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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
At UFC 114 on Saturday night, a year's worth of trash talking and hype leads to one of the biggest grudge matches finally taking place between Quinton "Rampage" Jackson and Rashad Evans.
A lot has been said about Rampage's desire to continue fighting after his public spat with Dana White last fall, stemming from him taking the role in the A-Team movie, but it's the trash talking from Evans that has brought out a motivated and now in shape Rampage to the cage.
"That's the wrong way, that's a bad idea," Rampage said this week, responding to a question of whether Evans has tried to play mind games with him from the outset. "It motivated me to train harder than I ever trained. When I fought Wanderlei [Silva], I trained really hard. After that fight, I thought, 'I didn't think I could train so hard.'
"For this one, I trained way harder. I trained like it was a championship fight, five rounds. And then after my last round, I wanted another. It was motivation. I'm glad he did it. It was a bad idea to get under my skin."
He wasn't in the greatest shape when he began his training camp for this fight, letting himself get to 251 lb. But with the help of his strength and conditioning coach Mike Dolce, a motivated Rampage has gotten into the best shape of his career.
The last two weeks have been crazy," Dolce said in an interview with MMAFighting.com. "It's sick what he's been able to do. He's a scary man when he's in this kind of shape."
"Quite honestly we had the worst Rampage eight weeks ago, and we're going to have the absolute best Rampage come fight night, which is amazing. He's having fun and he's in a great place right now, but at the same time, he's an angry, bitter man. He's got that dichotomy of character that a lot of athletes don't have. He has that switch in his head and he's in shape, so Saturday night is going to be a scary night for Rashad Evans."
Come fight night, Rampage says he's trained for this fight to go only one way, and that's all he can see when he's thinking about the fight.
"I trained to finish this fight, I trained to destroy Rashad," he said. "I'm not focused on a crazy gameplan, gameplan's out the window… I trained to destroy."
Now that the fight is a day away, Rampage is ready to get this over with and finish the fight on Saturday.
"I'm done with all the trash talk. I'm gonna let my fists do the talking."
Penick's Analysis: I'm still seeing this one ending by a Rampage KO. Rashad may be in great shape and great condition himself, but Rampage has taken on tougher competition in his career, taken damage from harder hitters and he's battled better wrestlers. That's not to say Rashad has no ways of winning this fight, but I don't think he's got the power to knock out Rampage, despite his KO of Chuck Liddell back in '08. I hope this fight can live up to the hype, because it can't be any more anticipated at this point.
RELATED STORY: UFC 114 NEWS: Quinton "Rampage" Jackson says his year long layoff was good for his body: [CLICK TO READ FULL ARTICLE]
[Quinton "Rampage" Jackson art by Cory Gould (c) MMATorch.com]
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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