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Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Khalil Rountree learned how to not be 'afraid of the fire' in Alex Pereira fight, vows to be 'undeniable' at UFC Baku
Khalil Rountree Jr. will be a part of history in his first fight since challenging for UFC light heavyweight gold this past October. Among the three title challengers that former champion Alex Pereira fought in 2024, none gave him a tougher battle than Rountree, as the two collided in a back-and-forth bout that made the short list for Uncrowned's best of the year. Rountree ultimately came up short, leading him to a clash with former champion Jamahal Hill this Saturday in UFC Baku's main event. The card will be the first UFC event in Azerbaijan after a Hill injury sunk the originally scheduled date for UFC Kansas City in April. Advertisement Having been in Baku since last Saturday, Rountree is pleased with how everything turned out. "It's an arena that I've never experienced before," Rountree said on "The Ariel Helwani Show." It's nothing like any arena that I've ever been to in the States. It's nothing like the T-Mobile [Arena]. It's nothing like anything. It's got a very different feel to it. It definitely feels authentic to Baku. "I've just been in awe of everything that I've experienced here. The arena was just one of those experiences. It just feels like a special place, it's got a different energy to it. I can't even explain it. It's not high up. It's kind of, like, low ceilings, but the floor is really wide, and I would just imagine it being packed with people, and it kind of brought me some chills, man." Despite the five-fight win streak Rountree rode into his Pereira title fight, he was ranked No. 8 in the UFC's light heavyweight division at the time and a controversial choice to challenge for the belt. Yet the performance was arguably the best of Rountree's career, and a stock-raiser even in defeat. Advertisement If he gets the win over Hill, Rountree hopes to be close to a second crack at the title. "There's been talks of what we'd like after this, and I think that the UFC have their own ideas and thoughts on what they would want," Rountree said. "My plan is to put on a performance that makes a title shot again undeniable, if that makes any sense. "I'm definitely sure that I'm ready to be a champion, and I'm ready to be that champion. Everything that I'm working on and doing is to be prepared for that again. That's absolutely what I want and what I'm gunning for. So my plan is to put on an undeniable performance, so that I can get that chance again." Rountree's performance against Pereira felt like a "coming of age" type of moment for the fighter. Early on in his UFC career, which began with "The Ultimate Fighter 23" in 2016, Rountree often impressed with highlight-reel victories but failed to string together consistency. When tasked with an opponent that could get him over the hump into title contention, he fell short several times under the bright lights. Advertisement So the first title fight of his 20-fight career was an eye-opener, to say the least. "I saw how far I was willing to go," Rountree said. "I was really tested to the very end in that fight. I went as far as I possibly could. In my mind, I enjoyed the whole thing. I enjoyed it all the way through, and it was just something that I remember. I gave my absolute all in that fight, so I got to experience what that feels like. I think that it just helped me grow — and not necessarily be afraid of the fire, for lack of better words. I've been through the fire, and although I didn't make it out victorious, I've been there, and I felt that, I felt it. So I think it toughened me up a bit. Advertisement "No fight stands out to me like that one does as far as having to go into deep waters." The UFC light heavyweight division has obviously shifted at the top since Pereira vs. Rountree. In March, Pereira finally met his match at 205 pounds, dropping his belt to Magomed Ankalaev after a back-and-forth bout at UFC 313. The expectation now is for an immediate title rematch between the two in 2025. For Rountree, though, it's not about the opponent when it comes to another title shot. "To be honest, I really care who the champion is until it's me," Rountree said. "I think that [rematch with Pereira] would be a great fight. I'm sure that people would want to see a second fight between us for the belt again. I think that would be exciting, but it's nothing that I'm hoping for. "Whoever has it, I'm doing whatever I can to prepare to fight whoever has it."
