This has always been one of the more difficult cases, because not only is he trying to fend off incoming knees, but he's also being cradled and moved around, so he's also looking to post and get his balance. At most, you could say that he was thinking about tapping and made the motion once before deciding to fight through it, but you could just as easily say that it was just his hand flopping to the mat because no knee was incoming at that moment. Tough one to call.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it Mezger, in his first UFC fight, who had a gentlemans agreement with his opponent, that there would be no hair pulling? If I remember right, Mezger and his opponent both had real long hair. They made a pact, that neither would pull hair in their fight.
Yep, and if you've ever seen what James Warring did to Erik Paulson, you can understand why.
I loved the early years of MMA. It's pretty cool, to be old enough to have seen the evolution of MMA in real time. Mezger was a Lions Den legend!
Early MMA is my favorite. I'll take the first 15 years over the last 15 years every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And yes, Mezger is one of the old school greats.
There sure was. He was one of my favorite fighters and Shamrocks star pupil which I believe harmed his career and benefited ken more than anything.
It harmed his career to train with the best fighter in the world at the time, in the best camp alongside a number of the top fighters at the time, and get booked in Pancrase - where he'd become a champ - the UFC - where he'd become a champ - and PRIDE, notching great wins and fighting epic battles in three of the biggest promotions in MMA history? Yeah, what an unfortunate set of circumstances...
He was the guy to give all the big stars really good fights like Chuck, Tito and even wanderlei who headbutted him wen he had him against the ropes. japanese loved some axe murdering so of course they let is slide.
It's true, outside of that first Tito fight, the ball never bounced his way. Any close or missed calls always went in favor of his opponent.
Ken made him quit in the Sakuraba fight. Guy had to deal with a lot of bullshit in his career.
Mezger then got screwed in Pride pretty good vs Sakuraba.
The "bullshit" that Guy had to deal with against Sakuraba was, as
JKS pointed out, PRIDE's fault, not Ken's. Guy was injured and took that fight on short-notice specifically on condition, as negotiated and agreed upon beforehand, that the fight would be one round and then a decision would be rendered. But when the round ended and Guy had the advantage for a decision, they said fuck you and your deal, he either fights another round or he loses. That was PRIDE fuckery for their hometown hero and Ken told them, rightfully so, to fuck off. Considering PRIDE's occasional fuckery with decisions, it's always been weird to me that they didn't just render a verdict and award Sakuraba the fight. But had Sakuraba not gone on in the tournament, we wouldn't have gotten that epic 90-minute Royce fight, nor would we have gotten to see Sakuraba hold his own against a HW Igor Vovchanchyn.
Why does Metzger only have 1 glove?
Because Mezger broke his hand earlier in the tournament, and after likely getting the glove cut off, he didn't want to deal with the pain of having to put a new one on.
Been seeing a lot of mezger posts here lately. He actually was pretty good! Supposedly got robbed against arona. Beat Tito once. Champion in pacrase and a ufc tournament winner. I need to check out some of his fights.
Mezger's career is definitely worth going through, because win or lose his fights were always great tactical battles.
RIP Blatnik. Dude was a great commentator.
Those days were amazing. Such a different feel. Such a different atmosphere.
Nostalgia new year.
To this day, my favorite UFC commentating team is Bruce Beck and Jeff Blatnick with either Jim Brown or a guest fighter on the third mic. Beck and Blatnick were the best. Beck was a super professional with a great, classic radio voice and Blatnick was an Olympic athlete with experience calling fights from his time calling wrestling for NBC, plus he genuinely loved the sport, would roll with the fighters to learn more about BJJ and catch wrestling. Good times.
BJM in his prime was an incredible muppet. A caricature of an aggressively stupid man.
The guy literally used to use stoppages as an opportunity to land random cheap shots on fighters.
If you were creating a ficitional power-tripping meathead cop, you'd tone it down a little because BJM would be too on the nose.
On the flip side, how many times did fighters get out of line? How many times was there a Gomi/Azeredo situation where the ref couldn't stop a fighter from continuing to hit a defenseless opponent? In over a decade, BJM's only "control" blemish is the Tank/Cabbage fiasco at UFC 45. But especially in those early years, when plenty of people could've easily died in there, you
needed that bouncer/cop energy.
And he never landed any "cheap shots" on fighters. The worst was when he forearmed Brian Johnston at UFC 11. But that was because (a) BJM knew that they had bad blood going in and so he was really on his toes to make sure shit didn't get out of hand and (b) because he freaked out when he saw how badly Johnston had busted up his face and so he stopped the fight with more haste than usual. Johnston didn't care, though, and after the fight, he was still pissed at Nesri for his shit talk and he was yelling at him on the ground, not at BJM. It was a whole lotta nothing. But, again, BJM was literally the one and only ref for a million years and a million fights. Every single fighter's safety was in his hands. I'd say he handled his duties remarkably.
I suspect what ultimately lost him the decisions though and the problem thoughout a lot of his career is that he was too passive.
Yep. It was all a game for points to him, never a fight. He always looked to touch gloves and smile, like he made a cool basket or hit a home run, when he should've been looking to take people's heads off. He had no killer instinct.
I remember someone describing that fight (Mezger vs. Macias I think?) as like watching the lead singers of Winger and Cinderella (80s hair metal bands) duking it out. Fun times.
His opponent for that long hair battle was Jason Fairn. Macias trained with Guy when Oleg was there training with Ken and the boys (hence the Oleg/Macias business) but he and Guy never fought.
I think Ken would have put him into a living death had they fought that night.
Oh, unquestionably. That was Ken during his blown-up WWF days when he was around 250 pounds of muscle. He was also still training his guys, so he was still pretty sharp. Around that time, Mark Coleman had gone to train with Ken at the Lion's Den and Ken handled Coleman. He would've chewed Tito up and spit him out.
