The World Series of Fighting’s second show is coming up this Saturday on the NBC Sports Network, with a damn solid main card and a main event that is starting to gain some real good buzz for pretty much the wrong reason. Oft-weight-cut-challenged welterweight, Anthony Johnson, has spent the better part of the last year fighting at or around the light heavyweight mark , and on Saturday, he’s moving up to heavyweight for the first time to face former UFC heavyweight champion Andrei Arlovski. Most people would be losing their minds at the thought of GSP vs. JDS (just for the initial implications haha get it?) but Anthony Johnson is no mere 170 pounder. Stories have gone around in the past of him starting his training camp in the 210-220 range, so if he put on a good amount of muscle for this fight, he could be fitting into his frame well. Arlovski even said that he expects him to be about 240 pounds of muscle, and that significantly evens out the size factor there, considering AA has been hovering at or around 240 his entire career.
So let ’em fight! WSOF CEO Ray Sefo defended his fighters:
“Anthony is his own man and can fight at whatever weight he wants to fight at.If he wants to fight at 205, great. If he wants to fight at heavyweight, great. Who are we to say where he fights at?”
Dana White was disparaging in his own way against the former welterweight, saying this wasn’t a “real” fight. This is what his former employee, Anthony Johnson had to say about Dana’s words:
“What Dana said was his own opinion, it didn’t really bother me. But to me, this is a legitimate fight. I have no hard feelings toward Dana for whatever he said. I don’t even think it was meant in a harmful way toward me or Arlovski. It was just his opinion.
“But I don’t know why he said welterweight, when I haven’t fought welterweight in over a year. I mean, get with the program, you know what I mean? I fight at 205. I’m fighting heavyweight for this fight. Stop living in the past, when I used to fight at 170. This is totally different. People change, and some people change for the better, and that’s what happened to me. So let’s not even talk about 170. Let’s talk about 205 and heavyweight.”
Arlovski weighs-in:
“It doesn’t matter what weight he wants to fight; it matters what he’s going to bring to the table,” Arlovski said. “He trained hard for this fight. It might be an easy fight, or it might be the hardest fight in my MMA career.
“It doesn’t really matter, and everybody has their own opinion. I’ll bring something to the table, and Anthony will bring something to the table, and we’ll see who was right and who was wrong. It’s only about the fight.”
“What gets me the most is if you’ve never been in that cage and experienced what it’s like, if you’ve never experienced training camp, what these guys go through and the sacrifices they have to put in to be ready for the 23rd, if you’ve never known what that feels like, then you shouldn’t really be disrespecting any of these guys,” he said. “It makes me really upset.
“I get it – if you want to criticize something, OK, fine, whatever. But it’s one thing to give an opinion – it’s another to disrespect. And it really burns a fire underneath me when people who have never been in that cage or ring disrespect the fighters. But at this point, it’s just a matter of educating them and saying, ‘Listen, maybe go to a gym and experience what it’s like for a couple weeks,’ and then you’ll understand what these guys go through.”
What do you think? Is this fight a freakshow or legit? We’ll find out this Saturday on the NBC Sports Network.
