Throwback Thursday Part II: Jose Aldo vs Mike Thomas Brown, World Extreme Cagefighting 44 November 18, 2009 youtube/watch?v=8GRanq_Mj6M World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) was started in 2001 as a rival MMA promotion to the UFC, based out of the Tachi Palace Hotel and Casino in California. In the early 2000’s it was home for many future and former UFC stars including Carlos Condit, Chael Sonnen, Brian Stann, Karo Parisyan, Nick Diaz, Frank Shamrock, Chris Leben and more. In 2006 Zuffa, the company that owns the UFC, run by the Feritta brothers and Dana White purchased the WEC. They disbanded all the weight-classes above Lightweight, folding them into the UFC. They kept Lightweight as kind of a minor league and there they developed future UFC stars like Ben Henderson. The WEC also became home to the highest profile Featherweight and Bantamweight divisions in North American MMA. In 2009 at Featherweight a new champion was establishing himself. Mike Thomas Brown had defeated the WEC’s poster boy and longtime Featherweight champion Urijah Faber to earn the belt in November of 2008, and defended the belt twice, including a rematch with Faber. Just over a year after winning his title Brown, considered the #1 Featherweight in the world at the time, faced a young Brazilian named Jose Aldo, who in just under a year had gone on a 5-0 tear through the WEC’s Featherweight division. They stepped in the cage together in the fall of 2009 and the rest is history.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 13:32:48 +0000
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