Page 57 - Top MMA News and Mixed Martial Arts Headlines

After 13 years and 21 fights in mixed martial arts, 35 year-old Javier Vasquez is hanging up the gloves for good. "Showtime" has no time for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).Former World Extreme Cagefighting(WEC) featherweight standout Javier Vazquez announced his retirement this week after compiling a 16-5 record in the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), including just one win in his lone appearance inside the Octagon, a unanimous decision victory over Joe Stevenson back in June 2011. Vazquez, who still has fights remaining on his ZUFFA contract, explains his decision to sherdog.com

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"I saw this douchebag at the elevator. I squeezed his hand and he's got the smallest hands I've ever seen in my life. I squeezed his hand and I'm sure he was in pain a little bit after that, he started talking about me, you know? About how short I am. But one thing you can be 100 percent sure about, is he has the smallest hands ever, like a little girls hands. But, I squeezed it and I think that's one of the reasons he is upset at me." - Hector Lombard

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Former UFC heavyweight champion and King of Pancrase Bas Rutten on Monday was awake in the hospital and recovering from neck surgery.

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K.J. Noons and Ryan Couture put up an entertaining fight on the preliminary card of Strikeforce's final show, and while Couture came away with the win, Noons will not be shut out of the UFC.

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Tarec Saffiedine: $39,000 (includes $19,500 win bonus) Nate Marquardt: $40,000 Daniel Cormier: $120,000 (includes $60,000 win bonus) Dion Staring: $8,000 Josh Barnett: $250,000 (no win bonus) Nandor Guelmino: $12,000 Gegard Mousasi: $175,000 (no win bonus) Mike Kyle: $25,000 Ronaldo Souza: $100,500 (includes $28,000 win bonus) Ed Herman: $34,000 Ryan Couture: $22,000 (includes $7,000 win bonus) KJ Noons: $41,000 Tim Kennedy: $80,000 (includes $25,000 win bonus) Trevor Smith: $8,000 Pat Healy: $42,000 (includes $15,000 win bonus) Kurt Holobaugh: $9,000 Roger Gracie: $94,000 (includes $47,000 win bonus) Anthony Smith: $10,000 Adriano Martins: $16,000 (includes $8,000 win bonus) Jorge Gurgel: $10,000 Estevan Payan: $12,000 (includes $6,000 win bonus) Michael Bravo: $6,000

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Strikeforce “Marquardt vs. Saffiedine” Medical Suspensions: Dion Staring: Suspended 30 days for precautionary reasons following TKO defeat Ed Herman: Suspended indefinitely; must provide commission with medical clearance on right shoulder, hand and elbow Kurt Holobaugh: Suspended indefinitely; must provide commission with medical clearance on right hand Anthony Smith: Suspended 30 days for cuts over left eye Mike Bravo: Suspended 30 days for precautionary reasons following TKO defeat

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It was a scary injury. Bellator featherweight champion Pat Curran was winding down his training camp for a title defense against Patricio Freire in August, and he caught a punch that put him on the sidelines for weeks with a fractured orbital. “I guess I was sparring with a guy a little bit too big,” Curran told the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “He was a boxer. I was just boxing down in Chicago. I don’t know, it was just a freak accident. I was sparring with him pretty much the whole camp leading up to the fight. It was my second to last sparring session and he just clipped me with a right hook, and it fractured it.” If a fractured orbital sounds painful, that’s because it is. “It was pretty painful,” Curran said. “It was my first time ever fracturing my orbital. When it happened, I really didn’t know what was going on. I was instantly blind. My nose started bleeding on the same side and I pretty much lost vision for about 30 minutes. It was hard for me to see out of that eye for a while, but in time, it healed.” The injury didn’t require surgery. Instead, Curran went eight weeks without sparring and then switched to thicker headgear before jumping back in the ring to prepare for his defense against Freire, which takes place Thursday at Bellator Fighting Championships 85

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Ben Henderson may make his next UFC lightweight title defense against Strikeforce lightweight champ Gilbert Melendez on April 20 on UFC on Fox 7.

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Do you love standup-only fights? If so, the main event on FX this Saturday night is must-see TV. Vitor Belfort versus Michael Bisping pits two of the UFC’s best 185-pound strikers (not named Anderson Silva) against each other in a championship eliminator, of sorts.

