Quinton “Rampage” Jackson joins the ranks such as Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, and many other athletes that have done many of the above feats. Rampage now has his own shoes.

If you are a huge Rampage fan or an avid MMA collector check out his shoes here. Don’t get it twisted. These are not PF Flyers that will make you run faster and jump higher. One version has chains, while the other one has the look of a cage. Neither one of these shoes are the next Air Force Ones or Chuck Taylors, but they do show the ever climbing popularity of MMA.

The Rampage Serve shoes will run you about $68.00. They do not come with your very own Rampage chain, or devastating right hand, but if you are Quinton’s number one fan these are a must have.

In response to the negative comments made by Chuck, Kimbo recently made and posted a video that is swirling about the internet. In the attached video you can hear his comments, as well as him challenging the UFC super star to a bare knuckle fight. Not only does he challenge him to the fight, but Kimbo also says he would do it at Chuck’s gym! Check it out and let the comments roll.

According to Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology, when faced with a Grade 3 concussion:

• Transport the athlete from the field to the nearest emergency department by ambulance if still unconscious or if worrisome signs are detected (with cervical spine immobilization, if indicated).
• A thorough neurologic evaluation should be performed emergently, including appropriate neuroimaging procedures when indicated.
• Hospital admission is indicated if any signs of pathology are detected, or if the mental status of the athlete remains abnormal.

Dan Simmler talks on the NHB forums and thanks to Cage Potato, you can quickly find it here. Nobody wants to see anyone get badly hurt in the cage and it looks like Simmler will fully recover. A lot of people want to see Simmler vs. Riddle 2 and considering both fighters live 60 miles from each other, it could happen. But, enough of that, here’s what the Serra Jiu-Jitsu fighter had to say:

So that wasnt as bad as I thought, I honestly didnt remember much. I found it kind of funny actually that I had no idea where I was.

I dont remember the flying whatever that was, I think triangle, and I dont remember anything else pretty much either.

The fiirst thing I remember was at the hostpital. So, I have a deviated septum in my nose, cant breath good at all with out a breath right strip, I had one on and right before my fight, I was told I couldnt wear it. I wasnt given a good reason, just that I couldnt, so as a result, I was breathing through my mouth the whole time, that just made things worse when I got hit. My mouth was wide open and I broke my jaw in three places. two on the left, one on the right. It was very painful to say the least.

One week after I got home to the day I decided I was going to train “Light” with a student, and I took his back and he pushed off and his head smashed me under the jaw with the back of his head, rebreaking the jaw. The hostpital is literally across the street from the school and I was kept over night and had surgery the next day. They put two small plates, 4 screws and wires back to keep it shut. For a little over 7 weeks I had nothing but shakes and tomato soup. It was horrible. I lost about 20 lbs and now I am waiting to get the ok to spar and get back to the grind. Ill be back and do better.

I am sorry that I couldnt have done better, I was happy to get it over with and see what I did and what mistakes I made and where I can improve. Thanks for the support.

Hopefully Dan is back up and training already. Good luck!

Continue reading to watch the video!

You can read more about the story and the Anti-MMA bill here. I’m sure FightLinker will have a petition to keep MMA alive!

• Denis Kang vs. Gegard Mousasi
• Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masakatsu Funaki
• Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Andrews Nakahara

The only real bout really seems relevant is the Kang-Mousasi fight. Obviously, that is a great bout with 2 potential GP winners eliminating each other. This definitely offers to be a great fight, especially compared to the other bouts. Kang’s journey to try and repeat his incredible run begins with a tough competitor in Gegard Mousasi, who is definitely one of the early Dark Horses in the GP. Mousasi’s last 2/3 bouts have been fought in Canada at the Hardcore Championship Fighting organization and his last win was at the M-1 Global Slamm show earlier this month.

Even though it’s not too competitive, I am incredibly interested in watching the Tamura-Fuanki fight for the shear fact that every fight Tamura fights against a Popular Japanese Fan Favorite seems to have a good build up. Hopefully, we don’t have a repeat of the disrespect we saw when he fought Hideo Tokoro at Dynamite!! 2007. Tokoro actually slapped him during the staredown and later when Tamura won the fight, Akira Maeda made a scene by shoving the winners trophy into Tamura in a very cold and disrespectful manner.

And there’s Sakuraba. What more can you say? Sakuraba will be fighting a Kyokushin Karate competitor from Brazil named Andrews Nakahara. This is the 25 year old MMA debut. What more do I need say other than hopefully, DREAM can get a better number for this show. I do expect and hope they actually get into the double digits with Funaki, Sakuraba, and Akiyama on the card but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Many speculate that this low number was particularly due to the opponent Mirko was facing. Luckily and hopefully, it seems that Mirko will face better competition in the near future and maybe sooner than we think considering the name Sergei Kharitonov has been thrown around for a possible June clash with Cro Cop. Kharitonov has remained inactive since avenging a loss to Alistair Overeem in August. Kharitonov was also supposedly scheduled to fight Might Mo at Dynamite!! but the bout was scrapped.

I know this is mostly a MMA site but I have to squeeze in a bit of K-1 news. Yosuke Nishijima is also back in action, sadly. He’ll be giving the K-1 circuit a shot. He’ll face Ewerton Teixeira at the K-1 World GP in Yokohama on April 13th, which also features 2 stelar bouts, Rey Sefo vs. Badr Hari and Semmy Schilt vs. Mark Hunt for the World Super Heavyweight Title. Mighty Mo, Glaube Feitosa, Chalid “Die Faust” Arrab, and Alexander Pitchkounov will also be featured that night.

