| Paulo Filho Ready for WEC Championship Fight Sunday |
LATimes reports - There’s one sure thing about MMA fighters. Eventually, because of stylistic difference, everyone is going to lose. With one exception.
The exception makes his U.S. debut on Sunday on the World Extreme Cagefighting show, which airs at 9 p.m. on Versus from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.
Paulo Filho of the Brazilian Top Team brings a 14-0 record into the cage when he battles for the group’s middleweight championship. If he beats Joe Doerksen, as he’s favored to do, he will join Brazilian Top Team member Anderson Silva, the UFC’s champion, as the two middleweight champions under the Zuffa umbrella. Filho’s record isn’t loaded with easy opponents, as it includes well-respected fighters such as Yuki Kondo, Amar Suloev, Ryuta Sakurai, Ryo Chonan, Kazuo Misaki and current Elite XC champion Murilo Ninja Rua, who, like every other opponent, was dominated and controlled on the ground.
Filho, who lives just outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, becomes the biggest international star to be put into the WEC, largely because Silva is the champion at his weight in UFC, and it would block him getting a title. It’s unique in that if Filho becomes champion, WEC could make a strong claim that it’s champion is the true No. 1 fighter in the weight division.
He sees Doerksen as a similar fighter to himself, primarily a wrestler who looks to control things on the ground, but Filho feels that he’s superior at Doerksen’s strengths of takedowns and submissions.
The 29-year-old Filho has never held a major championship in MMA after winning three world and six national titles in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu during the mid-to-late 90s when he was being coached by the late Carlson Gracie. In last year’s Pride tournament, he was one of the favorites in a loaded tournament, and in the semifinals, he dominated and then submitted Kazuo Misaki with an arm bar. However, Filho suffered a knee injury in that fight and couldn’t continue for the tournament championship match. Misaki came back in his spot and beat Dennis Kang in the finals on Nov. 5, 2006, in Yokohama, Japan. Misaki had earlier in the tournament beaten co-favorite Dan Henderson, the same Henderson who headlines the Sept. 8 UFC show in London in a Pride title vs. UFC title in the light-heavyweight division when he faces Quinton Jackson.
Filho, through interpreter Eddie Suarez, said he tries to not think about that tournament as it’s something of a personal nightmare, but feels a win on Sunday will allow him to erase the memory.
His fighting strategy is simple. His style is using his judo, which he started at the age of five, to take his opponent to the ground, and use his physical strength and his aggressive Jiu Jitsu to force a submission, with four of his last six wins coming by arm bar. The book on him is that if you can keep him standing, he’s vulnerable. In 14 matches, nobody has been able to keep him standing.
"He feels the WEC is the right place for him," Suarez said. "It’s a new organization and he’s new to the U.S. fans. He thinks they’ll be able to grow together, and give UFC a run for its money."
In reality, the two are sister organizations, with WEC focusing more on lighter weight fighters.
When Filho was growing up and competing in judo and BJJ, going into Vale Tudo, as MMA was known in Brazil at the time, was the natural career progression. But he never expected it would ever be his livelihood, as there wasn’t any real money in it in Brazil. His credentials from winning the Mundials (the world championships in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) got him a slot in Japan in his second pro fight. By 2004, he made his debut in Pride, which at the time had the most depth of any organization in his weight class. He feels his best attribute is that for his weight, because at 5-8 he’s shorter than most middleweights, he’s also more physically powerful than most of the fighters he comes up against. And coming to the U.S. makes things a slight bit easier, since the Japanese weight class was 183 pounds and in the U.S. it’s 185, and that’s the difference for him between a hard weight cut and an easy cut.
Notes: After the craziest period in the history of the sport, in particular a month of June that seemed to feature two or three major events almost every week, things are now at a more normal pace in MMA. Besides Sunday’s TV special, there is only one major PPV event, the UFC show on Aug. 25 in Las Vegas headlined by Randy Couture vs. Gabriel Gonzaga for the heavyweight title. Like almost every major Couture fight, he’s the underdog. Now, having passed his 44th birthday, he is facing a guy who is bigger, and, on paper, has better stand-up skills and more submissions. But Couture has won many fights when he was the underdog, against fighters with better on-paper attributes. Couture’s experience in surviving tough situations throws almost all predictions out. With one exception, every time Couture has been in a fight he’s been the underdog in, he has won. But September gets busy again, with three UFC events, a WEC live television special, the IFL championships, Elite XC doing a live event from Honolulu on Showtime and a U.S. vs. Brazil themed PPV put on by the Art of War Promotion in Dallas on Sept. 1 that kicks off the month
