch.
On the first show he broadcasted, it was a one-night tournament that came down to Dan Severn, then nearly 260 pounds, and a contemporary and teammate of Blatnick on the U.S. national team in the 80s, and 180-pound Royce Gracie. Severn took Gracie down at the start of the fight and kept him there for more than 15 straight minutes. Then Gracie clamped on a triangle and Severn tapped out. Blatnick became intrigued by it. In the days before UFC events he broadcasted, Blatnick would be rolling around on the mat, sometimes with the Gracies, often with Frank Shamrock, to learn what he didn't know.
Niskiyuna, where he grew up, immortalized him by naming a recreational facility filled with baseball fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, a driving range and a bicycle trail, as Jeff Blatnick Park. Niskiyuna Highs basketball court is known as the Jeff Blatnick Gym.
At the time of his death, Blatnick was the volunteer wrestling coach at Burnt Hills High School in Ballston Lake, NY, near his home in Clifton Park. His wife worked at the school as a bus driver and his two children, a son and a daughter, also attended the school. He made it clear he would not take any judging assignments on dates that conflicted with the high school teams wrestling schedule.
On 10/22, he appeared to be fine while attending a coaches meeting, and didnt speak of any impending surgery or health issues, because the procedure scheduled was considered minor.
Bena, who is still coaching, and was at the Anaheim Convention Center for Blatnicks gold medal win, had spoken with his most successful protege at the meeting that day.
Im going to miss that man. And it wont be real until I walk on that mat and theres no Jeff Blatnick over there.
Jeff came to me and asked if he could volunteer to help coach, said Burnt Hills High School Athletic Director Bob McGuire about their meeting back in 2006. What do you say to an Olympic champion who asks to help? You say, `Yes, welcome aboard, and let me get the door for you.
When youre talking about high school sports, youre always looking for that special individual who will be a role model for a lot of different children, McGuire said. And Jeff Blatnick was that person.
He never lived to see one of his goals, to see MMA, the sport he named, legalized in New York, and running in Madison Square Garden. He had worked for years, meeting with legislators in Albany, on that goal.
If someone would bring up battling cancer as a negative, he would respond by saying, If I didnt have cancer, nobody would know who I was. Not a lot of wrestlers make the news.
News of his death was like the worst body shot, knocking the air out of the MMA and amateur wrestling community.
We lost a giant today, said Gary Abbott of USA Wrestling. Not just because he was a heavyweight, because he was a great man. For many people that knew Jeff, even beyond the great work he put into wrestling, this is a sad day. We hope the world understands the massive contributions he made to society.
He was a good guy, said Dana White to ESPN radio in Las Vegas. When we first bought the company back at UFC 30, he was one of the commentators. He was one of the guys who helped Bob Meyrowitz (the original owner of UFC) really start putting some rules and regulations (in). A very good guy.
Its been 28 years since that match in Anaheim. Time marches on. Pretty much anyone under the age of 40 wouldnt have seen it or remembered it. And there have been plenty of Olympic heroes and great stories since that time. Many sports fans, certainly most younger ones, and even a lot of MMA fans today dont know who he is. Some may vaguely remember the name as some guy who won an Olympic gold medal way back when, with no knowledge of the context. Its no longer the 90s, when the name Jeff Blatnick would open doors to the executives of major companies who would recognize the name as an American sports hero. Its been more than a decade since hes called a UFC match, and the vast majority of current fans who pay close attention when hearing scores read and Bruce Buffer says, Judge Jeff Blatnick calls it 29-28, may have thought he was just some guy sitting at a desk.
Most of those who saw his Olympic win would probably still have clear memories of it, maybe not the match, but the final seconds, the reaction, the interview and the medal ceremony, as it was that powerful of a sports moment. Some older UFC fans remembered him as announcer, including one of the most memorable moments in UFC history. On his first night seeing the sport live, Gracie put away Severn with a triangle. Blatnick didn't think Gracie had anything as he locked on the move, that almost nobody in the crowd or watching on pay-per-view that night had ever seen before. When Severn tapped out, Brown, almost completely unprofessionally, yelled at Blatnick who seconds earlier had said how Severn was in no trouble, Dont you ever say nothing about wrestling.
There are a lot of things to remember Jeff Blatnick for. But every MMA fan, when they hear or read the term MMA, should in the back of their mind remember they owe him a debt of gratitude, because it was the name he gave the sport.
