(Props: FightMagazine via MMAFix)

Best of PRIDE host Kenda Perez has a new pictorial in Fight! Magazine, featuring a solid front-runner for ‘Hot MMA Chick Photo of the Year’. My goodness. Pick up the August 2011 issue of Fight! to see more, and follow Kenda’s life on Twitter. Another highlight from Kenda’s latest magazine shoot is after the jump…

Those of you who are Fight Magazine subscribers probably already have your copy of the December issue.  The rest of you freeloaders will just have to go down to Borders and read it in the bathroom like the rest of the homeless people.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back, you’ve probably noticed that in addition to a hilarious feature about athletes taunting each other in the cage, this issue also features a cover story on Jon Jones by yours truly.  In order to write this bad boy, I flew to Montreal to meet Jones during his stay at the Tri-Star gym a couple of months out from his fight against Matt Hamill at this weekend’s TUF finale.  The only problem was that once I got to Montreal, I found out that Jones was still at home in Ithaca, NY. 

Recently Fight Magazine launched a contest on their website where they choose an amateur or low-level pro fighter and send him off to Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas for some personal training time with Shawn Tompkins (naturally the lucky winner will live in Shawn’s “fighter house” while he’s there, presumably playing a lot of Xbox with Chris Horodecki).  They’ve narrowed it down to four finalists and are opening it up for a reader vote to choose the winner.  

Looking at the video entries and the resumes, it seems like there’s one guy who could probably do the most with a week at Xtreme Couture, and it’s Drew Dober.  Dude is 6-0 as a pro and is 20 years old, which only serves to remind us that a) our lives are wasting away, and b) this sport is going to change drastically when kids who have been doing MMA since they were fourteen begin to take over.

The July issue of Fight! Magazine (featuring a cover story by a dashing young writer who shall remain nameless) introduces the first four members of the magazine’s newly-created Hall of Fame.  This is great to see, since it gives us an honest, legitimate MMA Hall of Fame instead of the incredibly limited and necessarily biased UFC Hall of Fame.  It’s also voted on by MMA journalists and not event promoters.  You know, like the real Hall of Fames do it.  Also like the real Hall of Fames for baseball and football and sports mascots, you can’t help but look at some of the inductees and wonder whether they could really compete with the talent of today.

Yeah, that’s Miesha Tate showing off some of her assets (hi-yo!) in the new issue of Fight! Magazine.  She might not flaunt it as much as some others, but Tate is another female fighter who is both way too tough and way too good-looking for us.  Does that make us sad?  A little, yeah.  But this picture helps ease the pain.  If only we’d known how fine she was when we talked to her a couple of weeks ago, we could have really worked the old magic.  And by magic we mean been really weird and creepy.  Missed opportunity, there.

More Tate hotness is after the jump, and way more in this month’s issue of Fight!, which coincidentally also features an article by yours truly on everyone’s favorite mustache ride-offering hard-ass, Don Frye.  Check it out.

Pardon my language here, but what the fuck is Andrei Arlovski doing?  The man was once the UFC heavyweight champion, and now he’s doing skits on "The Jerry Springer Show" that look like they were written by a tenth-grade English class?  And not that it would have made any difference, but they couldn’t rehearse it once or twice just to work out some of the kinks?  It just seems too coincidental that Arlovski is sinking to these new lows at right around the same time he’s preparing to make his pro boxing debut.  This video settles it: boxing makes jackasses out of MMA fighters.  And since Freddie Roach makes boxers out of MMA fighters…you can draw your own conclusions about him.

After the jump, I talk ring girls, unnecessary nudity, and more with Fight! Magazine photographer Paul Thatcher, and Martin Kampmann shows us how they do over at Xtreme Couture.

Many of you disagreed with our description of yesterday’s cartwheel kick knockout as “the greatest KO ever.”  Yeah, we weren’t totally serious about that (ever heard of hyberbole?), but our good friend Matt Brown, editor of Fight! Magazine, took issue with it and sent us the above video to demonstrate what a truly amazing knockout looks like.

These two midgets pull out all the stops in this kickboxing bout, and as you can tell the announcer (is that you, Frank Trigg?) is loving it. So is this yet another sign of the impending apocalypse?  Maybe.  But we prefer to think of it as a sign that Matt Brown is a weirdo.  Don’t worry though, he insists that he only stumbled across the video by accident while searching for midget porn.

After the jump, Kimo Leopoldo is out of jail and breaking bricks with his head.  Is that more or less bizarre than the midgets?  You decide.

(The Buff clocks in to do a little work.  I don’t know about you guys, but I’m feeling kind of sexy.  I have no idea why.)

I’m sure you couldn’t tell from my post-party report, but I have to confess here that I am not a professional photographer.  I know, you had no idea, but it’s the truth.  The good news is that Combat Lifestyle’s Tracy Lee is a professional photographer and she was also at the party capturing all the action I missed, and doing so using a camera that was not the cheapest one she could find at Best Buy three years ago. 

To put it more succinctly, her photos are much better than mine.  Some of my personal favorites are after the jump, but you can head over to her UFC 96 pre-party gallery and see them all.

