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UFC Vegas 15 Preview: Anthony Smith – Devin Clark

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UFC Vegas 15 Preview: Anthony Smith – Devin Clark

Anthony Smith

In the co-main event of tomorrow night’s UFC Vegas 15 card, we have a light heavyweight contest which features a former title challenger. Anthony “Lionheart” Smith (33-16) will be taking on Devin “Brown Bear” Clark (12-4) in his 50th professional fight.

That number is truly astonishing considering the former UFC title challenger is only 32 years old. Nevertheless, Smith will be making the walk for the 50th time as he’s looking to bounce back after two consecutive losses in the octagon.

Clark on the other hand is looking to break into the UFC‘s top 15. The Jackson-Wink product has won back to back fights to push his overall record to 12-4. Clark has been tested in his UFC career against some of the best including Aleksandar Rakic and current champ, Jan Blachowicz.

Of course, Clark came up short in both of those fights. However, I’ve seen a lot of improvement in his last couple of outings. Sure, the competition level wasn’t extremely high, but he seems to be heading in the right direction.

Smith on the other hand is heading in the wrong direction. Two consecutive losses for Smith have had him contemplating his UFC career. Smith looked fantastic in the first couple of rounds against Glover Teixiera. However, since then, he’s been dominated in seven rounds since.

UFC Vegas 15 Preview

When thinking about the UFC Vegas 15 co-main event, this should be a win for Anthony Smith. However, the key word in that sentence is that it should be Anthony Smith. I really think Smith has a very solid overall game.

We’ve seen him look good on the feet and he’s shown off good submission skills in the UFC. However, he just looked completely out of it in his last fight against Aleksandar Rakic. Sure, he was hurt with leg kicks, but mentally he looked checked out.

Tomorrow night will all come down to which Anthony Smith we get. Devin Clark is going to push forward and try to take Smith down. We’ve seen Smith fold to the point where he accepts getting taken down then shows no urgency to get back up.

If that happens tomorrow night, we are going to see Clark pickup another decision win. However, if we see some urgency out of Smith, I think he can score enough points on the feet and win some scrambles to get the decision.

I think that this fight is going to go the distance. Again, UFC Vegas 15 will come down to which Anthony Smith we get. I think he’s going to show just enough urgency to squeak out an extremely narrow split decision, but I’m not confident in that pick.

Prediction: Anthony Smith by Split Decision

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Alistair Overeem stops Augusto Sakai at UFC Vegas 9

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Alistair Overeem stops Augusto Sakai at UFC Vegas 9

The UFC hosted it’s ninth event from the APEX this evening. It was a wild event and it all started way before the event started. The promotion lost several fights that left UFC Vegas 9 with just seven fights. Due to this, they decided to just have a fight card instead of having prelims and a main card.

In the main event of the evening Alistair Overeem (47-18, 1 NC) took on Augusto Sakai (15-2-1) in a fight that was massive for the UFC‘s heavyweight division. Both men were looking to take another step towards a future shot at the heavyweight crown.

Overeem Continues Final UFC Run

In a back and forth battle, Alistair Overeem was able to stop Augusto Sakai. This fight all came down to the experience of Overeem. This is a massive UFC win for Overeem who is in the twilight of his professional career.

Early on in the main event of UFC Vegas 9, Augusto Sakai was getting the better of Overeem. Overeem, the decorated striker, was getting outstruck on the feet. Sakai was doing a fantastic job of using blitzes to stifle Overeem against the fence.

However, halfway through the fight, Overeem made the winning adjustment. He started taking Sakai down. Once Overeem got Sakai down, Sakai really had no answer. Overeem got Sakai down in the fifth round for the final time and earned his second UFC main event victory of 2020.

For the second straight fight, Overeem had to battle adversity. However, Overeem was able to overcome it to win the fight. At 40 years old, Overeem is trying for one final run at the UFC heavyweight title.

 

 

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The Big Edge at Aria Resort & Casino (Las Vegas, Nevada)

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The Big Edge at Aria Resort & Casino (Las Vegas, Nevada)
Industrial Goods & Manufacturing
Image by @CarShowShooter
Nancy Rubins’ “Big Edge” sculpture combines over 200 aluminum canoes, kayaks, rowboats, and sailboats, each weighing between 60 and 125 pounds, into one flowering cluster of art. Built in 2009 and still standing today, Big Edge stands at a length of 75 feet and brightens up the day of every visitor to the CityCenter. Described as a “bouquet” and a “big metal flower,” Big Edge is the epitome of Nancy Rubins’ sculpture art, which specializes in clustering airplane parts, water heaters, and other industrial consumer goods into blooming bundles. Big Edge has also been described as “gravity-defying,” as thousands of pounds of stainless steel are used to make the sculpture appear as if it’s hovering above the ground. Although Rubins claims that Big Edge has no explicit meaning, its “boats on dry land” concept does draw attention to the troubling difficulties of building a verdant, lush metropolis in the center of an arid desert.
www.atlasobscura.com/places/big-edge

Nancy Rubins transforms industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, boats—into the building blocks of her physically commanding monumental sculptures. This sculpture, for example, features numerous and varied canoes and rowboats, arranged around a large steel armature, like many leaves on the limb of a tree. Miyamoto provided structural design services for a large and irregular sculpture adjacent to a roadway. The design consisted of a development of performance-based design criteria, code-compliance, 3-D dynamic analysis, contractibility, completeness and quality. One of the most important tasks of the process is the communication of the response characteristics of the structure with the client. For structures where design response limits are not well defined in building codes, it is important to have limitations that satisfy the artist and engineer and be established and reliably quantified in the design process.
miyamotointernational.com/work-detail/big-edge-by-nancy-r…

Nancy Rubins (born 1952 in Naples, Texas) is an American sculptor and Installation artist. Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects. Works such as Big Edge at CityCenter in Las Vegas contain over 200 boat vessels. Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, contains 66 used aluminum boats and rises to a height of 30 ft. Rubins was born in Naples (Texas) and grew up in Tullahoma, Tennessee. She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where she received her BFA in 1974, and then at the University of California, Davis where she received her MFA in 1976. Rubins currently resides in Topanga, California and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1982 to 2004.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Rubins