Sante Fe’s ‘Renegade’ returning to octagon
It’s time to get back into the octagon. Santa Fe’s Jerome “The Renegade” Rivera will fight Francisco Nazareno as part of UFC’s Fight Night on Jan. 20. The card at UFC Fight Island in Dubai will be broadcast by ESPN+.
Rivera (10-3) is coming off a Sept. 19 loss to Tyson Nam in Las Vegas, Nev. Nam got the best of Rivera in the second round, halting the momentum Rivera established with a win just seven weeks earlier over Luis Rodriguez.
A Brazilian, Nazareno (11-3-1) hasn’t won a fight in 32 months and has won just twice in the last four-plus years.
Their bout will be one of 11 on the card, headlined by the Leon EdwardsKhamzat Chimaev main event. The undercard includes New Mexico’s Carlos Condit (31-13) against Matt Brown of the United States.
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Get your feel-good merchandise. The New Mexico Activities Association has partnered with regional sports apparel outfitter Kukulski Brothers Inc. to peddle three T-shirt designs geared toward optimists who still believe in a positive message.
The NMAA’s familiar slogan of “We will play again N.M.” has been the organizations go-to phrase during the pandemic. You can now buy a white cotton shirt with the slogan splashed across the front with the NMAA’s logo.
Christmas is done, but the shirt makes for a nice gift for other occasions, for the reasonable cost of $20 each, even if the sentiment may turn out to be wishful thinking.
The deadline for football’s Feb. 1 return is just five weeks away. Without a dramatic drop in both COVID-19 cases and infection rates, high school sports will be nothing more than a forgotten item on a Christmas wish list.
But, hey, sports will return. Someday.
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Speaking of online shopping, there’s a place where Santa Feans can find a familiar look from the past. The city’s former team in the North American Hockey League, the Santa Fe RoadRunners, has moved to Texas and been rebranded as the Texas RoadRunners.
The team’s logo is largely the same, although the navy blue highlight has been replaced by black. The team has also dropped down a level into the NA3HL, the Tier III level of the nation’s junior hockey family tree that includes the Tier II NAHL that has roots in Northern New Mexico.
Hockey came to Santa Fe in 2004 when the Lone Star Cavalry left the Forth Worth, Texas, area and relocated to New Mexico to become, at first, the Santa Fe Missions and then the RoadRunners. The team had four largely unremarkable seasons between 2004-07 at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center before the franchise was sold and moved to Topeka, Kan.
The Topeka RoadRunners flourished for a decade before adopting Pilots as a new name. The franchise itself moved to Kansas City earlier this year and was renamed the Scouts, but the RoadRunners brand was sold to a group that shipped it to College Station, Texas, to become the team it is now — albeit at a lower level.
Long story short, if you’re feeling nostalgic for Santa Fe’s hockey connection to the past, you have a landing spot to feel warm and fuzzy.
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If that’s it for the New Mexico Bowl, what a sad goodbye it was.
A predictably bad crowd of just 2,060 attended the Christmas Eve game between Hawaii and Houston in what was the 15th installment of the annual college football game. It was played in Frisco, Texas, home of Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas, rather than Albuquerque, due to the state’s COVID-19 restrictions.
Stats-wise, it was the ninth win by a Mountain West team, Hawaii, giving the league a 9-5 record in 14 appearances. Following the naming-rights debacle of the 2019 bowl and now this, it makes you wonder if ESPN, which owns and operates the New Mexico Bowl, has seen enough to end the annual contest.
All things considered, it wasn’t a bad run. The game did produce some remarkable memories that included wins by the Lobos in 2007 and 2016. Three of UNM’s four appearances drew crowds of at least 30,000.