It wasn’t easy, but we’ve poured through your entries and selected the two we liked best to join us for some VIP fun at the Sugar Bar in Columbus, Ohio this Friday night as we get our UFC 96 pre-party on.  Your winners:

Vrax: we liked his Maker’s Mark-centric entry, and he did a lot of work on the Wiki for us and we don’t forget a friend like that.

Cariouslesions: there’s something about a Cage Potato reader who is in dental school and also subscribes to Fight! Magazine that we like.

Gentlemen, please send us an email at feedback@cagepotato.com with your real name and contact info and we’ll put you down on the guest list (+1).  See you Friday, 8:30 pm.

For those of you who didn’t win, this doesn’t mean we don’t like you.  It just means we don’t like you as much as Vrax and Cariouslesions, who are going to get to throw a few back with us, some UFC fighters and Octagon girls, and the guys from Fight! Magazine.  The rest of you can and should still swing by when the club opens to the public at 10 pm.  We’ll have t-shirts to give away and a ring girl contest for you to enjoy, and we’d love to make your acquaintance and then forget all about it in the morning.

Many of you have already submitted your entries to the Fight! Magazine/Cage Potato Pre-UFC 96 VIP party contest.  Looking through the forum thread, I have to say I’m impressed at the variety of methods you people came up with to prove your worthiness. 

Some of my favorites range from promising us drugs to telling us your sad, sad story to posting evidence of your frequent flier miles to pointing out that you are biologically a woman.  [Note: that last one may be rare and impressive enough by itself on an MMA forum, DutchAsFuck, but is much less so at a party with a ring girl contest going on.  Try again.]

As much as we’ve enjoyed hearing your pleas for fun, this must come to an end.  Tuesday we announce our winners, based on whatever the hell criteria we feel like, so get your entries in now if you haven’t already.  Hopefully that will give the lucky winners time enough to make the necessary plans while also allowing the rest of you to heal from the tremendous hurt you’ll have suffered.  And yes, if you win you will be permitted to bring one guest.  But choose wisely.  The friend you have who’s known for shooting tequila and puking on himself?  Even though you guys have been bros since fifth grade, maybe it’s best to leave him at home for this one.

The good news is that even if you don’t win you can still meet up with us when the club opens to the public at 10 pm.  The ring girl contest is set to pop off at around 11 so you’ll still get to see the good stuff, and we may even have a t-shirt or two left to give out by then.  If that doesn’t entice you enough, I’ll leave you with this: what do all three UFC Octagon Girls have in common?  No, it isn’t daddy issues.  Well, maybe it is.  But more importantly they’ll all be partying with Cage Potato and Fight! Magazine this Friday night.  Where will you be?

‘Sup, Potato Nation.  What are you guys up to next Friday night?  Just sitting around, painting your toenails and wishing it was Saturday already so you could watch UFC 96?  That’s a bummer, because we’ll be partying our asses off at a VIP party with Fight! Magazine at the Sugar Bar in Columbus, Ohio.

It’s no big deal, really.  Just us, the dudes from Fight Mag, a bunch of UFC fighters, an open bar, and a ring girl contest hosted by none other than Bruce Buffer himself.  See I lied, it’s totally a big deal!!!!

But we’re not telling you simply to brag about how big time we are.  We want you to come party with us to kick off the UFC 96 weekend, and two lucky Cage Potato readers will get the full VIP treatment – free drinks, hobnobbing with the stars (and, you know, us), the works.  To determine which two of you will receive this honor, we’re going to have ourselves an old-fashioned (really, really short) essay contest.

Simply tell us, in 100 words or less in this forum thread, why you think you deserve to hang with the stars and party it up in Columbus, Ohio before UFC 96.  Only entries in the forum thread will be considered, and to be eligible you should a) be 21 or over, and b) be reasonably capable of actually getting to Columbus on March 6.

(Somehow, even in these bleak economic times, this man still has a job.)

Houston Alexander has apparently heard internet rumors to the effect that he’s been dropped from the UFC or has fired his entire coaching staff or desperately needs to learn the ground game. Oh, wait. That last part’s not a rumor. Anyway, the point is, he’s sick of it. So to clear the air and talk directly to fans without the filter of the MMA media, he turned to the Fight Magazine MMA blog:

People keep asking me what my plans are, they have read things all over the internet about my future with the UFC and how I am firing my coaching staff. So I thought I would address the rumors and my upcoming plans.

NO – I have not lost my UFC contract.

NO – I have not fired my coaching staff.

NO – I am not going to step down and fight for smaller organizations.

The loss last month was tough, but life goes on. People need to remember that I have only been fighting professionally for a year and a half. I have made great strides during that time, as well as faced some setbacks. My training will continue and we are looking at visiting some of the larger camps for additional training and strategy for my next fight. I have a lot to learn and am hoping to have everything straightened out before I enter the cage next time.

Look Houston, you seem like a nice guy so it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for you, but maybe the part about firing your coaching staff isn’t so crazy. If three straight losses isn’t a sign that something needs to change, I don’t know what is. And as for strategy, it should probably include either getting really good at jiu-jitsu really fast, or at least developing a top notch takedown defense. After what we’ve all seen in your last few fights, you can bet that everyone you face will be intent on getting the fight to the ground until you prove that it’s a bad idea.