This hasnt been publicized, but the 11/10 show on Fuel is not going to do much in the way of numbers. The show is airing in prime time in China, which means it airs at 9 a.m. Eastern time on a Saturday morning and 6 a.m. Pacific time, which is where the highest concentration of the UFC audience lives. The Facebook fights start at 4 a.m. Pacific. Weigh-ins will be on 11/9 at 5 a.m. Eastern and then replayed at 7 p.m. Fuel will start TV coverage with the pre-game show at 8 a.m. They will also do coverage from 6 p.m. on and again repeating from midnight on. So for the West Coast, where UFC is the most popular, the three-hour TV broadcast will air at 6 a.m., 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. Immediately after the live show will be a one hour post-game show, followed by a one-hour documentary type show on UFC 148, covering the build up and the fight (Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen).
The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a story saying that the reason UFC no longer runs shows at The Pearl at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, and their smaller shows (both Strikeforce events and UFC events such as the Ultimate Fighter finals) were moved to the Hard Rock was because Joe Magliarditi, the Palms President, cut his credit line by 50% and he blew up. This all happened several months ago although the version of the story I heard at the time was very different. I was told that the Maloofs, who used to own The Palms, before they lost it when the hotel was losing tons of money during the recession that killed a lot of Las Vegas hotel owners, had a sweetheart deal with UFC for running there. I dont know all the details but it included the hotel agreeing to buy a certain number of tickets to the shows with the idea having the show there would get fans and bring attention to the property. Very few people actually purchased tickets for those shows. Magliardti saw that deal, supposedly ran the numbers and felt it wasnt worth it and wanted to restructure it. UFC was still welcome, but it would be treated the same as anyone else who wanted to run at the Pearl. UFC then took its business back to The Hard Rock, where they had been running those type of shows before moving to The Palms when the Maloofs cut their deal. The last time they ran was 6/1 for the TUF finals. The story in the newspaper talked about how when White was on a hot streak, he was a ridiculous tipper, noting that at one point over a two-month period he tipped dealers, waiters and waitresses at the hotel more than $100,000. He regularly ate at N9NE Steakhouse, taking out guests and having $15,000 to $20,000 tabs and paying $10,000 in tips, and he would do this multiple times per week. There have been stories of people who have been out with White when hes gambling and he could be up or down several hundred thousand in one night. Also, from friends in Las Vegas, when White shows up anywhere in Las Vegas, the valets fight over who gets to park his car because hes known all over the city for being a monster tipper.
Right now, the company is planning on doing 31 live events next year. A lot of them are going to be international with 5-7 in Brazil. The idea for a lot of the international shows is to feature fighters from the region almost exclusively on the undercards with maybe two matches feature out of market bigger stars. The shows will be airing for the most part in prime time in that market, which means Europe, Japan, Brazil and Australian shows that are non-PPV events (or FX events) wont be airing in weird time slots locally like those earning morning Japan and Australia events.
He did say after seeing Japanese pro wrestling, because it was more sports oriented and also because it would be in Japan and not the U.S., that he would have been open to doing that.
On April 4, 1998, when Antonio Inoki had his retirement match against Don Frye at the Tokyo Dome, at the time the biggest money live pro wrestling event of all-time, New Japan and Inoki invited a number of celebrity guests. To show how impressed Inoki and the Japanese were with Blatnicks real-life story, he was one of only two men, the other being Muhammad Ali, invited that were not pro wrestlers, and Ali had the historical link with Inoki. He did have offers from Japan, but the scheduling never worked out.
In 2000, a consortium from New York that was looking to buy World Championship Wrestling, brought him on board to be a public face of the organization, but the deal never got to where negotiations were significant.
Blatnick was hired by UFC since they felt they needed someone who knew wrestling in the broadcast booth to be an analyst and also they wanted someone with the sports world credibility he brought with him. UFC was looking at having people credible in the sports world endorse their product, as the first few shows they featured Jim Brown, a sports icon from a prior generation as one of the greatest NFL running backs of all-time, in the broadcast booth. Plus, the idea of UFC intrigued him. A few years after he won his gold medal, people would always ask him who would win a fight between himself and Mike Tyson, and as most wrestlers of that era would think, he figured hed take a non-wrestler down instantly and with ease, and the boxer would be rendered helpless. Everyone but wrestlers in that era thought differently and hed get those, Whatever looks while hed explain, If I stood there toe-to-toe with him, Id get killed, but Id win every single clinch.
