According to LatinoReview, Georges St. Pierre, the UFC’s face guy sweet-boy dreamboat welterweight champion, who rules his division with a charming accent and boring decisions, has been cast as a villain in Captain America: Winter Soldier.  Meanwhile, word out of the Nick Diaz camp is that GSP only got the part because he was illegally greasing at the audition, and something seemed funny about his knuckle wraps. (*puts on “STOCKTON” hoodie, spray paints “209 FA LYFE DON’T BE SCARED HOMIE” on the side of abandoned check cashing store*)

GSP will play one of the villains, Batroc the Leaper!!!
Here is a bit of info on the character.
Batroc has no superhuman abilities, but is in peak physical condition in every respect. He is an Olympic-level weightlifter and has extraordinary agility and reflexes. His leg muscles are particularly well-developed which enables him to leap great distances with the strength of an Olympic athlete. He is an expert hand-to-hand combatant and specializes in savate (French-style kickboxing). He is also a skilled military tactician, having formerly been in the French Foreign Legion.
Batroc is an experienced thief and smuggler, who also speaks French and English. Although, as a mercenary, he does not hesitate to perform any number of criminal acts for his clients, Batroc has, by his own rights, a strong sense of honor, and he will turn against any client whom he feels has unfairly deceived him into committing crimes to which he might not otherwise have agreed. [LatinoReview]

Well that sounds like GSP. You know, except for the villain part. But I do like that one of Captain America’s nemeses is a French-Canadian. Who’s his boss, Gerard Depardieu? In fact, all of Captain America’s enemies should be offensive racial stereotypes. Maybe get Mickey Rooney back in his Breakfast at Tiffany’s make up, hire a drunk Russian like that one guy from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out – have it be like the It’s a Small World After All of malevolent, semi-racist caricatures. If Seth MacFarlane and Harmony Korine have proved anything, it’s that if you go half way, you’re an asshole. If you take it three steps further, you’re a genius.

And now, we go to Nick Diaz for comment:

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Along with not being able to keep track of space and time and his unique physiological response to arousal, another one of Steven Seagal’s quirks is not understanding “jokes” or “context.” So when Randy Couture jokingly said he’d come out of retirement to fight Seagal, Seagal issued a totally-not-joking response to Ariel Helwani that boiled down to “any time, any place.” Though he also added the conveniently prohibitive stipulations “no rules, no witnesses.”

So what does a 49-year-old former UFC champion think of a no-rules death-match challenge from a 60-year-old fondue enthusiast? CagePotato called him up to find out (emphasis mine):

“I’m the one that started the joke as an off-handed comment I made to Jay Glazer — that I’d only come out of retirement if it were to fight Seagal. Obviously now somebody has talked to him about it and it has gotten some legs,” Couture chuckled to us over the phone today.
“I’m not surprised that he wants to do it in private, remote location where nobody could see it happen. Obviously I intended it as a joke. I don’t think it would really happen.”
Couture is clearly bemused by the actor’s ominous-sounding statements. Asked if he was intimidated by Seagal’s claim that the fight would be truly no holds barred, Couture neatly replied, “I don’t think that changes the nature of the fight at all.”
So it’s safe to say that Couture is not going to take Seagal up on his battle-to-the-death challenge, then, right? “Hey, it could happen organically I suppose,” Couture ended, simply. [CP]

Randy Couture clearly doesn’t think much of Seagal’s supposedly deadly and illegal techniques, but that’s only because all Couture’s fights have been in a cage with pre-agreed-upon rules, not the kind of waffle house yakuza brawls that shaped Seagal’s style. Couture might sing a different tune if he were ever subjected to one of Steven Seagal’s brutal nipple locks. Do you know how many powerful men Seagal has brought low by controlling them at their weakest point? It’s a key tenet of Seagal’s martial arts teaching, “it is through the nipples that weakness leaves the body.” Some say he even derives magical powers from a necklace made from his enemies’ nipples that he always wears against his skin.

Couture forgets, Master Seagal has already defeated him once using powerful nipple magic.