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Former UFC Heavyweight champion Frank Mir discussed the UFC 155 rematch between Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos. He praised both fighters but had some very particular criticism for the ground game of Junior dos Santos.

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Strikeforce Light Heavyweight Gegard Mousasi thinks the time is right for his imminent UFC debut and he hopes to face a top contender like Alexander Gustafsson, Shogun Rua or Lyoto Machida.

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The fight card for the UFC's second FOX show in Chicago, Ill. continues to fill out. NCAA Diviion II All-American Josh Janousek will make his Octagon debut against Michael Kuiper at the network television event. MMA Fighting's Ariel Helwani has confirmed that news with sources close to the signing. A junior college national champion in wrestling, Janousek eventually moved on to the Minnesota State University, Mankota for his junior and senior years in 2004 and 2005 where he earned All-American honors. Janousek, 32, is 8-1 in professional mixed martial arts and has moonlighted as a coach for various other fighters. Most notably, he helped Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira prepare for Brendan Schaub prior to UFC 134. He also prepped Junior dos Santos prior to his first meeting with Cain Velasquez at the first UFC on FOX.

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Nate Marquardt's anticipated return to the UFC was thrown into major doubt after he was hammered by Tarec Saffiedine in Saturday's final Strikeforce event, on a night when Daniel Cormier sent a message to Jon Jones.

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The final Strikeforce event in history took place in Oklahoma City on Saturday night. As most oddsmakers and fans expected, the main card chugged along with a series of four fast finishes by the bout favorites. Yet MMA relies on the unexpected, and the main event delivered as a 170-pound Strikeforce Challengers graduate used strategy and precision to neutralize the strength of a former UFC middleweight contender, wresting away the welterweight title.

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Strikeforce LHW Mike Kyle has announced his retirement following a first-round submission loss to Gegard Mousasi in the organization's final card.

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Oklahoma City's Chesapeake Energy Arena played host to the Strikeforce promotion's swan song, an event rich with MMA bold names, as evidenced by a pedigreed undercard boasting names such as Gracie, Kennedy and Couture. Over the course of six fights, fans saw finishes, grinding wins, adrenaline-inducing wars -- in other words, the best of MMA.

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UFC lightweight champion, Benson "Smooth" Henderson, was one of the WEC's top lightweights before getting placed into the UFC. He proved the WEC doubters wrong, as he became the UFC lightweight champion and has since defended it twice. With that, he has now signed an eight fight deal with the UFC, likely for a pretty good amount of money. Ben Henderson, the reigning Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight champion, is coming off a terrific win over Nate Diaz at UFC on Fox 5 in Dec. 2012, defending his 155-pound title for the second time in a row. "Smooth" has made it to the highest point in the mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion's most talent-laden division, and now it looks like he'll be getting the pay that comes with it, inking a brand new eight fight deal with the UFC.

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Junior Dos Santos has attempted to explain his lop-sided UFC heavyweight title defeat to Cain Velasquez, claiming he had personal problems leading into the fight and he peaked too early in his training.

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There was a time when Michael Bisping - who fights Vitor Belfort on January 19th in the main event of UFC on FX 7 in Sao Paulo, Brazil - didn’t know what to do with his life. He’d dropped out of an electrical engineering course and worked a series of blue-collar jobs. But when he committed to MMA in 2003, the working-class kid from Manchester, England found some much needed direction. In 2006 he reflected on his humble beginnings, saying, “You always think you’re going to be great and you’re going to do things, but then I got in my early 20s and I was quite disappointed. And if I was being realistic, my life was going nowhere really. And it was going nowhere fast and I wasn’t getting any younger.”

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LAS VEGAS – MMAjunkie.com was on scene and reporting live from tonight's 2012 World MMA Awards red-carpet, black-tie ceremony. Tonight's industry-wide festivities took place at The Joint at Las Vegas' Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The ceremony, which was a black-tie affair with red-carper arrivals, was co-hosted by UFC fighter Chael Sonnen and sports reporter Molly Qerim. The event also included performances by the rock group Otherwise, as well as the acro-cabaret variety show Absinthe. Although the event did not air or stream live, FOX Sports Net will broadcast the show nationally via tape delay on Jan. 20.

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