Time of India
08-05-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Former UFC champion Jamahal Hill shares an unusual interaction with upcoming rival Khalil Rountree Jr. - 'It's weird to me'
Jamahal Hill with The Schmo. Image via The Schmo/YouTube (screengrab) Former light heavyweight champion Jamahal Hill Khalil Rountree Jr Jamahal Hill details the weird interaction with Khalil Rountree Jr, tags Islam Makhachev vs. Ilia Topuria bout as the best possible matchup for IFW Jamahal Hill Details 'Weird" Locker Room Encounter with Khalil Rountree, Alex Pereira Title Rematch will face light heavyweight contender. in Azerbaijan on June 21, 2025. The fighters were supposed to face each other earlier at UFC Kansas City, which got replaced by the Ian Machado Garry vs. Carlos Prates bout. Both Hill and Rountree are looking for redemption following the previous losses faced by the fighters. In a recent interview, Hill deep dives into the relationship he shares with Rountree while talking about the possible main card event of the upcoming International Fight and awkward conversations between fighters are quite common in the world of combat sports. And former UFC champion Jamahal Hill is not new to the experience. The fighter has had such interaction with other athletes like Alex Pereira ahead of Pereira's bout against Magomed Ankalaev at UFC 313. Hill's recent confrontation involves his upcoming opponent for UFC Azerbaijan, Khalil Rountree Jr. Both fighters are currently training for their upcoming bout in Las Vegas, specifically at the UFC Performance Institute , a place that facilitates innovation, research and training for the athletes and members of the MMA in his recent interview with the Schmo, shares an awkward incident that the fighter had to face while confronting his rival Rountree in the locker I was in the UFC PI, walked into the locker room, and I'll say 'What's up' to anybody. And I walked into the locker room and he's like, 'Man, you really don't like me do you?'…and I was like what? And he was like 'You really don't like me, do you?'', The statement took Hill by surprise and he continued, 'I was like 'I don't even know you, we haven't even had a conversation'.It's almost like he's gotta build me up as this villain or this person that he hates, which is fine with me.'Hill further explained the possible repercussions of such an attitude, 'But whenever you start putting the energy off the UFC staff and sh*t like that like we can't be around each other, or something's going to happen, you're not going to do sh*t. So what's the point of that? It's weird to me.'When Hill was asked about what he is most prepared for in context of his rival, the fighter talked about the consistency that Rountree showcases within the Octagon, 'He is able to take damage and still have a game to throw and deal it out. So you got to be ready for that. He's got some fast twitches on some of his strikes into his game. So you got to be ready for that as well.'Towards the end of the 10-minute-long interview, Hill puts his opinion in on the possible main card event of the International Fight Week, 'I am hearing Islam and Topuria, but who knows man!' The fighter continued, 'If they want to make a lot of noise about it, I don't see too many other fights outside of that, you know.'Also read: 'I want to fight asap' - UFC Middleweight contender Bo Nickal opens up on future plans following the first loss of his pro-MMA career Both Hill and Rountree faced defeats in their previous matchups and are looking for a redemption towards the next title shot of the division. After losing the belt to Pereria, Hill lost another bout against Jiří Procházka and is aiming to bounce back and claim the light heavyweight championship belt.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
How Demian Maia continues to influence a new generation of UFC fighters, from Ian Machado Garry to Reinier de Ridder
Demian Maia fought in the UFC for 14 years, challenging for titles in two different divisions. Now, at 48, his work as a coach and mentor is shaping a new crop of fighters. (Jason da Silva-USA TODAY Sports) If you were watching closely last Saturday night you might have seen him. He was there in Ian Machado Garry's corner, whispering in the welterweight's ear between rounds, chiding him for his risky use of the wrong half-guard in the final round, fine-tuning the already pretty finely tuned points of the fighter's transition game. Of course, in order to know who you were looking at and why he still matters so much to mixed martial arts, you'd need to know at least a little bit of the history of this sport. Advertisement Or you could also ask Reinier de Ridder, who fights Bo Nickal in the co-main event of Saturday's UFC Fight Night event in Des Moines, Iowa. Ask him who he looks up to as a submission grappler trying to make that style work for MMA. 'It's really just one guy, and that's Demian Maia,' de Ridder told Uncrowned earlier this week. 'He's the guy. You look at what he did, his creativity — he's the one.' He's not the only fighter who feels this way. Years ago I talked to Neil Magny right after he'd been submitted by Maia at UFC 190. He'd gone into the fight knowing that Maia was supposed to be some kind of jiu-jitsu wizard, but so what? He'd fought good submission grapplers before. He'd won seven straight fights in the UFC and was feeling pretty confident. 'I had a great training camp, felt like my coaches had brought in the guys I needed to train with, all that,' Magny told me in 2016. 'But then getting in there and experiencing his pressure, I realized, wow, this guy is on another level. … I had kind of got to feeling like I was untouchable, then this guy comes along and exposes me on the ground. I was like, how can I get to the point that he's at right now?' Advertisement Maia still gets this kind of thing a lot from other fighters. At age 47, he has a few flecks of gray in his beard, but otherwise looks like the same guy we remember from an MMA career that spanned nearly 20 years, almost all of it in the UFC. These days Maia is mostly a coach and trainer, and his expertise is in high demand. Last Saturday's UFC Kansas City main event, for instance, was comprised of two guys who both sought out his services. (Garry got there first, so Carlos Prates had to look elsewhere.) What they come to Maia for isn't just instruction on jiu-jitsu or submission grappling, though. You can get that lots of places. The MMA world is teeming with black belts, after all. Advertisement Maia offers something different. He's the rare guy who knows exactly how to tailor a jiu-jitsu game for the specific demands of an MMA fight. He knows what works in those cages, with those rules and rounds. He also knows what doesn't. And he knows because he figured it out himself, the hard way, over the course of many years. 