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UFC Hall of Famer Chuck Liddell has been an important part of Glover Teixeira’s career since the beginning and is in part responsible for the Brazilian’s emergence as one of the top 205ers in MMA.

Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz have each worn the UFC light heavyweight championship, so the trio know a thing or two about what it takes to become the best.

Saturday night, fellow former champs Mauricio “Shogun” Rua and Lyoto Machida will each have a chance to position themselves for a future title shot. Rua will meet Brandon Vera and Machida takes on Ryan Bader at UFC on Fox 4.

Recently, Liddell, Couture and Ortiz were asked to give their opinion on each 205-pound encounter.

Liddell on Rua vs. Vera:

I like ‘Shogun’ in this one. I think the incentive to get a shot at his belt will really make him come out all guns blazing and of course he can hit. I expect to see the best Vera we’ve seen in a long time, but I think ‘Shogun’ has this.

Couture on Rua vs. Vera:

Rua is still one of the top contenders for the belt and should be feeling the pressure to impress on the night. He has to be favored to win this – he’s the guy with more big wins, championship experience, and he’s the one with serious ambitions of being a two-time UFC champion at the weight. It is Rua’s fight, but don’t discount the upset.

Ortiz on Rua vs. Vera:

This is ‘Shogun’s’ fight to lose. He has the advantage, he has the experience, and he must feel that he can win the title back and won’t want to miss out on that shot. I think ‘Shogun’ should win, but Vera winning would be a heck of a story, and if he can do it, good for him.

Liddell on Machida vs. Bader:

Bader has to take him down and not get caught on the way in. I’m going for Machida to catch him coming in and stopping him.

Couture on Machida vs. Bader:

For Bader, the real challenge is finding out a way to get to Machida consistently. I think Bader needs to get the takedown very quickly in the fight before Machida hits his stride or he will have problems.

Ortiz on Machida vs. Bader:

With Bader, I had my way with him (Ortiz won by submission). I landed a big shot and tapped him out with a choke, but I think losing like that made him make adjustments and I think he can still be a champion some day. I think Bader could take this.

Photo credit: Esther Lin/MMA Fighting

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell offered up his selection for Saturday’s super-fight between UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva and long-time nemesis Chael Sonnen via Twitter recently.

Anderson Silva RT @DT_Hanmer: @ChuckLiddell Who do you think wins the rematch, Silva or Sonnen?

— Chuck Liddell (@ChuckLiddell) July 1, 2012

Silva-Sonnen will take place on July 7 in the main event of UFC 148 from Las Vegas. Liddell, who continues to work for the UFC, will likely be in attendance for the fight.

There’s only one thing Chuck Liddell would come out of retirement for — a UFC light heavyweight title shot. As he put it in this interview with Ariel Helwani on last night’s episode of UFC Tonight, Liddell doesn’t want to come back to be a “sideshow.” Fortunately for Chuck’s noggin though, there’s virtually no chance that opportunity presents itself for a number of reasons, the biggest being Dana White would never let it happen.

From Monday’s episode of The MMA Hour, Ariel Helwani talks with UFC light heavyweight contender Rashad Evans as he prepares to face Jon Jones for the title this Saturday at UFC 145. Also on the show, UFC legend Chuck Liddell joins Ariel, UFC 145′s Michael McDonald discusses his upcoming bout with Miguel Torres, and Siyar Bahadurzada talks his quick knockout win over Paulo Thiago.

For more clips from this episode of the MMA Hour, including interviews with Pat Miletich, Frank Trigg, Tim Credeur, and Dustin Poirer. as well as much, much more, check out MMAFighting.com.

More segments after the jump.

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Okay, it’s not actually Chuck Liddell’s Super Bowl commercial, but he is in it for approximately 1.2 seconds!

I know it’s completely unrelated to MMA, but have you seen the Ferris Bueller Super Bowl commercial? It’s pretty awesome.

HT: BE

On Saturday night the UFC returns to the FOX network proper, and with it comes a six-man fight card that features one jiu-jitsu master, one Brit, and four wrestlers-turned-mixed martial artists. Yes, that’s four dudes – a full two-thirds of the main card – who know all too well what it feels like to starve themselves into a singlet and compete in a sporting endeavor whose scoring system is only slightly less complex than that of cricket or Calvinball. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s worthy of some sort of acknowledgment that wrestling is a huge ingredient in the simmering soup that is an MMA fighter. And what better way to acknowledge that than to harken back to some of the greatest wrestling moments in MMA history? (That’s a rhetorical question; I really don’t care what your answer is. I’m writing this damn thing either way.)

-UFC 4, December 16, 1994 – The year was 1994, and the types of fighters we’d thus far seen in the Octagon wielded backgrounds in either useless, esoteric arts or stuff that (surprisingly) actually worked. Seriously, ninjitsu. Five Animals Kung Fu. Joe Son Do. Need I say more? Looking back, we were even laughing about it then. Of course, a real shock in terms of a style that fell into the “what works” category came at UFC 4, when Dan Severn stepped into the cage, snatched up a much smaller Anthony Macias, and repeatedly suplexed the poor guy into the canvas. It was Division I collegiate wrestling in action, and like an athletic supporter full of Bengay, it was an eye-opener.

