Sunday, October 9, 2011

UFC 136 postfight: ?Rocky? references, baseball bats and the People?s champ

UFC 136 postfight: ?Rocky? references, baseball bats and the People?s champ

HOUSTON - In the end, the main card at UFC 136 delivered because Frank Edgar and Gray Maynard produced another classic in their third meeting in front of 16,164.

The live gate was $2.23 million. The UFC now holds the marks for the No. 1 and No. 4 all-time gates at the Toyota Center.

The effort in that main event got the UFC's lightweight champ the Knockout of the Night bonus, good for $75,000. Joe Lauzon beat out Chael Sonnen for Submission of the Night, while Fight of the Night went to Nam Phan and Leonard Garcia for their rock'em, sock'em brawl.

- Sonnen certainly deserved the Postfight Interview of the Night bonus. He called out Anderson Silva and asked to fight on the UFC's Super Saturday card in early February of 2012 in Las Vegas. Sonnen said the speech in the Octagon was off the cuff and he got fired up when he saw Silva sitting in the crowd. Dialing up more of the wrestling rhetoric, Sonnen said he was the people's champion and he was willing to give Silva a shot at the linear belt, his belt.

- White said he was highly impressed by Sonnen's victory over Stann. He believes in the theory of ring rust, but Sonnen showed no signs that he'd been away from the Octagon for 14 months.

- White said he wants to make the Silva-Sonnen fight as soon as possible. He wouldn't confirm that the fight would be on Super Bowl weekend, but he did say Brazil was almost an impossibility.

- Both Joe Lauzon and Dana White agreed on Melvin Guillard's performance saying he came into the fight with a lack of focus. Lauzon pointed out that while he sat in his hotel room all day on Saturday, Guillard was hanging out the UFC Fan Expo going down next door at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

- A very disappointed Kenny Florian wouldn't address retirement rumors. He was asked five questions and had little to say.

- Maynard still appeared stunned during the postfight. He couldn't believe Edgar made it through the first round.

"I don' know if he has a button that puts him out. I hit him on a knee, a right ... I think I hit him on a hook. What else? If there was a bat in there I probably would've hit him with that too. I couldn't find one. Where do you keep the bats in the cage?" Maynard jokingly asked White.

- White said he lost his mind cage side when Edgar pulled off the victory. Some may say�� his mind was still lost when he made an impassioned plea that Edgar is now the No. 2 pound-for-pound fighter in the world during the postfight. White said he always thought the stuff you see in "Rocky" movies was [expletive], but Edgar produced a real-life Rocky fight.

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/blog/cagewriter/post/UFC-136-postfight-Rocky-references-baseball-?urn=mma-wp8049

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