(Rickson. That’s all you need to know.)

FIGHT! Magazine‘s May issue just hit newsstands and features a list of the seven best fighters who never did battle in an Octagon. This exclusive excerpt showcases four of them, starting with the undefeated legend of the Gracie family…

RICKSON GRACIE
Career: ‘94-‘00
Record: 11-0
Prime: ’94-’97

Tournament Experience:
Rickson won both the 1994 and 1995 Vale Tudo Japan eight-man tournaments.

Key Victories:
“Zulu” Nascimento, Masakatsu Funaki, Yoshihisa Yamamoto

Why it never happened:
This one is easy to answer. Rickson should have been in the UFC because it was designed with him in mind. As the family’s recognized champion, Rickson was Rorion Gracie’s first choice to show the world what Jiu-Jitsu could do. It was only after a falling out between the two brothers that younger brother Royce was selected to represent the family in the UFC. Rickson did help train Royce for the event, and he eventually established himself in another arena: Vale Tudo Japan.

IGOR “ICE COLD” VOVCHANCHYN
Career: ‘95-‘05
Record: 51-10-1
Prime: ’96-’99

Tournament Experience:
Vovchanchyn is the winner of six eight-man tournaments, including three eight-man tournament titles and a four-man tournament in just sixty days. He competed in three other tournaments, losing in the semifinal or final bout.

Key Victories:
Kazushi Sakuraba, Mark Kerr (1-0-1), Gary Goodridge (2-0), Enson Inoue, Yuki Kondo

Key Losses:
Mark Coleman, Quinton Jackson, Mirko Filipovic, Mario Sperry, Alistair Overeem, Heath Herring

Why it never happened:
In 1996, Vovchanchyn’s name was mentioned for participation in the UFC 11 tournament, but visa issues kept the Ukrainian nightmare from ever stepping foot in the Octagon. Ironically, Mark Coleman went on to win that tournament. Like the PRIDE FC 2000 Grand Prix, he only fought twice that night to claim the title. Had Igor faced “Tank” Abbott in the semifinals, or Coleman in the final of UFC 11, we might be discussing a much different UFC history.

FIGHT! Magazine‘s February issue hits newsstands today, featuring a long cover-story on Brock Lesnar, steamy photos of Arianny Celeste, a behind-the-scenes look at American Top Team, and a profile of Jon Fitch. But our favorite article is “Mayhem’s Best & Worst,” where Jason “Mayhem” Miller describes what really goes into living as a fighter, from groupies to sponsorships to psycho fans. Check it out below, and then go out and buy the issue — trust us, it’s worth your $4.99.

MAYHEM’S BEST & WORST
By Jason “Mayhem” Miller

Flashing lights, TV screens, ring girls clamoring for your jockstrap; the world of fighting seems quite enjoyable from this particular angle. But we live in a three dimensional world where we sometimes have to look at things from all angles, even, at times, the ugly ones. I decided this month to dig down and inspect both the positive and negative aspects of being a professional mixed martial artist. Not that it’s a far journey for me; I don’t have to follow anybody around for a week documenting everything he does and how he feels at each moment. Well in a way, I suppose I do. So here goes my attempt at listing the best and worst parts of being a fighter.

BEST

Girls Girls Girls
Oh man, your teenage desires may all be met, if you are lucky and hardworking enough to become a popular MMAer. Hell, even if you don’t fight, you can ride the poon-tang wave caused by your buddy who made it into the fight game. Ask my friends, now that I’ve shacked up with my ol’ lady. Back in the day, I was the only fighter in my hood, so I was the fighter, until some local tools figured out that they too could get some booty by saying things like, “Yeah, I’m a blue belt. It’s kind of a big deal.” My lines were much more subtle, like “I’m sorry, what was your name, I get punched in the head for a living.” Girls are as dumb and horny as you are, so it is possible you could be in for a wild ride if you play your cards right.

Sponsorship
If it wasn’t for Triumph United, Pro-elite, and Osiris shoes, I would have been either panhandling or hookin’ on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to make ends meet during my recent sabbatical from the cage. Sponsors are like a beautiful welfare system for those addicted to violence. I cash in my food stamps on the first of every month so that I can support my habit for just a little while longer, and inject a fresh batch of face punching right into my vein. I hope my parents don’t read this and schedule an intervention.

Free Stuff
“Here Mayhem, I got this one.” I respond, “Okay,” without even pretending to reach for my wallet. Where were all these nice people when I was starving between training sessions? Ah well, best not to ask too many questions and just soak up the limelight while I can, until I have to buy my own over-priced filet mignon. “Dude, Mayhem, I just want to give you a t-shirt.” I respond, “Duh, okay,” adding another one to the ever-expanding pile in the back of my truck. If I would’ve known that at my age I would be running a goodwill donation center that specializes in fight fashion, I would’ve bought a bigger truck. I have enough skull printed fabric back there to decorate a haunted mansion for a decade.