Tate to fight first, then root for Seahawks
Top UFC women’s bantamweight contender Miesha Tate is planning one heck of a celebration after her bout Saturday night against Olympic silver medal-winning wrestler Sara McMann on the UFC 183 card at MGM Grand.
The Las Vegan, a native of Tacoma, Wash., plans to drive to Glendale early Sunday morning to watch her beloved Seattle Seahawks play in the Super Bowl.
“It will be like one big after party,” she said. “I might just pull like one big 24-hour all-nighter and keep the party going.”
Tate took a brief respite from training camp to fly to Seattle for the NFC Championship Game. She said it provided a nice mental break from the rigors of preparing for a fight. The game turned out to be a bit stressful, though, as the Seahawks made the victory quite dramatic.
The comeback also provided inspiration for her own career.
“It motivated me thinking, ‘Look what they were able to do with such little time on the clock.’ If they would have been just feeling sorry for themselves or given one inch of slack thinking they weren’t going to win, they wouldn’t be going to the Super Bowl,” Tate said. “It just reiterated to me what I already know to keep that mentality in my fights to give it 100 percent from bell to bell. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been beat on, but there’s 10 seconds to go in the last round, I’m still going to look for that submission or knockout, I’m still going to try to find a way to win. That’s what they did.”
Tate has won two straight fights since losing a title bout to champion Ronda Rousey. She said she needs what would be a third fight against Rousey at some point to make her career complete and a win over McMann, who also lost a title bout to Rousey, would go a long way to making that happen.
Tate said she feels her best chance to beat McMann will be in the stand-up, but she’s not afraid of McMann’s impressive wrestling credentials.
“Straight wrestling and MMA wrestling are very different. It will be interesting to see how my MMA wrestling and her MMA wrestling match. It’s definitely different when everything from knees and kicks to punches are flying at your face. You can’t just shoot blindly. Well, you can, but you might have to pay a price,” Tate said. “If she shoots in and I stuff her shot, but don’t make her pay for it, what’s to stop her from just relentlessly shooting again until she does get me down? I have to make her pay. It’s like when a dog poops on the carpet, you don’t give it a biscuit, right? You spank it and put it outside. Punish it.”
Tate and McMann will fight in the featured bout on the Fox Sports 1 preliminary card on Saturday night. The pay-per-view portion of the event will be headlined by a middleweight bout between Anderson Silva and Nick Diaz.
JOHNSON READY FOR JONES — Anthony Johnson’s first-round knockout of Alexander Gustafsson in the main event of a card in Stockholm on Saturday night earned him the next shot at Jon Jones for the UFC light heavyweight title.
It took some time for Johnson to realize he wasn’t dreaming.
“It just didn’t seem real,” Johnson said at the post-fight news conference. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe I just beat the guy who, in my opinion, beat Jon Jones.’ So I was really in a state of shock. Nobody’s ever stopped Alexander before like that, so I was just speechless, really.”
Johnson offered the champion a bit of advice in advance of their future bout.
“(I’m going to take out Jon Jones) the same was I took Gus out — knock him out,” Johnson said on the post-fight show on Fox Sports 1. “That’s the only thing I know — to finish people. I’m definitely going to do my best to finish Jon Jones because he is a beast.
“Jon, keep your hands up, because if you don’t, it’s lights out.”
Since he was released from the UFC in 2012, Johnson has won nine straight bouts, including six by knockout.
He has won all three fights since making his return to the UFC, the last two by first-round knockout. Johnson believes he can do the same thing to Jones when they step in the cage at some point this year.
“I think I’ll be the hardest puncher that he has ever faced,” Johnson said. “Hopefully, I can do things that nobody else has done to him. Alexander gave him the worst beating he has ever had. Hopefully, I can give one 10 times worse.”
‘CRO COP’ RETURN SET — The UFC announced Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic will return to the organization to fight Gabriel Gonzaga on the organization’s first card in Poland on April 11 in Krakow.
Filipovic, 40, lost to Gonzaga at UFC 70 in 2007 when Gonzaga landed a head kick late in the first round. He left the UFC after three straight losses in 2011 and briefly retired from MMA to return to kickboxing.
He has won three of four fights since returning to MMA, including back-to-back wins over Olympic judo gold medalist Satoshi Ishii, and will now give the UFC another try.
Contact reporter Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5509. Follow him on Twitter: @adamhilllvrj.