On the first show he broadcasted, it was a one-night tournament that came down to Dan Severn, then nearly 260 pounds, and a contemporary and teammate of Blatnick on the U.S. national team in the 80s, and 180-pound Royce Gracie. Severn took Gracie down at the start of the fight and kept him there for more than 15 straight minutes. Then Gracie clamped on a triangle and Severn tapped out. Blatnick became intrigued by it. In the days before UFC events he broadcasted, Blatnick would be rolling around on the mat, sometimes with the Gracies, often with Frank Shamrock, to learn what he didn't know.
Niskiyuna, where he grew up, immortalized him by naming a recreational facility filled with baseball fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, a driving range and a bicycle trail, as Jeff Blatnick Park. Niskiyuna Highs basketball court is known as the Jeff Blatnick Gym.
At the time of his death, Blatnick was the volunteer wrestling coach at Burnt Hills High School in Ballston Lake, NY, near his home in Clifton Park. His wife worked at the school as a bus driver and his two children, a son and a daughter, also attended the school. He made it clear he would not take any judging assignments on dates that conflicted with the high school teams wrestling schedule.
On 10/22, he appeared to be fine while attending a coaches meeting, and didnt speak of any impending surgery or health issues, because the procedure scheduled was considered minor.
Bena, who is still coaching, and was at the Anaheim Convention Center for Blatnicks gold medal win, had spoken with his most successful protege at the meeting that day.
Im going to miss that man. And it wont be real until I walk on that mat and theres no Jeff Blatnick over there.
Jeff came to me and asked if he could volunteer to help coach, said Burnt Hills High School Athletic Director Bob McGuire about their meeting back in 2006. What do you say to an Olympic champion who asks to help? You say, `Yes, welcome aboard, and let me get the door for you.
When youre talking about high school sports, youre always looking for that special individual who will be a role model for a lot of different children, McGuire said. And Jeff Blatnick was that person.
He never lived to see one of his goals, to see MMA, the sport he named, legalized in New York, and running in Madison Square Garden. He had worked for years, meeting with legislators in Albany, on that goal.
If someone would bring up battling cancer as a negative, he would respond by saying, If I didnt have cancer, nobody would know who I was. Not a lot of wrestlers make the news.
News of his death was like the worst body shot, knocking the air out of the MMA and amateur wrestling community.
We lost a giant today, said Gary Abbott of USA Wrestling. Not just because he was a heavyweight, because he was a great man. For many people that knew Jeff, even beyond the great work he put into wrestling, this is a sad day. We hope the world understands the massive contributions he made to society.
He was a good guy, said Dana White to ESPN radio in Las Vegas. When we first bought the company back at UFC 30, he was one of the commentators. He was one of the guys who helped Bob Meyrowitz (the original owner of UFC) really start putting some rules and regulations (in). A very good guy.
Its been 28 years since that match in Anaheim. Time marches on. Pretty much anyone under the age of 40 wouldnt have seen it or remembered it. And there have been plenty of Olympic heroes and great stories since that time. Many sports fans, certainly most younger ones, and even a lot of MMA fans today dont know who he is. Some may vaguely remember the name as some guy who won an Olympic gold medal way back when, with no knowledge of the context. Its no longer the 90s, when the name Jeff Blatnick would open doors to the executives of major companies who would recognize the name as an American sports hero. Its been more than a decade since hes called a UFC match, and the vast majority of current fans who pay close attention when hearing scores read and Bruce Buffer says, Judge Jeff Blatnick calls it 29-28, may have thought he was just some guy sitting at a desk.
Most of those who saw his Olympic win would probably still have clear memories of it, maybe not the match, but the final seconds, the reaction, the interview and the medal ceremony, as it was that powerful of a sports moment. Some older UFC fans remembered him as announcer, including one of the most memorable moments in UFC history. On his first night seeing the sport live, Gracie put away Severn with a triangle. Blatnick didn't think Gracie had anything as he locked on the move, that almost nobody in the crowd or watching on pay-per-view that night had ever seen before. When Severn tapped out, Brown, almost completely unprofessionally, yelled at Blatnick who seconds earlier had said how Severn was in no trouble, Dont you ever say nothing about wrestling.
There are a lot of things to remember Jeff Blatnick for. But every MMA fan, when they hear or read the term MMA, should in the back of their mind remember they owe him a debt of gratitude, because it was the name he gave the sport.
