The Donald, facing declining ratings, has put a new spin on his reality show The Apprentice. This season, the show will feature “celebrities” with UFC star and MMA fighter Tito Ortiz being part of the cast. As reported by the Associated Press, the 14 “celebrities” won’t be vying for a job with Donald Trump, as in the previous six “Apprentice” seasons, but instead will compete in business-oriented tasks around New York City to raise money for their favorite charities. The official “Celebrity Apprentice” will win a $250,000 bonus to donate.

The full list of cast members include (more…)

Yet another MMA fighter makes the leap from the cage to television/movie set. This time it’s the highly popular UFC fighter Forrest Griffin taking his turn at the craft of acting (hopefully he’s better than Mac Danzig). Griffin will appear on the Nov 20th episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. From the trailer, it looks like Forrest will have a significant role on the episode. This is yet another testament that mixed martial arts is growing like crazy and continues to be adopted by the mainstream.

The episode is called “Fight,” here is the synopsis: A TEENAGER’S BODY IS DISCOVERED IN THE WOODS AND PROFESSIONAL FIGHTER MIKE KONA’S (GUEST STAR FORREST GRIFFIN) DNA IS FOUND ON THE SCENE — A young girl’s death seems to be linked to the world of ultimate fighting, but after questioning Kona and his girlfriend (guest star CoCo), the evidence trail leads Detectives Chester Lake (Adam Beach) and Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) to two young brothers (guest stars “Friday Night Lights” Gauis Charles and Arlen Escarpeta) who have more than a few skeletons in their closet. When the brothers are arrested, tension brew within the SVU. Also starring: Mariska Hargitay, Chris Meloni, Dann Florek, Ice-T, Diane Neal, Tamara Tunie, Richard Belzer, and BD Wong.

Source: Entertainment News International

Today at 4pm PT ESPN’s news magazine show E:60 will air a segment dedicated to mixed martial arts. I checked out the ESPN website in hopes of viewing a preview of today’s show but to no avail. I caught the show’s preview on TV the other day. It will be interesting to see what kind of picture the network paints of MMA. It looks like they will be interviewing some IFL fighters and showing a lot of their training.

Tomorrow Randy Couture (yes, he’s everywhere these days) will be making a special appearance on CBS’s television show The Unit. I caught the episode preview on TV the other night and they hyped up Couture’s special appearance pretty good. Unfortunately the CBS website doesn’t have a trailer for the upcoming episode, which makes zero sense to me. One would think it would be easy to post a simple video preview of a show’s upcoming episodes to help gain viewership . Whatever.

Anyway, Randy will be a guest actor on the The Unit tomorrow (Tuesday). The only source I could find that even mentiones that Couture will be on the show was on IMDB.

This weekend Joe Rogan will host another installment of the UFC’s replay show of featured fights, WiRED.

Fights that will be highlighted include:

Jon Fitch vs. Luigi Fiorivanti from UFC 68

Drew McFedries vs. Allesio Sakara from UFC 65

Tyson Griffin vs. Frankie Edgar from UFC 67, billed as on of the best fights of the year.

To see if you’ll have access to the show, check out your local tv listings here.

ProElite and Mark Burnett (producer of Survivor, The Apprentice, The Contender, and other top reality shows) are teaming up to create a reality-based MMA television show starting celebrities and former well known athletes. The show is without a name at this point, but what is known is that it will be shown on network television (unlike the UFC’s partner on cable TV). Combine network distribution and household names, and you’ve got a pretty powerful MMA footprint.

The first “season” will focus on MBL and NFL studs Jose Canseco and Herschel Walker who together with a group of other former pros will train as a team to cross over into the sport of mixed martial arts. These athletes will fight with select EliteXC fighters in each episode with the series finale featuring a famous celebrity athlete match up. I’m sure EliteXC fighters will take it easy on the former pros, but nonetheless it should be highly entertaining to watch someone as athletic as Herschel Walker (he used to do 2,500 crunches and 1,000 push-ups every day during the NFL off season) learn mixed martial arts.

This might be a good opportunity forShaq to show off his MMA skills.

Source: www.proelite.com