Wow. On a list of places you didn’t think that you would see a UFC anytime soon, Abu Dhabi is probably pretty high up there. From Hughes’ Blog:

“I didn’t know if I could say anything about my next fight, but I see that Dana has let the cat out of the bag. So I can tell you what I know, on April 10th I will be fighting Renzo Gracie in Abu Dhabi. I haven’t signed any paperwork and I don’t think Renzo has either; but I think this fight is going to happen. That’s all I know, serious training will start for me at the new year.”

We’ve been on record as saying that this fight doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from the UFC’s prespective. They will play up the Gracie family tradition and how Hughes beat Royce back at UFC 60. However, if Hughes was serious about making another run, he would be fighting one of the 450 guys who have called him out over the last six months.

Instead, we are going to get a fight that is designed for Matt Hughes to win. The idea for putting this fight in a new market is probably to put a card based on the history of the sport in the middle east for the first time. When you talk about the early days of the UFC, you have to talk about the Gracie’s and when you talk about the next generation of stars after Royce and Shamrock, you talk about Matt Hughes.