Before Shogun vs. Machida went down at UFC 104, I tirelessly drew every comparison that I could to Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon. When I first mentioned it, people said it was genius. No, genius would be finding the guy that convinced Kawajiri to rock a fish-net, black hoodie at Dream 15. That guy should get a Nobel Peace Prize. When the rematch was announced for UFC 113, everyone’s head detonated in sheer excitement leaving a bloody mess for their roommate to clean up. I managed to keep my head intact and reminded everyone that having Lyoto Machida vs. Shogun Rua was synonymous to that epic battle scene at the end of Berry Gordy’s film that pitted The Last Dragon vs. The Shogun of Harlem. If you weren’t born in the early 80s, I suggest you find the nearest flux capacitor equipped Delorean (or alternatively you can yell at your mother for not having premarital sex much earlier). We were all really watching Lyoto ‘The Last Dragon’ Machida vs. Shogun ‘The Shogun of Harlem’ Rua. It was like Joe Silva tapped into our childhood and extracted the one memory that didn’t involve Voltron, getting bullied in school or Alf.
After correcting the ‘Machida error’ that we all witnessed at UFC 104, Shogun seemed to be on a path that involved systematically destroying anyone out there at 205lbs. However, a prior knee injury from UFC 76 was apparently re-aggravated in his first round KO of Lyoto Machida. According to Eduardo Alonso, it seemed that Shogun Rua was healing faster than expected and that he would be ready ‘sooner than expected’. That’s not genetics. It’s called a ‘healing factor’ and some geek out there created an entire Wikipedia entry about it including every comic book character that has it. That’s why when the rumor surfaced earlier today that Shogun Rua was injured due to some nutty injury we had a feeling it wasn’t true. Shogun’s manager, Eduardo Alonso, shared our same belief. Now we have multimedia proof Shogun Rua is in fact alright and he’s schooling pads at King’s MMA in Huntington Beach, California. [Source]