The only thing that could really eclipse this show is a solid K-1 MAX card and April is the beginning of a year long search for the 2008 K-1 World MAX champion. K-1 World MAX 2008 World Championship Tournament Final 16 will be on April 9th and definitely promises to deliver. This card is just incredible from top to bottom and to me, is definitely the best card in April whether it be K-1 or MMA. The tournament bouts are as follows:

K-1 World MAX Championship Round of 16

1. Masato vs. Virgil Kalakoda
2. Buakaw Por. Pramuk vs. Albert Kraus
3. Andy Souwer vs. Mike Zambidis
4. Yoshihiro Sato vs. Murat Direkci
5. Drago vs. GORI
6. Artur Kyshenko vs. Jordan Tai
7. Saro Presti vs. Warren Stevelmans
8. Chi Bin Lim vs. Yoshihiro Kido

Overall, an amazing card. The 2 things I don’t really like too much are the fact that both recent GP winners, Lim and Kido will be facing off against each other in the 1st round. I would’ve liked to see how far both can go in the competition. Also, the fact that HIROYA is on the undercard. I don’t see why they’re pushing this kid so much considering he didn’t win the U-18 tournament last year. Also, my pick to win the MAX title this year is bold but I’m gonna have to go with Artur Kyshenko. I think he’s definitely going to take all the experience from last year and crown himself champ at years end.

Sticking with FEG, DREAM.2 is around the corner. The fighters announced to be participating in the GP for the event are:

• Dong Sik Yoon
• Yoshihiro Akiyama
• Taiei Kin
• Kiyoshi Tamura
• Masakatsu Funaki
• Ikuhisa Minowa
• Kazushi Sakuraba

At 1st glance it does appear like this is Akiyama’s tournament to lose but names like Daniel Acacio and Zelg Galesic have come up and could make this a lot more interesting. Sadly, it looks like Melvin Manhoef will not be participating this year due to a scheduled fight against Peter Aerts in Holland. Yes, Peter Aerts believe it or not.

Finally, some World Victory Road talk. Sengoku 2 and 3 were announced at the inaugural show on the 5th but new names have been confirmed for this upcoming show on May 18. Satoru Kitaoka, Yoshihiro Nakao and Yuki Sasaki join Roger Gracie and Kevin Randleman on the growing list of fighters. While not necessarily the elite of Japanese MMA, they do bring in experience and big wins to the table. I really like the fact that some of the Pancrase fighters are actually fighting on bigger show, which was the case for Kawamura, Monteiro and now Kitaoka. Nakao was just recently on the edge of fighting Cro Cop but was saved by the bell and from potential death when The Oriental Mystery Takumi Yano joked about Nakao’s possible death after the Cro Cop fight.

Also, to shift things to the WVR side of the Japanese MMA power struggle. It was announced that FujiTV has decided to pick up a WVR program. This doesn’t necessarily mark the re-entrance of FujiTV completely back into the MMA game but this may be a sign of things to come. I think we all know how important a TV deal would be for a large Japanese promotion and I’d like to wait and see what comes out of this. FujiTV, as we all should know, was the network that dropped PRIDE after news of the Yakuza scandal rocked the MMA world.

Heiwa DREAM.1

1. Shinya Aoki vs. Gesias “JZ” Calvancanti
2. Tatsuya “Crusher” Kawajiri vs. Kultar “Black Mamba” Gill
3. Kazuyuki Miyata vs. Luis “Buscape” Firmino
4. Joachim “Hellboy” Hansen vs. Koutetsu Boku
5. Mitsuhiro Ishida vs. Jung Bu-Kyung
6. Katsuhiko Nagata vs. Artur Oumakhanov
7. Andre Dida vs. Eddie Alvarez

Super Fight

1. Hayato “Mach” Sakurai vs. Hidetaka Monma

The plan is to obviously have 10 fights with Cro Cop and Minowaman with unconfirmed opponents thus far. It’s very apparent that there are only 7 GP matches meaning only 14 fighter but due to the lack of fighters, supposedly Caol Uno and Vitor “Shaolin” Ribiero could have the fortune of being passed directly to the round of 8. Personally, I think everyone in the GP should fight. No bye-rounds unless you’re the Champion and even than it’s really iffy. Also, you have to remember that Takanori Gomi did manage to secure a win at Sengoku and I’m incredibly sure that World Victory Road might be willing to co-promote if it meant getting a bit more eyes on their product.

As for Sengoku, they had their inaugural 1st show on Wednesday and had a decent show and fights. One thing I will admit was that the introduction before the promo parade looked incredible and just beautiful. Overall, like I said a good night of fights and some mostly obvious outcomes. Nothing incredibly surprising came out of the fights and almost nothing really worth mentioning unless you’re talking about Siyar Bahadurzada. I was beyond impressed with him.

The biggest winner of the night was someone who lost. Siyar Bahadurzada definitely moved up a notch for me. Coming into the match I had speculation of how he would adjust to fighting on a bigger circuit against someone as tricky and tested as Misaki but he managed to stay in alot longer than I expected and also put up one heck of a fight. Also, something that should be noted because it’s truly bizarre. I was kind of thrown off when Misaki secured a Kimura in the 1st and it looked to me like the Referee’s where actually giving their backs so that Misaki had a stable surface to perform this because he was almost falling out of the ring. Am I the only one who noticed that? I could be wrong.

Anyways, DREAM.1 is this friday so definitely expect a preview and hopefully a full card within the coming days.