Jerome Le Banner

('It's not a skirt, you assholes.  The Romans wore these. Read a book.')

The surprises just keep coming for the New Year’s Eve K-1 Dynamite show.  Jerome Le Banner is sick with the flu and has been forced to pull out of his fight with Mark Hunt, and Melvin Manhoef has agreed to take his place.  Despite the incredible weight difference between the heavyweight Hunt and the sort of middleweight Manhoef, the two will fight an MMA bout under “Dream rules” for three five-minute rounds.  

Is it a good idea for Manhoef, a vicious striker with an almost non-existent ground game to face a much heavier and damn near impossible to knock out fighter like Hunt, who also packs a serious wallop of his own?  Short answer: no.  No, it is probably not a good idea.  Especially on short notice.  But unlike many of the other bad ideas on the Dynamite NYE show, this one I’d actually love to see. 

Dammit, Japan.  Just when I want to curse your lack of rules and regulations, you go and do something like this to leave me more conflicted than ever.  I just can’t quit you.

In other news…

(Jerome would like to know if you're going to finish that baguette.)

MMA Weekly is reporting that Affliction is in negotiations with French kickboxer Jerome Le Banner, with the intention of setting up a fight between the former K-1 star and Tim Sylvia for Affliction's third MMA show (early '09, location TBA). According to Le Banner's agent Alan Kermorvan, "We have been talking with Tom Atencio for about two weeks about this possibility...I'm pretty sure we can work out something pretty quickly, it’s just not signed yet."

Though he never held a title in K-1, Le Banner holds notable kickboxing wins over Peter Aerts, Ernesto Hoost, Gary Goodridge, Don Frye, Mark Hunt, and Hong Man Choi. He is 3-1-1 as a mixed martial artist, with his last MMA fight resulting in a first-round knockout victory over Jimmy Ambriz at K-1 Hero's 4 in March 2006.

A matchup between Sylvia and JLB would represent the culmination of a rather-entertaining war of words that's gone on for the last couple years, which began with Le Banner publicly dissing the Maine-iac for being a boring fighter with overrated striking. Sylvia responded by challenging Le Banner to a fight on his home turf, but the match didn't come together due to Le Banner's refusal to sign an exclusive, multi-fight deal with the UFC. In an interview with Fighthype last December, Le Banner referred to Sylvia as "big sausage," and called him "so ugly and annoying."

In addition to Affliction's pursuit of Le Banner, Tom Atencio told MMANews.com that he's interested in signing Sergei Kharitonov, the heavyweight PRIDE standout who was briefly rumored to be fighting Antonio Silva for EliteXC's heavyweight title.