Intrepid MMA reporter and my best Twitter pal Ariel Helwani had the chance to interview Steven Seagal yesterday, and as always, the old poonani-loving, Nobel Prize-deserving, sleeveless kimono-wearing, front-kicking, chicken killer did not disappoint (I meant Seagal there, in case that was unclear). First, he made sure to point out that welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre is good, but not great, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that GSP’s action movie star to humor du jour is Van Damme, while Seagal himself has long been humored by middleweight champ Anderson Silva, who may fight GSP at some point in the nearish future, in the MMA equivalent of Pacquiao-Mayweather. (With Van Damme and Seagal in their respective corners to help stretch their groins and execute proper karate kicks, I’m sure).

“I think [GSP] is a really nice guy,” said Seagal. “I think he is a good fighter and a good martial artist. Would I call him great? No.
“One of the things that a master looks at when they look at a fighter is the history of the fighter. When you look at the history of the fighter, you look at their very best fights, their best work, and their worst. If you look at Anderson’s worst fights, they’re not bad. He still looks pretty good.”
“If you look at GSP’s worst fight, you look at the thing he did with Shields in Canada, that was atrocious. I think that is very telling. I just didn’t think the technique and the fighting skill was there in that instance. I also saw him after the fight and he wasn’t looking or feeling very well either, which does have some meaning. I think he got hurt in that fight and whether he dominated him or not, I just didn’t think he looked good.”

Silva had two atrocious fights against Thales Leites and Demian Maia, and almost got wrestle-f*cked to a decision against Sonnen, so that’s just stupid. But as crappy as Seagal’s logic is, I wouldn’t argue that GSP is on the same level as Silva either. Also, I’ve buried the lede: Seagal also says he’s willing to fight retired former light-heavy and heavyweight champ (and budding action star) Randy Couture “any time, any place.” Oh pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, Dana White make this happen, this would be the best Christmas present EVER:

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What’s this? Oh, just Jean-Claude Van Damme helping Georges St. Pierre stretch out his groin muscles. What? Don’t look at me like that, that’s just what bros do, we help each other. What else do bros do? Well, according to Jean-Claude Van Damme, bros make epic video tributes to their bros, like the one you see below, editing together clips from their movies with clips from their bros’ MMA training. At least, that’s what JCVD did for his bro GSP. The groin stretching clips are set to epic opera choir music and overlaid with motivational quotes, by the way, as you do. Van Damme apparently produced this video and released it on the internet… just because.  In the dedication at the end of the video, Van Damme says:

“Hi Georges. The memories of our friendship, of a great country and a great city, Montreal, and a great team of people surrounding us, made of love, sports, health, and like I said … friendship.”

And then he punctuates the sentence fragment with a high kick, and shot freeze frames, goes to black and white, and fades out like an eighties TV show. This… this is real. Stunning.

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Apologies if you’ve seen this one before, but I hadn’t before today and I needed a lead-in for a mini-Seagal story. As you may have already gleaned from our

This is the Steven Seagal Movie Generator. Above is a randomly generated Steven Seagal film, along with its poster. Just press reload to generate yourself a new film.
The titles and plots are randomly assembled from the titles and plots of actual Steven Seagal films. Don’t believe me? Just look at Seagal’s Filmography.
Yep. It’s really that simplistic. And if you see a plot point that makes you say “There’s no way that was in the movie,” guess-a-freakin’-gain. All plot points have been taken from actual Seagal films.

My first try yielded “Shadows on the Wounds.”

Steven Seagal is a retired Navy Seal Ninja Chef who needs to stop a corrupt Oil Company Executive (played by Brian Cox ) from selling drugs to kids.
Seagal is joined by a LAPD Detective (played by Shawn Lawrence ). With the odds against them, can they prevent Brian Cox from fleeing the country?

Man, Brian Cox should be in everything. Try it for yourself. Meanwhile, in more newsy news, it seems that every MMA fighter now wants to fight Seagal, apparently undaunted by the fact that Steven Seagal invented the front kick.

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