“For me, it’s not a title performance. For me, I don’t think about the title. What I want is to beat B.J. Penn. I want to beat the name.” –- Georges St. Pierre at the UFC 94 press conference.
"I won't know. Will it be because Kenny Florian called me out? As soon as I'm done, I beat him and then Diego Sanchez calls me out and then I beat him and then there is going to be the next guy and it is just a never-ending thing. What if I want to walk away and then all the fans say, 'You owe it to us to fight again. You won the title. You owe this to us.' It is just going to be crazy after I kick Georges' ass." -- Penn on the future to Men's Lifestyle Magazine.
"I wanted something flashy, and I paid for this… I felt like very comfortable. And, again, I paid for this." -- Andrei Arlovski to Sherdog.com on his loss to Fedor Emelianenko.
"If Fedor wants to keep winning, and winning well, he needs to train professionally. Right now he won with his old tricks. The fact that Fedor won, don't get me wrong, I'm very happy about. But he won this fight because of the training before this fight. The experience he had before this fight. The trainers did everything we could to get him ready. But for title fights, we can't train the way we trained for this one." -- Emelianenko trainer Vladimir Voronov to SI.com.
"If Fedor doesn't care than neither do I. If he wants to come over and fight the best in the world then that's cool with me. At the end of the day, if Fedor wants to fight here I'm here, if he doesn't I don't care." -- UFC President Dana White to ESPN Radio 1100.
"Oscar de la Hoya… is in nearby Anaheim where his company got a $5 million fee form a T-shirt maker so that he would be personally involved in the promotion of a mixed martial arts show. It would take that much, Jim, to get me to go to one of those things" -- veteran HBO boxing announcer Larry Merchant during HBO broadcast of Shane Mosley vs. Antonio Margarito fight that ran head-to-head with Affliction. Both shows had involvement from Golden Boy Promotions.
"The fact is Oscar is now really ticked off, because Oscar didn't make a penny, and, in fact, paid for his own expenses [to attend the show]."-- CEO Richard Schafer to Sherdog.com.
"The $5 million was the number thrown out. There was not a discussion on how that precisely was allocated or how it was branded. Is it a little bit glib or short-handed to say that Golden Boy got $5 million and Oscar had to be there? Yeah. Yeah. I'm on television and I'm trying to tell a story as tightly as I can." –- Larry Merchant to Sherdog.com.
“… This is hard for someone with my experience to compute. When somebody says ‘$5 million sponsorship,’ I have a different interpretation. This never even occurred to me that Affliction was the guys behind this and that Golden Boy was just putting its brand on it and was not taking any risk and would make money on the end. This is a whole new financial model from what I’ve known in boxing.” –- Merchant to Sherdog.com after being told Affliction was the promoter of the event, not just a sponsor.
"I'm trying not to think about the fans. No offense to the fans, but they're a little bit ignorant and they have no idea the pain that I was enduring. For them to think I was looking for a way out -- I fought close to 13 minutes with a broken hand and foot and I could've easily quit the fight before that. Why would I endure all that pain just to quit? I'm not a quitter. I'm a fighter. I'm a champion and I'm going to try and defend my title to the death." -- WEC lightweight champion Jamie Varner on Sherdog Radio Network’s "Beatdown" show.
"I'm starting to wonder that myself. It hurts. I hope. I'm training. I wanna whip ass. I love to fight. It is what I do… right now I'm just feeling like a really old 34-year-old man. But I'm not done. F--- that. I'm not done." -- an emotional Jens Pulver asked whether he is still relevant following loss to Urijah Faber, Pulver's third straight.
"When I was younger I was the worst person in the world. If someone did anything wrong to me, I immediately wanted to kill them. I would never have reached the fighting level I got to if I was a good guy… When I started there were only criminals to fight against, I confronted a human jungle. And to kick an animal's ass you must be worse than it, which is my case. Man is the worst animal on the face of Earth." -- the late Helio Gracie to Gracie Magazine in 2005.
The Week Ahead
There will be plenty to chew on as the broad implications of the GSP vs. Penn superfight come into focus.