Urijah Faber is gearing up for competition once again but this time it won’t take place inside of the Octagon but rather on the grappling mats.
The UFC Hall of Famer is slated to take on fellow Hall of Famer and MMA Legend Kazushi Sakuraba in a grappling contest when the two fighters captain two out of four teams in Quintet.
This grappling concept is slated to go down in Sin City at The Orleans Arena on Oct. 5. This is the first bout announced for the show that will air on the UFC’s streaming service, UFC Fight Pass.
Faber decided to hang up his gloves in December of 2016 in his hometown of Sacramento. As for the reasons for his retirement, it was due to a waning passion for the actual fights as well as still having his health.
Since then, he has stayed busy by doing commentary work on the first season of Dana White’s Tuesday Night Contender Series Snoopcast and remaining an integral part of Team Alpha Male as both coach and training partner.
On the flip side, Sakuraba has a track record that is unbelievable as it all started over two decades ago that was highlighted when he won the UFC Japan heavyweight tournament in 1997. He would later fight in PRIDE where he picked up a win over Royce Gracie, which marked the first pro-MMA loss for the MMA Legend in a legendary 90-minute fight in the 2000 Openweight Grand Prix. The last fight that saw Sakuraba compete as a pro-MMA fighter was back in 2015 where he suffered a loss to Shinya Aoki
Faber stated in a recent interview that the matchup with Sakuraba is an honor.
“For me, Sakuraba was my favorite fighter when I first got into the sport,” Faber said at a Quintet media day Monday at the UFC Performance Institute (transcript courtesy of MMAFighting). “I had a two-hour VHS tape of Sakuraba and all his crazy stuff. He was doing crazy double flying chops with both hands and undressing the Gracie family one shoulder at a time and probably my favorite fight of all-time was when he fought in Heroes and was rocked and kind of out of it, and they stopped him and kind of shook him in bounds. The guy’s incredible. I think he and I both have 19 submissions, which is close to the record in UFC, WEC, Strikeforce and PRIDE combined. So for me, this is awesome man, it’s a dream come true.”
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