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1 week ago | 
ca.sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
Bo Nickal got run over by a Reinier, which is par for the UFC course in 2025Back in January, the blue-chip prospect Payton Talbott made the walk as a 10-to-1 favorite against Raoni Barcelos at UFC 311 and then got dominated for three rounds. That hurt, but not nearly as bad as the kicks he received on social media after the loss. Playing along, he posted afterward that he was sentencing himself to Dagestan to learn to wrestle. Last week, Carlos Prates suffered something similar.
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1 week ago | 
ca.sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
Outside of Pennsylvania or maybe Romania, the UFC couldn’t have placed Bo Nickal onto a better card than its UFC Fight Night in Des Moines. When you think of Iowa, you think of things like corn, fullbacks and corn-fed wrestlers built like fullbacks. Nickal has the ears to fit in. Maybe it’s because of the Miletich Fighting Systems back in the day, which was a Midwestern grindhouse in Bettendorf that produced so many of the UFC’s early champions.
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3 weeks ago | 
ca.sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
In a roundabout way, Jack Della Maddalena has the fate of one man, two divisions and three champions in his hands right now. That’s a lot of power to be toting up to Montreal for his welterweight title bout against Belal Muhammad next month. Muhammad is of course the one man — as in the one man who stands between Della Maddalena and the top of the mountain.
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1 month ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
If you were around in the 1990s, the George Foreman you knew was a gentle giant. You could see the dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, which was often. He would talk about his faith in such a warm way that even if you didn’t believe, you wanted to believe. The old boxing heads would tell you about his transformation from what he was in the 1970s, back when he was boxing’s heavyweight champion. The words they used made no sense. Brooding. Mean. Terrifying.
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1 month ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
In retrospect, if UFC 304 was geared toward being a kind of hero’s homecoming for Birmingham’s own Leon Edwards, Saturday’s return to England feels like it could be a sendoff. A fight with Sean Brady is such a thankless task after losing his title that it borders on cruelty. It’s like a meeting with the taxman as a dedicated 1099; all the fun of the 13-fight unbeaten spree and that two-year run as the welterweight champion comes with a heavy toll.
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1 month ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
Carlos Ulberg has had a couple of different nicknames in his day. The first, “Ladies Night,” because there was a stretch about a decade ago — just before he discovered the joy of fighting — that he worked as a male stripper all over greater New Zealand and Australia. The other, “Black Jag,” because, well, that’s his alter ego. The thinking is that, whenever Ulberg goes into Black Jag mode, he abruptly darkens from his usual nice-guy self to become a legitimate danger.
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1 month ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
NEW YORK — They don’t turn the rivers green in New York for St. Patrick’s Day, but the gutters are known to overflow with the afternoon’s intake of Guinness. And on the eve of that special day in the Big Apple, a good many were in their best and proudest greens as the Irishman himself, Callum Walsh, took center stage at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. It was an old-school affair.
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2 months ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
There’s a fellow from Batumi, the second largest city in the country of Georgia, who has a master’s degree in management and economy. He owns several properties, including a quaint little grocery store called the Green Wood Market, just down from the Holy Christ the Savior Church on the Black Sea. He is a gentle soul by all accounts, friendly to the passersby and a proud member of his Georgian community.
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2 months ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
Back when Glover Teixeira was the UFC’s light heavyweight champion, you would see him carrying on in the western parts of Connecticut. He had his gym in Bethel, right across from Michael’s Tap Room, and was a regular fixture at the Farmhouse, a restaurant in Newtown where he could be found with a couple of glasses of wine and a steak on a random Thursday, talking to the locals about what it was like to be a UFC champion in his forties.
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2 months ago | 
sports.yahoo.com | chuck mindenhallUncrowned |Chuck Mindenhall
So much was going on for the UFC’s initial foray to the Sphere in Las Vegas last September that one of the great fights of 2024 — a clash between Mexico City’s Daniel Zellhuber and Argentina’s Esteban Ribovics — went woefully unsung. It was Zellhuber who came into UFC 306 as the known commodity, as he’d demonstrated a willingness to turn ordinary fights into wars.