-UFC 10, July 12, 1996 – The role of wrestling took a turn for the intense when Mark Coleman entered the Octagon at UFC 10. Yup, intense. Very intense. So intense, in fact, that opponents feared his unstoppable takedowns and headbutt-heavy ground and pound as much as they feared his post-fight victory celebrations and the veins that threatened to explode on his forehead. Coleman is singularly responsible for ushering in the era when wrestlers dominated, as well as the era when no one cared about dangerously high blood pressure and brain aneurisms.

-UFC 15, October 17, 1997 – It didn’t have to all be about getting people down and mushing them, as Randy Couture showed us at UFC 15 when he took on the Brazilian fistic freight train known as Vitor Belfort. No, an extensive background in Greco-Roman (a form of wrestling that most resembles ballroom dancing) meant a fighter could latch onto a foe and repeatedly deliver short punches to the face. It was immediately labeled “dirty boxing” by pundits who recognized its effectiveness, although Belfort called it “Oww, stop, it hurts! Stanky, help!”

-UFC 31, May 4, 2001 – Chuck Liddell had already fought in the UFC four times before he met up with Kevin Randleman at UFC 31, but it was only at that particular event that the world saw wrestling employed in a way heretofore unseen with such complete effectiveness. A little context first, though. Back then, Randleman was the latest version of “unstoppable wrestler with unmatched intensity”, and though he’d secured himself a UFC heavyweight championship belt and subsequently lost it to Couture, he was still a beast, and his bout with “The Iceman” was to mark the beginning of his run at the organization’s light-heavyweight title. But Liddell, who was a Division I wrestler before becoming a dangerous kickboxer, needed only a minute and eighteen seconds to sprawl out of trouble and stun Randleman into the Land of the TKO’d, and that was all she wrote. You see, wrestling skills didn’t have to be about getting someone down; they could also be about preventing yourself from getting taken down so you could punch someone’s lights out.

-Dynamite!! USA, June 2, 2007 – Not since Bam-Bam Bigelow had fought Kimo Leopoldo in Japan and Kimo was fooled into thinking his victory was real (and not predetermined) had a pro wrestler pulled off such a convincing con, but then came Brock Lesnar, who parlayed a win over South Korean grappling dummy/punching bag extraordinaire Min-Soo Kim at a Dynamite!! USA show in Los Angeles into a trip to the UFC. It probably helped that Lesnar hailed from a legitimate amateur wrestling background, but still, you can’t tell me that Dana White and Joe Silva didn’t take one look at his World Wrestling Entertainment credentials and said “Sold!” in unison.

-UFC 117, August 7, 2010 – Chael Sonnen was a pretty okay fighter leading up to his UFC 117 title shot against middleweight king Anderson Silva. But that “okay-ness” transcended into something so much more when he talked endless trash and backed it up by beating the ever-loving snot out of the Brazilian. For four and a half rounds Sonnen employed top-notch wrestling to outwork Silva and batter him relentlessly on the ground (and even get in a few good licks on the feet) before tapping to a submission. It goes without saying that if you replaced the American’s wrestling background with, say, badminton, he’d have never been able to pull off what he did. A great wrestling moment in MMA history? Definitely.

It looks like Tito Ortiz’s planned retirement is going to wait an extra month. Instead of wrapping up his storied UFC career in late May, Ortiz now says he wants to step in the Octagon for the final time on the July 4 weekend card.

The date may have changed but his preferred opponents haven’t. Tito recently told MiddleEasy that he still wants to fight Forrest Griffin or Chuck Liddell. Transcription via BE:

July, hopefully Fourth of July weekend I will be fighting my last fight and I will be done. That’s it; it’s time to walk away. You know, Forrest, or I know everybody would like to see me against Chuck (Liddell) and, I don’t know. We will see what Lorenzo and Dana have to offer and see what they want to do. I’ll sit down with Lorenzo and Dana next week and let’s see, let’s make a fight, my last fight and let’s make a memorable one.

In a perfect world, I think Liddell vs. Ortiz 3 would be the most fitting way to end both of their careers, but there’s virtually zero chance of that happening now that Chuck has settled quite comfortably into retirement and Tito has proved that he actually has some knockout power. Ortiz vs. Griffin 3 will do I guess, but like Tito said, it will be up to the UFC to decide.

Any other suggestions for Tito’s retirement bout?

Image via Tracy Lee for Yahoo! Sports

Dana White and Chuck Liddell check out the new UFC app on XBox Live which includes a fight prediction game, interactive fight cards, live pre-fight weigh-ins, press conferences, previews, an expansive on-demand video catalogue and live pay-per-view events starting with UFC 141 next week.

Looks like Chuck Liddell has one more fight in him. He takes on Alex O’Loughlin tonight on CBS’ Hawaii Five-O, in a ProElite cage no less. Judging by this preview clip, I’m thinking Chuck didn’t get a whole lot of training in for this one. My prediction: Chuck gets “caught.”

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