#broke Former UFC heavyweight champ Mark Coleman selling Pride GP 2000 trophy on Ebay for $24.5K ?

Former UFC heavyweight champ Mark Coleman selling Pride GP 2000 trophy on Ebay for $24.5K

THIS IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF MMA MEMORABILIA! PRIDE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP 2000 GRAND PRIX FINALS TROPHY AND CHECK. THE 2000 GP WAS THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS TOURNAMENT IN MMA HISTORY AND WILL FOREVER STAY THAT WAY. THIS TOURNAMENT HAD ALL THE TOP FIGHTERS IN THE WORLD INVOLVED. MARK COLEMAN IS A LIVING LEGEND AND A MEMBER OF THE UFC HALL OF FAME AND IS THE FIRST UFC HEAVY WEIGHT CHAMPION AND THE LAST UFC TOURNAMENT CHAMPION. COLEMAN WON UFC 10, 11 and 12 AND ALSO BECAME THE #1 FIGHTER IN THE WORLD BY WINNING THE GRAND PRIX 2000. THIS IS FOR THE SERIOUS COLLECTOR. THE TROPHY IS WELL OVER 5FT TALL AND THE CHECK IS WELL OVER 6 FT LONG. THIS IS A MUSUEM WORTHY CENTERPIECE AND IS SURELY THE TOP COLLECTABLE IN ANY PRIVATE COLLECTION IN THE WORLD!!!! IT DOES NOT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS!! THIS IS A ONCE IN A LIFETIME CHANCE TO OWN A FUTURE MMA MUSUEM CENTERPIECE...

UFC 109 Results ! Watch the intro fight ! Randy Couture vs Mark C.

Fighters with more than two decades of experience in two different sports collided Saturday night in the first-ever battle of UFC Hall of Famers as Randy Couture scored just the third submission victory of his storied career in stopping Mark Coleman.
The main event of UFC 109, which took place before a sellout crowd of 10,687 fans at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, pitted two guys who started as national champions in amateur wrestling and later became heavyweight champions in mixed martial arts.
The 46-year-old Couture (18-10) was the heavy favorite and he appeared quicker standing, employing his usual strategy of using a Greco-Roman wrestling-style clinch against the cage, his best position, to tire out Coleman (16-10) and throw punches.

