It's good to be a fan of MMA these days. The sport is growing at an amazing pace and there are emerging talents across all divisions. Friday night was an opportunity to see some of this talent, at the Strikeforce Challengers Series 5 at Memorial Hall in Kansas City.

The main event featured a very impressive Tyron Woodley against Rudy Bears. Woodley is an extremely athletic fighter and it didn't take long to realize that Bears was in trouble. After getting a takedown he started to work for the arm-triangle choke. As soon as Woodley passed the guard and secured side control, the submission was on tight and Bears was forced to tap 2:52 into the first round.

Woodley is now unbeaten in six fights and five of them have been first round submissions. That is quite impressive and I look forward to seeing more of T-Wood, as he is called, in the future.

I really respect Strikeforce for promoting womens MMA and we have seen some great matches lately. On this card we saw Kerry Vera in a dominating performance against Kim Couture. Vera was successfull in neutralizing Coutures takedowns and displayed some very sharp striking. After freeing herself from a clinch, she unleashed a flurry of strikes that really punished Couture. Unable to defend against the damage, the referee wisely stopped the bout at 3:35 in the first round for a Vera TKO victory.



In other fights we saw Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante defeat Aaron Rosa with a TKO 3:25 into round two.

Fight of the Night was without a doubt Bobby Voelker against Erik Apple. Voelker survived an early onslaught and gradually gained control of the fight for a very impressive TKO victory.