The Weekly Wrap: June 26 - July 2

Odds and Ends

• The latest indicators for business sparked by recent UFC pay-per-view offerings look promising. The Wrestling Observer reported that UFC 114, headlined by Quinton Jackson vs. Rashad Evans, looks to have tied UFC 66 for the second-highest buy rate in UFC history at 1.05 million buys. UFC 115 two weeks later, headlined by Chuck Liddell vs. Rich Franklin, did an early estimate of 520,000 buys. Both numbers are well above expectations and put the UFC on track to break the record it set last year for most pay-per-view buys drawn by a single company in one year (about 8 million).

• The next step for “Rampage” Jackson in the UFC looks to be Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, as several sites reported the fight as agreed to, likely for September or October. Jackson reportedly turned down a fight with Lyoto Machida; he wrote on his Twitter that the matchup did not interest him because it would produce a boring fight. UFC President Dana White pushed back at the idea in remarks to the media, saying the Machida fight remains a possibility. As for the champion of the light heavyweight division, Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, White said the Brazilian will be out until March due to knee surgery.

• Consider it a signal of the kind of hurdles the UFC faces in Germany, a country in which it was recently banned from television. One of Germany’s biggest newspapers is holding a media conference in October that includes a discussion on MMA entitled “When Sport is Close to Murder,” according to a report from BloodyElbow.com. The newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, has rebuffed requests from the UFC’s U.K. office to offer counterpoints during the discussion. The UFC has reportedly been eying a November return to Germany, in part to demonstrate that it will not easily be deterred from expanding into countries unfamiliar and uncomfortable with MMA. UFC 99 in June 2009 in Cologne, the company’s only event in Germany, was met with hysterical media coverage due to the violence of the sport and its effects on youth.

• The UFC announced it has signed Korean Top Team middleweight Dongi Yang, a 27-year-old with a 9-0 record. His debut has not been announced, but the UFC’s decision to sign him appears to be part of an effort to generate buzz in South Korea, a market the promotion has eyed in the past year.