It’s been a big summer for Glory World Series. The European kickboxing organization ran an excellent event in May, then positioned themselves as one of the clear top 2 kickboxing organizations in the world with their merger with It’s Showtime. Now, Glory is looking ahead to the future, and they’ve got some excellent news for us.
On November 3 in Rome, Glory will present the finals of the 2012 70kg Grand Prix tournament they started in May. This will be a one night, 8 man tournament, with the winner walking away the Glory 2012 champion. Here are the tournament participants:
Giorgio Petrosyan
Albert Kraus
Robin van Roosmalen
Shemsi Beqiri
Ky Hollenbeck
Tim Thomas
Davit Kiria
Sanny Dahlbeck
Clearly the big name here is Petrosyan. The 2009 and 2010 K-1 MAX Grand Prix champion is the undeniable #1 fighter at 70kg in the world. He hasn’t lost a fight since 2007, and is the heavy favorite to win this. His involvement also makes this the definitive 70kg tournament of 2012, as K-1 is also in the midst of their GP, but the lack of Petrosyan makes it a bit harder to view that winner as #1 in the world.
The dark hose here is Robin van Roosmalen. He’s coming off a cut stoppage loss, but remains one of the very few fighters out there who poses a legitimate threat to Petrosyan. That’s THE big fight at 70kg right now – let’s hope it happens on November 3.
Glory also has issued a response to K-1’s claims regarding fighter pay, which we’ll cover in the full article.
As we previously reported, there has been a bit of nasty back and forth between K-1 and Glory / It’s Showtime as of late. It’s Showtime head Simon Rutz publicly attacked K-1, claiming his fighters had not been paid for taking part in K-1’s May event in Madrid, prompting K-1 to respond by placing the blame on Rutz for not providing proper payment info.
Now that they own It’s Showtime, Glory has gotten involved. They still place the blame on K-1’s shoulders, and note that Rutz is still owed money, but to me, the big issue here has always been fighter pay. And Glory confirms that now all the It’s Showtime fighters who competed for K-1 in May have in fact been paid. So the fighters have been paid, and whoever’s fault it was that they were paid late doesn’t particularly interest me. With this news, let’s hope we can move past this organizational feuding and put the focus back on the fights.
One last piece of Glory news – they confirmed that It’s Showtime will still have two shows in 2012, one this weekend in Spain, and one later this year in Brazil. Both will still take place under the It’s Showtime brand, not Glory. So for now at least, Glory will be maintaining the two as separate brands. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, and we’ll get the first look at it this weekend at the It’s Showtime Spain show.
Read Glory’s full statement here
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