 D Meltzer

Couture used mostly uppercuts in winning the first round. Coleman was unable to take Couture down or really get any strong offense going, and Couture was happy to keep Coleman in a clinch for most of the round.
The match ended at 1:09 of the second round, as Couture got Coleman again in the clinch and was able to fire punches before taking Coleman down – a position that Coleman said before the fight he needed to avoid.
Couture threw more punches on the ground, forcing Coleman to turn his back, and from there he seized the choke in a fight that had to be almost a blueprint of what he was hoping would happen.
Through both luck and sound training, Couture preserved far more of his athletic ability than is logical to expect from someone of his age. Coleman, on the other hand, looked his age, not maintaining the speed or power that made him one of the great MMA fighters of the 1990s.
Couture took little punishment and was never in trouble, as Coleman is not the same striker as his last two opponents, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Brandon Vera, who both knocked Couture down.
“I enjoy what I’m doing,” Couture said. “I’m the best fighter I’ve ever been. I have benchmarks in training and I hit them.”
In one respect, though, the game plan was different for Couture, showing respect for Coleman’s freestyle wrestling game.
“Usually I like to move forward, but with Mark, it would have opened me up for a takedown,” said Couture. “I went to make him come forward and come after me.”
“He’s a great fighter, one of the best of all-time,” Coleman said after the loss. “He beat me to the punch. I was a little slow tonight.”
There were a lot of themes going into the match. It was Greco-Roman vs. freestyle in wrestling, as Couture was a four-time national champion in Greco, just never during an Olympic year. Coleman was a freestyle wrestler who won a college national championship at Ohio State (Couture’s best finish in the NCAAs was second) and made an Olympic team (1992). At his peak in 1991, he was second in the world championships.
Coleman defeated Couture in a freestyle match in 1989, the only time the two had ever met, but he said that didn’t play a part in his motivation, noting that it was a long time ago and in a different sport – and it wasn’t a match he’d thought about a long time.
In fact, Couture has helped Coleman, inviting him to his gym in Las Vegas last year to train with a wider variety of training partners and coaches than he ever had in his career leading up to Coleman’s July 11 win over Stephan Bonnar. Coleman did have to find a new gym, the Tapout gym, to train for this fight, but he did train with Shawn Tompkins, who was one of Couture’s coaches in the past.
“We both come from the wrestling background,” said Couture . “On paper, he was a little better than I was. He was a national college champion, which I tried to be and never was. He went to the Olympics, which I tried and never could do. Fighting him wasn’t an issue. In wrestling, we often have to fight our best friends to make an Olympic team.”
Couture also noted that Coleman using his former striking coach was nothing that upset him, and that in a roundabout way, he owes some of his success to Coleman.
“He was one of my inspirations to get into this,” said Couture, who followed Coleman from the elite level of wrestling into the UFC. “I watched him take people down and ground-and-pound them.”
The win opens up all kinds of possibilities for Couture, who behind the scenes has had three of the UFC’s five champions – Anderson Silva, Lyoto Machida and Brock Lesnar – showing interest in fighting him. Couture, probably one of the three most popular fighters in UFC history, brings marquee name value to any championship fight, both due to his enduring popularity and because the story of the aging warrior going for a record sixth championship is easy to market.
Plus, for fighters who are paid based on how well pay-per-view events draw, he would be the biggest money fight possible for Silva and Machida, and the second biggest, behind Frank Mir, for Lesnar.
Of the three, the Silva fight makes no sense because it would have to be at light heavyweight and thus wouldn’t be for the championship. The light heavyweight champion, Machida, or possibly Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, who faces Machida on May 8 in Montreal, makes the most sense, since Couture has scored two straight wins in that division.
A possible fight with Lesnar brings with it the most financial sense, but it’s harder to justify since Couture lost his last heavyweight fight to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.
Couture said he’s happier to stay at light heavyweight, but he also said that if he’s asked to face Lesnar in a rematch of their 2008 fight, he would most likely not turn it down.
“I like being at light heavyweight,” said Couture, who walks around at 217 pounds and had what he considers an easy weight cut – 55 minutes in the sauna on Friday – to sweat out eight pounds and make 205. “The camp is better going against guys my size. The heavyweights are good and it’s hard when giving up 30 pounds.
“I’ll fight whoever they ask me to fight. I think I was doing pretty well against Lesnar,” said Couture, who gave up close to 60 pounds on the day of the fight in their initial meeting, where Lesnar captured the heavyweight title. “If they ask me to take the fight, I’ll most likely say yes.”
Coleman is in a tough position. He may not have needed a win, but for him to remain in the mix with the top guys, he needed an impressive performance. His conditioning was improved from most of his recent fights, but he didn’t really show any new tricks. He was admittedly slow – in a sport where he can’t get away with that, particularly when he’s no longer fighting as a heavyweight.
Perhaps a small door opened for him after the fight. While he was doing an interview with Joe Rogan, Tito Ortiz walked past him at ringside and said, “Payback’s a [expletive],” and followed with another expletive, apparently mad at something Coleman, or someone in Coleman’s camp, said about his girlfriend, Jenna Jameson. Or perhaps because Coleman was his scheduled opponent on Nov. 21 but had to pull out due to injury. Ortiz lost his UFC return to Forrest Griffin instead.
Coleman fired back in kind as a response.
“Tito’s fighting Chuck [Liddell] next,” said Dana White, referring to a match scheduled for the summer while not wanting to touch on the possibility of an Ortiz-Coleman match. “That’s just Tito.” yahoo.com 
Competing in the second bout of a new seven-fight deal with the UFC, five-time champion Randy Couture picked up the biggest check at Saturday's "UFC 109: Relentless" event for his winning effort against Mark Coleman.

Couture made an event-high $250,000 in disclosed pay (with no win bonus) to lead UFC 109's official fighter payroll of $944,000.

MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) recently requested and received the list of disclosed salaries from the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

UFC 109 took place Feb. 6 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas and aired on Spike TV (two preliminary-card fights) and then pay-per-view (main card).

In addition to Couture, other top earners from the card included Matt Serra ($150,000), Chael Sonnen ($64,000), Demian Maia ($62,000) and Coleman ($60,000).