'A lot of people, they think the grappling in MMA is just no-gi jiu-jitsu,' Maia told Uncrowned this week. 'It's not. It's totally different. I put a lot of effort into trying to be the best grappler of my time, and to try to develop and understand a way of using jiu-jitsu for MMA.' That, in itself, was a process. When Maia first came to the UFC in 2007, he raged through the middleweight ranks like a wildfire. He won his first five fights, all via submission, beating the likes of Chael Sonnen and Nate Quarry without ever facing much in the way of resistance. He was simply that far ahead of everyone else when it came to the ground game. Demian Maia (right) has been a big part of Ian Machado Garry's UFC journey. (Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC) (Mike Roach via Getty Images) But as he climbed higher up the division, he discovered the limitations to his style. He suffered a knockout loss against Nate Marquardt in 2009. He had a fairly disastrous title shot against Anderson Silva in 2010. He realized he needed to up his striking game if he was ever going to reach the top, so he dedicated himself to improving his boxing. Advertisement 'For a long time, I trained just boxing,' Maia said. 'That was a mistake. A lot of guys still do this. They train just their striking, and then just their ground game. But in an MMA fight, they are not separate. In MMA, most things happen in the transitions. You have to understand that and work that into your training.' The fork in the road came after his 2012 decision loss to Chris Weidman. Against a talented wrestler, Maia opted to stand and trade punches for most of the fight. But while his boxing was improved, it wasn't a real threat in isolation. Weidman easily outpointed him on the feet and went on to fight for — and win — the UFC middleweight title the next year. Maia went back to the drawing board with his team, who hit him with some tough love regarding the necessary course corrections. 'I remember [after the Weidman fight] we were talking about what we needed to change and all that,' Maia's longtime manager Eduardo Alonso told me in 2019. 'At one point, [Maia] said, 'But I felt like I was right on the verge of knocking him out at any minute.' We all looked at each other and at him and we had to say, 'No, that was never close to happening.' You know, that was the peak of him wanting to be a striker, and he was in that bubble partly for emotional reasons.' What Maia and his team realized was that, no matter how he improved his striking game, he was never going to be as elite on the feet as he was on the mat. His boxing was a thing that had to exist, but it had to be a means to an end. To the extent that he spent any time striking on the feet with opponents, it needed to be done with the goal of transitioning to the ground, which was where he would really win fights. Advertisement 'I changed my training then, and my thinking,' Maia said. 'I wouldn't just do boxing; I would do boxing with clinches, with takedowns. I would train with boxers, but I would throw two punches and then look for where I could clinch, where I could take down. In MMA, you need to know where all the opportunities are, not just for you but also your opponent, where he could elbow you or throw a knee. You can't just do these things separate.' The result was a late-career renaissance. Maia changed his whole outlook on the sport. He dropped down to welterweight. He won seven straight fights at one point. He submitted guys like Carlos Condit and Matt Brown. He choked decorated wrestlers like Ben Askren. One night he squeezed Rick Story's face so hard he made blood shoot out of his nose on live television. Advertisement Every opponent knew exactly what Maia wanted to do, but he kept doing it anyway. He even earned a UFC title shot in a second division, though he came up short in a decision loss to Tyron Woodley in 2017. His last fight came in 2021, when he lost a decision to current UFC welterweight champ Belal Muhammad. After that, Maia moved more into a coaching role. He'd always been a teacher of jiu-jitsu — even former opponents like Magny came to his seminars to learn the magic he'd wielded against them, and Maia enthusiastically taught it to them without worrying that they might become future opponents — and so the transition came easily to him. But beyond his own instruction in the gym, his career in the cage provided a blueprint that other grappling-based fighters like de Ridder still benefit from and attempt to emulate. 'Some of those very creative moments in his game, like when he couldn't take a guy down so he'd use the half-guard or the deep half, he showed different ways you could make it all work together,' de Ridder said. 'I really liked all the stuff that he did and wanted to be like that. He's not the most physical guy, not the strongest guy, but he could dominate people.' Advertisement These days, Maia said, hearing this kind of thing from the younger generation of fighters helps him feel like he hasn't been forgotten. He may have had to struggle through the wilderness to find a new path to the waterfall, but it was worth it to see others follow him while paying their respects to the man who led the way. 'That makes me very happy when I hear that,' Maia said. 'I tried to always be learning and growing. ... When I was starting out, I would ask lots of questions of the older guys and they would always help me. I wanted to do that for other guys too." These days the UFC has plenty of fighters who would say he has. And he's not done yet.
