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| December 2009
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| Below you will find all the archived news for December 2009. For current news, please visit our HOME page.
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| 12.04.09
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Tonight at the U.S. Cellular Coliseum fans will have the chance to meet the fighters and watch the weigh-ins! Local rock band Protégé will be there playing and the Coliseum will have drink specials at the bar! Admission is $5 and it all starts at 6pm!
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| 12.03.09
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"Clash at the Coliseum," coming Saturday to Bloomington's U.S. Cellular Coliseum, will pair off contestants in an eight-sided cage and feature various forms of boxing, wrestling and martial arts.
One cage. Eight sides. Two fighters. Multiple fight techniques. No dull spots.
Add 'em all up, and the sum total is: mixed martial arts, the full contact combat sport making its debut this weekend at Bloomington's U.S. Cellular Coliseum. Dubbed "Clash at the Coliseum," the event at 6:30 p.m. Saturday will thunder along through 20 fights pitting a legion of local/regional fighters vying for eight title belts. While not a first for Bloomington-Normal, the event is the first for the Coliseum.
All concerned are betting that it won't be the last, with more titanic Clashes envisioned for the future.
The event is the brainchild of TJ Mohler, who runs the Bloomington-based Hive MMA and has promoted past events at area venues, including Bloomington's Interstate Center and Pekin's Dragon Dome. This, however, is the biggest Hive showing to date, with the buzz already high among area aficionados of the no-holds-barred action. "This is the perfect venue to take the sport to the next level," Mohler says. "We have quality fighters and we really take the time to make sure we have great match-ups."
The initiated don't need to be told what will be happening in that octagonal cage Saturday night.
But for the lay person who doesn't know Spike TV from the hunk of iron holding down a railroad track, here's the lowdown.
Simply put, mixed martial arts, says Mohler, can be viewed as a more refined outgrowth of the late-'70s Toughman craze -- the notorious sport that pitted novice amateur fighters against each other in a kind of wild frontier ambience (it even spawned the 1979 Dennis Quaid movie, "Tough Enough").
The MMA's trademark octagonal cage isn't for animalistic appearances, by the way; it's for safety's sake, notes Mohler, freed of a traditional boxing ring's tangle-prone ropes.
When MMA action took hold locally around 10 years ago, Mohler says, "the fights being staged were not sanctioned and what they were doing was similar to Toughman contests."
The sanctioned era began around 2˝ years ago with Mohler's first Interstate Center event on June 9, 2007. Attendance at that event and others ranged from 500 to 2,200, he says, and has been growing in popularity since.
Mohler, a Logan County native who moved to Bloomington following his high school graduation in 1997, comes from a tae kwon do/judo background that left his elbow shattered and competition days numbered. "I reached a point where the mind was willing, but the body was not," he says, which led him into the martial arts academy business and, eventually, MMA promotion.
When he began, "it was a very dirty sport -- a cutthroat world."
Ever since, Mohler's goal, he says, has to been to "lead the way in looking for safe venues and shows to take my teams to."
That striving for quality concurrent with delivering the MMA goods spectators want will be in full flower, he says, at the Coliseum debut.
The profile of a Hive fighter can't be pinned down to any one type, though Mohler does get the quota of "kids that like to fight on the street, and come in with attitude and a lot of aggression." In the most successful scenario, "training takes the fight out of them, as far as their wanting to scrap on the street."
At the other end of the spectrum, "there's the guy from Pekin who makes over $100,000 a year and doesn't have to fight, but loves it anyway -- he's a different kind of animal, not a street fighter but a technical student of the game." Street fighter or technician or someone in between, that eight-sided cage levels the field to a pair of rigorously trained fighters going at it with all the concentration and strategy, says Mohler, of an intensely thought-out chess match.
With non-stop kicks, punches and body blows for good measure.
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| -- Dan Craft of Pantagraph.com
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