Midnight Mania! Sonnen Reveals Shocking Silva Tattoo

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Welcome to Midnight Mania!

UFC fighter tattoos are more common than most would expect. A fan recognizes a great champion or great moment with some artwork on their skin, hardly an unheard of homage in this day and age. Even UFC fighters like Cody Garbrandt have artwork of their combat sports heroes, as “No Love” has a portrait of Arturo Gatti on his leg. I know of one example of a UFC fighter with another UFC fighter inked on them as well: UFC Featherweight Andre Fili paid respects to his lifelong coach Urijah Faber with a portrait as well.

Still, the image above stands out as something special. To my knowledge, I cannot think of any time a defeated athlete put a full-on portrait of the man who bested them twice on their body. Truly, Chael Sonnen is an innovator, and there are certainly worse fighters to have on your tricep than the legendary Anderson Silva.

For anyone who wasn’t following the sport ten years ago, Sonnen challenged Silva twice for the Middleweight title in 2010 and 2012, ultimately coming up short each time. Between the fights, Sonnen was constantly badgering Silva and talking about as much trash as is humanly possible. The two have been on friendly terms for a while, but things got pretty ugly.

In short, this makes the Tyron Woodley vs. Jake Paul tattoo bet look like child’s play!

In this modern Internet age, there’s a lot of questions flying about. One commenter points out that there’s no swelling, which is definitely a cause for investigation. This could certainly be a case of photoshop or AI or even simple henna — it’s tough to tell solely through a filtered Instagram picture. Sonnen is not above stretching the truth to make some noise!

Perhaps we’ll find out for sure the next time Sonnen is in front of a live camera.

Insomnia

A Valentina Shevchenko vs. Sean Strickland shooting contest is the dumbest thing I’ll ever watch the Twitter highlights of.

If you didn’t see Slava Borshchev vs. Nadim Saydkhov on the UFC 295 “Prelims,” you missed out!

Wrestling tends to run in the family.

Francis Ngannou vs. Anthony Joshua is distinctly more possible now then it was six months ago.

Cancel culture strikes again!

Paul Craig didn’t really give any shocking answers here, but the clip still made me chuckle a bit.

Some killer Alex Pereira art!

Slips, rips, and KO clips

“The Bone Saw” is a great nickname, especially if she makes a habit of winning via armbar.

You can tell both men were exhausted by this point, but Smotherman made the finish happen anyway!

A switch high kick sneaks through the guard:

Random Land

Nuclear reactors at work.

Midnight Music: Indie, 1999

Sleep well Maniacs! More martial arts madness is always on the way.