Oh man! I have been waiting for this match up for so long. Only the Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock fights equal the anticipation I felt for watching one of my UFC favorites, BJ Penn, try to redeem himself after his last loss to Pulver. Penn was in his finest fighting form ever and dominated from the beginning. His determination was scary and his technique flawless as he countered every one of Pulver’s moves. This was as much a mental game as it was physical combat. It was also really nice to see these two enemies, who verbally attacked each other non-stop throughout season 5 of The Ultimate Fighter, embrace at the end of the match. All past misgivings forgotten in mutual respect, true warriors all the way!
It was a weird night otherwise, with some very unorthodox endings. Manny Gamburyan dislocated his shoulder and couldn’t continue the match, ending in a sad loss to Nathan Diaz for the TUF 5 Champ standing. Andy Wang lost in a blink of an eye to Cole Miller, hope he didn’t cry this time. Rob Emerson tapped out just as Gray Maynard knocked himself out on a takedown, the result is a disappointing No Contest. Looking forward to seeing the rematch on this one!
UFC’s 71 and UFC 72 have been truly exciting for the UFC franchise and TUF 5 has certainly kept up the action with the 155lb weight class. Should be interesting to see some of the great Japanese talent from Pride come over and shake up the UFC.
Here’s the rest of the results:
Posted on June 23rd, 2007 by Leo
Filed under: Lucid Thoughts
I thought about doing a post on tonights show, but then figured I could come here and sure enough, you didn’t disappoint!
I agree, this was a very good show. I expected Jens to put up more of a fight but BJ really was on top of his game tonight. The submission was excellent; pinning Jens’ arm so he really had no defense for the choke. In the end, great sportsmanship from both guys. Two thumbs up.
The Emerson / Maynard bout was crazy, although I do agree with Maynard’s argument that he should have won. After all, Emerson DID tap out before it was realized that Maynard ‘knocked himself out’. I think he was hurt, yes, but I didn’t consider it knocked out.
The other best match IMO was Joe Lauzon vs. Brandon Melendez. I really like watching Lauzon fight; he looks like such a weakling but yeah, he’s outstanding with submissions.
Good fight, good night
BJ’s little post-fight remark of “if you want to know how i feel, then check out bjpenn.com right now.” left me wanting to check it out. This mornin i head over there and find that I get “Internal server error.” WTF, way to go whoever runs BJ’s site!
Same. Lol, I expected it to be slow cause so many people were checking it out at the same time, but I think the volume broke the server
Yah same here, I hit the site like 5 seconds after he made that remark and it was down.
Hey!
BJ’s site is finally up now
Have you seen the episode of Entourage that the Ultimate Fighter is on?
No, I always seem to miss that show. But the episodes I have seen are hilarious, especially since I work in the movie industry.
Leo, I’ve been staying away from your site because I saw the headline for this post in my RSS reader and didn’t want to spoil it before I saw the fights.
I just watched the fights tonight and thought there were some great fights. I’m surprised nobody mentioned it but it looked like BJ Penn held the choke on Jens for an extra second or two after he tapped and the ref was trying to pull his arm off. Then BJ got up and was looking at someone with a guilty look on his face and then hugged it out with Jens. Still a great fight though.
I agree with Shawn’s earlier comment about Joe Lauzon, he is an exciting fighter to watch and I have a feeling he might cause some problems for quite a few people. It’s interesting to see how many quality fighters have come out of the various TUF seasons.
Yeah, Penn was really “in the zone” and I think it took him a second to realize it was over. I don’t think he held on extra long on purpose.
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