Poll: Who Wins UFC 187’s Two Main Bouts?
Unless you’ve been living in a cliffside cave for the past five months, you probably know now that this Saturday night (May 23, 2015), the biggest mixed martial arts (MMA) event of the year will be going down from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
UFC 187 may have taken some big hits, true; but it’s still rolling forward as the most exciting top-to-bottom pay-per-view (PPV) the promotion has yet to put on this year.
At the top of the blockbuster event, Anthony Johnson will battle recent tittle challenger Daniel Cormier for the belt that was left up for grabs when dominant former champion Jon Jones was indefinitely suspended for a felony arrest stemming from his alleged involvement in an early morning hit-and-run accident in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The bout will mark the interesting new beginning for the storied 205-pound division, and it’s also one that’s wholly difficult to predict. ‘Rumble’ obviously brings the massive momentum of a nine-fight win streak that was bolstered by his most recent win, a first-round stoppage of Alexander ‘The Mauler’ Gustafsson in his homeland of Sweden.
Cormier lost his last fight, a hard-fought five-round decision to Jones at UFC 182, so he may be a slight underdog, but you can be assured that he’ll be more than motivated not to squander his rarely-seen second chance. Johnson fully expects Cormier to go ‘absolutely crazy’ this Saturday night, so we could be in for a barnburner.
In the co-main event, injured middleweight champion Chris Weidman will finally put his belt on the line against 38-year-olld Vitor Belfort, who hasn’t fought since November 2013, in a bout that has literally been in the works since Weidman fought Anderson Silva for a second time at the fateful UFC 168 in late 2013.
It’s an incredibly bad blood-fueled grudge match that has featured a good measure of back-and-forth trash talk, with Weidman throwing jabs at Belfort for his much-publicized use of testosterone-replacement therapy (TRT) and ‘The Phenom’ responding with his own criticism for ‘’The All-American’s’ numerous injuries that have forced the fight to be rescheduled twice since last December’s UFC 181.
These inherent dynamics make UFC 187 one of the more intriguing PPVs in recent memory, a characteristic that all too many fans have complained has been missing from the UFC schedule as of late. With anticipation reaching its height, who are your picks to win UFC 187’s blockbuster main bouts?
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