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Biggest UFC Heist Incoming: Ian Machado Garry Teases Bold Plans Post Carlos Prates Win
Biggest UFC Heist Incoming: Ian Machado Garry Teases Bold Plans Post Carlos Prates Win (Image Source: Getty Images) Just days after his unanimous decision victory over Carlos Prates at UFC Kansas City on April 26, 2025, Ian Machado Garry has revealed an unprecedented contract clause that could result in 'the biggest heist in UFC history.' Irish welterweight, the undefeated fighter, has secured a backup fighter position ahead of his upcoming UFC 315 title bout, which could see him earn a shot at the title on just two weeks' notice. Ian Machado Garry's strategic contract negotiation opens an unexpected title path Ian Machado Garry disclosed during his appearance on The Ariel Helwani Show, "I negotiated it into my contract that when I win, I get the opportunity to go and be the backup," following his dominant performance against Carlos Prates. The 27-year-old fighter explained that his willingness to save UFC cards by accepting short-notice bouts has earned him this rare opportunity. Ian Machado Garry Reacts To DOMINANT Win Over Carlos Prates, Why He Deserves Title Shot Next UFC CEO Dana White confirmed at the UFC Kansas City post-fight press conference that Ian Machado Garry will in fact be the official backup for the welterweight championship bout between Belal Muhammad and Jack Della Maddalena, which takes place May 10, 2025, at UFC 315 in Montreal, Canada. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Google Brain Co-Founder Andrew Ng, Recommends: Read These 5 Books And Turn Your Life Around Blinkist: Andrew Ng's Reading List Undo Ian Machado Garry, however, was quick to announce he would travel to Las Vegas to get the best recovery treatment possible, despite the fact that he came off a gruelling five-round battle. 'Could anybody slip up? If so, what would the world look like?' He is seen as it would be the biggest heist in UFC history, fighting twice in 14 days, and the possibility of UFC gold. Welterweight division tensions rise as Joaquin Buckley's confrontation adds to the storyline Following UFC Kansas City fight week, the welterweight landscape has become increasingly convoluted with an altercation between Ian Machado Garry and fifth-ranked contender Joaquin Buckley. Buckley made an appearance at Garry's weigh-in and is said to have approached the Irishman's family, causing a tense situation. Ian Machado Garry commented that Joaquin Buckley's actions were just desperation. "So he can't do stuff he does, he can't generate enough talk about himself, so he has to try and piggyback off other people." Although Ian Machado Garry is acknowledging physical soreness from his recent five-round contest, he is confident he will be able to compete at UFC 315 if called upon. But the welterweight contender also predicted that current champion Belal Muhammad will beat Della Maddalena and then go on to challenge himself in the future. UFC 315, featuring a welterweight title fight between Belal Muhammad and Jack Della Maddalena, will be live on pay-per-view on May 10, 2025. Prelims will be on ESPN+. Also Read: UFC Shake-Up: Tom Aspinall Reportedly Agrees to Ciryl Gane Fight as Jon Jones Unification Bout Stalls With top contender Shavkat Rakhmonov sidelined by injury, Ian Machado Garry's unprecedented contractual arrangement could potentially reshape the welterweight division's immediate future in dramatic fashion.
The South African
30-04-2025
- Sport
- The South African
Cameron Saaiman promises to bounce back from brutal UFC knockout
South Africa's MMA star Cameron Saaiman has promised to bounce back from his brutal knockout defeat at UFC Kansas City last weekend. Taking to social media on Wednesday, Saaiman spoke of a 'challenging last 12-18 months' and said he 'WILL bounce back'. Saaiman wrote: 'I would firstly like to thank each and every person who showed their support. I really appreciate you guys. 'To my team, family, friends and sponsors, 'Thank you for sticking by my side through a very challenging 12-18 months. I am deeply grateful to you guys for always being there through the highs and lows. 'I felt amazing in that cage. It felt like home. So it really pains me knowing that I could not live up to the expectations and standards that I set out for myself. 'I truly love this sport more than anything in the world and I will not allow these losses to define me. 'I know that I WILL bounce back from this. 'Thank you all ' Malcolm Wellmaker's right hand earned him a UFC contract and on Saturday night it earned him his first UFC victory. The 30-year-old bantamweight made a spectacular octagon debut at UFC Kansas City, needing less than two minutes to land a right hook that floored South African opponent Cameron Saaiman. Wellmaker was aggressive from the start, cutting off the cage in pursuit of Saaiman. When Saaiman attempted to punch his way off the fence, Wellmaker slipped the shots and countered with his own, landing square on Saaiman's chin and sending him crashing to the canvas. The official time of the stoppage was 1:59 into Round 1. Wellmaker, known as 'The Machine', improved to 9-0 as a professional. Meanwhile, Saaiman now finds himself in something of a slump after a 3-0 start to his UFC career. He is now heading in the opposite direction, having lost three straight fights. Whether he's given another UFC fight any time soon remains to be seen. Click HERE to watch the end of the fight Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
