CroCop: "Overeem needed putting back in his place"
February 4th 2013
It wasn’t only Brazilians who celebrated Antonio ‘Bigfoot’ Silva’s win over Alistair Overeem on Saturday night. The third-round KO caused a certain Croatian heavyweight to jump out of his seat in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Shortly afterwards, Mirko ‘CroCop’ Filipovic was sitting down in his Zagreb home to explain to his Facebook friends why he was so happy to see Overeem get finished like that. It wasn’t because Overeem nearly kneed his testicles into a living death at DREAM 6, but rather on grounds of sportsmanship.
“I wasn't surprised by Silva's victory at all and I had believed he would win. I don't want to come off as a smart-ass or say I knew it all along, so I'll explain why I'd believed so. First, Silva is a big tough guy with a huge heart who had demolished Fedor and he needs no better reference than that and Alistair hugely underestimated him and belittled him with his arrogant statements, so this motivated Silva in the best possible way,” he wrote.
“Second, Silva is a natural heavyweight, and Alistair - for the first time since way back in 2007, when he began to gain huge weight – fought without the drugs he had used constantly for years, including testosterone and all the other shit that goes with it.
"Watching the weigh-in, I saw that his muscle-mass was nowhere near usual. He had the weight, but he wasn't nearly as carved out and defined, since he couldn't take anything because he was watched by the Athletic Commission. This also reflects on the psyche of a man who's been using stuff to increase his strength, endurance, pain tolerance and aggressiveness for years, and now there was none of that.
“Alistair is an excellent fighter, but he still owes that excellence to something that's dirty and forbidden and, in the end, very dangerous to health. But I don’t think he is concerned by any of that, he wanted success at any cost.
“And the third reason is, Alistair had behaved so arrogantly that someone needed to put him back in his place. His belittling of Silva was repulsive, saying that after beating up Silva he'd go for the belt, and at the weigh-in and entering the arena he acted like he invented the fighting sport. He's been behaving with so much arrogance lately that I'm glad Silva put him back in his place and taught him a lesson! Congratulations Silva, from the heart!”
http://www.fightersonlymag.com/content/news/18209-crocop-qovereem-needed-putting-back-in-his-placeq