UFC 111 Aftermath: Rodney Wallace Went For It Against Jared Hamman And Is Proud Of It

North Carolina based fighter Rodney Wallace lost another decision at UFC 111 against Jared Hamman.  Wallace stunned Hamman early, but seemed to fade a bit as the fight went on.  Wallace talks about the fight, why he fought the way he fought, and Joe Rogan's commentary:

I went for the kill. It was a calculated risk. You can do two things: you can sit back or you can go for it. A lot of people get criticized for not going for it. Like GSP, who is the ultimate fighter ever, but he gets criticized for playing it safe. This is a spectator sport, and you have got to try to fill out what the fans want see. If I sit back, and I lose or somebody plays it safe and they win, what do you want to see? I think I went forward, and I gave you what you wanted to see, and I didn’t try to sit back and just win. I really tried to take him out. If I would have set back or just jabbed and moved around, I would have been criticized for that. ‘Yeah, you can win, but you ain’t no fighter.’ You know, throughout all of that, I’m content with the way I fought the fight, and the judges are going to judge it however they are going to judge it."

Wallace did absolutely go for it, but extended a lot of energy in the process which prompted Joe Rogan to state that Wallace needs to lose some of his muscle mass:

"Everybody with a microphone doesn’t have something smart to say. You put a mic in front of somebody and that doesn’t make them a scholar. Joe don’t know (crap) about muscles or fatigue or how the heart reacts to the lungs. He has his opinion just like everybody else has his opinion. I’m sure he looks at me, and he sees a person that probably took a whole bunch of creatine or just stayed in the weight room, doesn’t do cardio, and just tries to get big to walk around on the beach and stuff like that. But, if he knew my whole life and how I got to where I’m at, how I got like this, or knew my conditioning, he wouldn’t have said that because, at the end of the day, he contradicted himself by saying I was going to get fatigued and then when I got the takedown, he said, ‘When you’re that muscular the takedown is easy.’ I’m like, ‘What’s it goin to be?’ Am I going to get fatigued or is the takedown going to be easy? It’s a contradiction, and at the end of hte fight, I still proved him wrong because I was the one still throwing the bombs at the end of the fight."

I can't speak on what Joe Rogan said, because I honestly couldn't hear what he was saying since I was a bar while the fight was on.  I will say that I think Rodney needs to drop down to the middleweight division.  Some of my thought process is based on his muscle mass.  The other part is based on him only being 5'9" tall or so.  He's already giving up a huge reach advantage to guys with great stand up skills once you crack the top ten of the division.  I think Wallace's style would be better suited for middleweight, since the fighters there tend to grapple a lot more than they strike. 

HT: TandD.com