This hasnt been publicized, but the 11/10 show on Fuel is not going to do much in the way of numbers. The show is airing in prime time in China, which means it airs at 9 a.m. Eastern time on a Saturday morning and 6 a.m. Pacific time, which is where the highest concentration of the UFC audience lives. The Facebook fights start at 4 a.m. Pacific. Weigh-ins will be on 11/9 at 5 a.m. Eastern and then replayed at 7 p.m. Fuel will start TV coverage with the pre-game show at 8 a.m. They will also do coverage from 6 p.m. on and again repeating from midnight on. So for the West Coast, where UFC is the most popular, the three-hour TV broadcast will air at 6 a.m., 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. Immediately after the live show will be a one hour post-game show, followed by a one-hour documentary type show on UFC 148, covering the build up and the fight (Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen).
The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a story saying that the reason UFC no longer runs shows at The Pearl at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, and their smaller shows (both Strikeforce events and UFC events such as the Ultimate Fighter finals) were moved to the Hard Rock was because Joe Magliarditi, the Palms President, cut his credit line by 50% and he blew up. This all happened several months ago although the version of the story I heard at the time was very different. I was told that the Maloofs, who used to own The Palms, before they lost it when the hotel was losing tons of money during the recession that killed a lot of Las Vegas hotel owners, had a sweetheart deal with UFC for running there. I dont know all the details but it included the hotel agreeing to buy a certain number of tickets to the shows with the idea having the show there would get fans and bring attention to the property. Very few people actually purchased tickets for those shows. Magliardti saw that deal, supposedly ran the numbers and felt it wasnt worth it and wanted to restructure it. UFC was still welcome, but it would be treated the same as anyone else who wanted to run at the Pearl. UFC then took its business back to The Hard Rock, where they had been running those type of shows before moving to The Palms when the Maloofs cut their deal. The last time they ran was 6/1 for the TUF finals. The story in the newspaper talked about how when White was on a hot streak, he was a ridiculous tipper, noting that at one point over a two-month period he tipped dealers, waiters and waitresses at the hotel more than $100,000. He regularly ate at N9NE Steakhouse, taking out guests and having $15,000 to $20,000 tabs and paying $10,000 in tips, and he would do this multiple times per week. There have been stories of people who have been out with White when hes gambling and he could be up or down several hundred thousand in one night. Also, from friends in Las Vegas, when White shows up anywhere in Las Vegas, the valets fight over who gets to park his car because hes known all over the city for being a monster tipper.
Right now, the company is planning on doing 31 live events next year. A lot of them are going to be international with 5-7 in Brazil. The idea for a lot of the international shows is to feature fighters from the region almost exclusively on the undercards with maybe two matches feature out of market bigger stars. The shows will be airing for the most part in prime time in that market, which means Europe, Japan, Brazil and Australian shows that are non-PPV events (or FX events) wont be airing in weird time slots locally like those earning morning Japan and Australia events.
polyh3dron
Banned
ugh come on meltzer, must you apply pro wrestling lingo to fucking everything
AWW yea! Oh god i can only imagine mma halo gaf...
dream
Member
I agree. You should join Heel and dream in Happy Street.
TheKaeptain
Banned
If I had a 360 I would buy Halo 4.
and dammit guys she has a boyfriends. Oh fuck you world.
and dammit guys she has a boyfriends. Oh fuck you world.
We tried with diablo 3..well I tried but failed cause my pc is dying. Yaco, foda and a few others played together.
Ninja Scooter
Member
Apparently there is some channel called "MAV TV" and they show King of the Cage reruns. Surprise Bad MMA is the best kind of Bad MMA.
polyh3dron
Banned
TheKaeptain
Banned
HA!
So tomorrow I get to register for next semester at 6 a.m. in the morning. Because I am a Vet I get super early registration. If everything works out I will only have class on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Good night MMA-gaf.
So tomorrow I get to register for next semester at 6 a.m. in the morning. Because I am a Vet I get super early registration. If everything works out I will only have class on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Good night MMA-gaf.
ItAintEasyBeinCheesy
it's 4th of July in my asshole
Ehhh Parodies usually aren't very..... hard.
Anyway, I'm there for a good time, not a long time
GSP, Putin's bastard.
Anyway, I'm there for a good time, not a long time
GSP, Putin's bastard.
TheKaeptain
Banned
Alright. Woke up early to register for next semester.
GungHo
Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
Nico should have just gone to see American titties with his cousin.
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