The full payouts included:

Randy Couture: $250,000 (no win bonus)
def. Mark Coleman: $60,000

Chael Sonnen: $64,000 (includes $32,000 win bonus)
def. Nate Marquardt: $45,000

Paulo Thiago: $30,000 ($15,000 win bonus)
def. Mike Swick: $43,000

Demian Maia: $62,000 ($31,000 win bonus)
def. Dan Miller: $15,000

Matt Serra: $150,000 ($75,000 win bonus)
def. Frank Trigg: $30,000

Mac Danzig: $40,000 ($20,000 win bonus)
def. Justin Buchholz: $8,000

Melvin Guillard: $28,000 ($14,000 win bonus)
def. Ronys Torres: $4,000

Rob Emerson: $24,000 ($12,000 win bonus)
def. Phillipe Nover: $10,000

Phil Davis: $10,000 ($5,000 win bonus)
def. Brian Stann: $17,000

Chris Tuchscherer: $20,000 ($10,000 win bonus)
def. Tim Hague: $7000

Joey Beltran: $12,000 ($6,000 win bonus)
def. Rolles Gracie: $15,000

Now, the usual disclaimer: The figures do not include deductions for items such as insurance, licenses and taxes. Additionally, the figures do not include money paid by sponsors, which can oftentimes be a substantial portion of a fighter's income. They also do not include any other "locker room" or special bonuses the UFC oftentimes pays.

For example, as discussed above, the figures above do not include the UFC's traditional "fight night" bonuses. The UFC 109 bonuses were worth $60,000 and awarded to Serra (Knockout of the Night), Thiago (Submission of the Night), and Chael Sonnen and Nate Marquardt (Fight of the Night).

In other words, the above salary figures are simply base salaries reported to the commission and do not reflect entire compensation packages for the event.

Tito Ortiz Resigns with UFC ? Tito to fight in December 2009 ?

UFC president Dana White touched on a wide variety of topics in a news conference call on Friday, including the signing of former light heavyweight champion and longtime antagonist Tito Ortiz along with several roster additions from the defunct Affliction promotion.
Ortiz (15-6-1) had what both sides categorized ahead of time as his final UFC fight on May 24, 2008, losing a one-sided decision to Lyoto Machida, the company’s current light heavyweight champion.
After major back surgery, Ortiz, 34, said he was targeting November or December for his return, with White saying Ortiz’s first opponent would be Mark Coleman (16-9), the 44-year-old former Olympic wrestler who was heavyweight champion in 1997, and is coming off an upset win over Stephan Bonnar on July 11.

“Tito and I have a history that everyone knows,” said White. “He’s still a guy that everyone wants to see fight. He said his back has healed perfectly and he’s ready to take a shot at the title. He’s one of those guys that people love and people love to hate. We’ve put all our differences aside, have squashed everything and will move forward, and Tito will retire in the UFC.”
White also changed the main event of UFC 103 on Sept. 19, a show at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, an important date on pay-per-view because it goes head-up with Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s next boxing match, against Juan Manuel Marquez. Rich Franklin (25-4) vs. Vitor Belfort (18-8), as a light heavyweight match, will be the new main event for the Dallas show.
Belfort, 32, a onetime teenage prodigy in the sport, has run off four straight wins since a 2006 loss to Henderson. He has been fighting during that period as a middleweight. Belfort had been training for a match with Jorge Santiago on the Affliction card.
Last week, the company had announced Franklin vs. Dan Henderson, a rematch of a Jan. 17, fight in Dublin, Ireland that Henderson won via decision. The announcement was not well-received, largely because people were expecting Henderson’s next fight to be a middleweight title match against Anderson Silva.
Franklin vs. Belfort is actually a weaker-drawing match in opposition to the Mayweather fight, since Henderson clearly became the biggest star of the three men coming off his vicious knockout of Michael Bisping at UFC 100. However, the change is a long-term positive, because White said that Henderson would be kept at middleweight and would get the next shot at Silva. Silva is facing Forrest Griffin in a light heavyweight fight on Aug. 8 in Philadelphia. White said that depending on how much damage Silva takes in that fight would determine when Silva vs. Henderson would take place.
“It could be very soon,” said White.
Previously, an Aug. 29 match between Demian Maia and Nate Marquardt had been considered the match to determine Silva’s next contender, and White indicated the winner of that fight would get the following shot after Henderson.
As for Ortiz, his return to the UFC is the latest in a storied history. White originally got involved in MMA as the business manager for both Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. It was through that association in 2000, that he found out UFC was for sale, and convinced high school friend and casino magnate Lorenzo Fertitta to buy the company for $2 million in early 2001.
Ortiz, who had won the vacant UFC middleweight (now light heavyweight) championship on April 14, 2000, in Tokyo, via decision over Wanderlei Silva, was the biggest star in the early years of White’s promotion. His 41-month reign as champion, before losing to Randy Couture on September 26, 2003, in Las Vegas, is still the longest title reign in any weight class in promotion history.
But over the past eight years, the relationship between White and Ortiz was like a roller coaster ride. Problems first became public in 2003, when Ortiz held out, asking for more money, which White blamed on his wanting to avoid facing Liddell in a title defense.
Their first complete split came in 2005, as Ortiz left the company and complained for nearly a year about the UFC pay structure. He was brought back at the end of the year to oppose Ken Shamrock as coaches on the Ultimate Fighter reality show, and to lead to a match.
The Ortiz-Shamrock drama played out in several chapters and led to a record-setting business year in 2006. During that period, White joked, since Ortiz earned a reported $5.8 million that year in four matches, wins over Forrest Griffin, two over Shamrock and a loss to Liddell. “He loves me now.”
But as Ortiz’s star faded after a loss to Liddell and a draw with Rashad Evans, tensions mounted, leading to Ortiz’s departure from the company.”Time really cures everything,” said Ortiz. “Dana was a man of his word. Dana apologized to me. We’re like boyfriend and girlfriend.” Ortiz said he’d been plagued by back problems since 2003, stemming from an injury in training before the Couture fight, and the injury had gotten progressively worse. He said after recent surgery, his back feels the best it has in years.
He’s already got his rap down for his return, noting that before leaving the promotion, he had matches with the three most recent UFC champions.
He won a close decision over Griffin in 2006, although Griffin improved greatly since that point in time. He went to a draw with Rashad Evans in 2007, and he did catch Lyoto Machida in a tight triangle in the third round of their fight last year. Machida escaped and dominated a lackluster fight, but it was the only vulnerable moment Machida has had since joining UFC.
Ortiz said when White and Lorenzo Fertitta came to his home in Huntington Beach to sign him, he said they gave him “an offer you couldn’t refuse.”’
“I’m happy, I’m satisfied,” said Ortiz. “You’ll never hear anything about money again.”
Besides Ortiz and Belfort, White announced the signing of former Affliction fighters, welterweight Paul Daley, lightweights Dan Lauzon and Rafaello Oliveira, and heavyweights Ben Rothwell and Chase Gormley to UFC. The latter two are already scheduled for an Oct. 24 match in Los Angeles. He also announced that Affliction featherweights Javier Vazquez, L.C. Davis and Mark Hominick have been signed and will fight in World Extreme Cagefighting.
He indicated there are eight or nine other fighters from Affliction they are talking with, mentioning Gegard Mousasi (who faces Renato Sobral on Aug. 15 in San Jose for Strikeforce) as a possibility. But White said he has no interest in former UFC heavyweight champions Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia, both coming off multiple first-round losses.
In a sense, the announcements were a little disappointment to a media expecting a new U.S. television deal to be reached, with rumors abounding regarding ESPN getting into the game. There was an ESPN announcement, regarding the new U.K. version of ESPN, which launches in two weeks, being the new home of UFC in England and Ireland.
On the television front, White indicated the company had multiple network suitors coming off the success of UFC 100, which is estimated at doing 1.6 million buys on pay-per-view. The show ranks behind only the biggest blockbusters in boxing history, the 2007 Oscar De La Hoya vs. Mayweather fight, the 1997 Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield fight and the 2002 Tyson vs. Lennox Lewis fight, in terms of purchaes. It was also the biggest pay-per-view event of any kind in Canada.
Prior to the event, when UFC understated predictions on what the show was going to do, White said that he would to a back flip off the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas if the show did 1.5 million buys.
“I have to work that out with Mandalay Bay,” he said. “We have to figure it out. I’m a man of my word so I’m jumping. I’m not looking forward to it.”