FanHouse Matt Hamill

UFC light heavyweight Matt Hamill will return from a knee injury to take on rising star Jon Jones at The Ultimate Fighter 10 Finale on Dec. 5 at the Pearl in Las Vegas, the promotion announced Tuesday.

At 22 years of age, Jon Jones (9-0) already holds three UFC wins against Andre Gusmao, Stephan Bonnar and Jake O'Brien since debuting August 2008. Jones recently raised his stock in the eyes of MMA insiders with his decision to join Greg Jackson's team in Albuquerque, N.M., where he'll mix it up with the likes of Rashad Evans, Keith Jardine and Nate Marquardt.

An injury to Matt Hamill has forced a change to the upcoming UFC 102 card, as Krzysztof Soszynski, and not Hamill, will now reportedly face Brandon Vera in the first fight of the pay-per-view show.

Our new UFC twitter mailbag features questions about the UFC 102 light heavyweight fight between Brandon Vera and Matt Hamill, Dana White's celebrity status and, of course, the question that never seems to go away about the possibility of Fedor Emelianenko signing with the UFC. Your questions and my answers are below.

The year is half over, so we're giving out some MMA half year awards. Today we've got the best knockout of the year so far in MMA.

The best mixed martial artists are the ones who are constantly developing new skills, and Matt Hamill showed that off in a big way in his last fight: Hamill, primarily known as a wrestler before, knocked out Mark Munoz with a devastating kick to the head in their fight at UFC 96 in March.

Now Hamill is preparing for a fight with Brandon Vera at UFC 102 in August, and he says Vera had better be ready for another new weapon. Video below.

When Matt Hamill first appeared on The Ultimate Fighter, he was an aspiring mixed martial artist whose method of fighting was fairly simple and fairly boring: He was a big, strong college wrestler who beat his opponents by holding them down and overpowering them.

But Hamill, who now has eight UFC fights under his belt, showed at UFC 96 on Saturday night that he has evolved in MMA to the point where no one would call his fighting style "simple" or "boring."

This is the FanHouse UFC 96 live blog, where we'll have play-by-play on the three big undercard fights: Gray Maynard vs. Jim Miller, Matt Brown vs. Pete Sell and Matt Hamill vs. Mark Munoz.

To find out who won each fight, check the UFC 96 results post. For round-by-round results, the live blog begins below.

Matt Hamill	vs.	Mark Munoz
The Hammer	Nickname	The Philippine Wrecking Machine
5-2	Record	5-0
No. 17 light heavyweight	Rank	No. 92 light heavyweight
4-1	(T)KO Record	3-0
0-0	Sub. Record	0-0
1-1	Dec. Record	1-0
W-1	Streak	W-5
205	Weight	205
6-2	Height	6-0
32	Age	31
wrestling	Background	wrestling

Matt Hamill will fight Mark Munoz on Saturday night at UFC 96. The full preview is below.

With a few days to go before his fight with Mark Munoz at UFC 96 on Saturday night, the Ultimate Fighting Championship light heavyweight Matt Hamill took some time out to answer our questions. The interview below with Hamill, who is deaf, was conducted via e-mail.

UFC light heavyweight Matt Hamill, who is coming off a second-round TKO win over Reese Andy at UFC 92, answered some questions from FanHouse this week. Via e-mail, we asked him about the UFC 92 fight, his future plans, whether his deafness affects his communication with his corner, and his thoughts on some of the big names in MMA.

You sustained a cut under your left eye against Reese Andy at UFC 92. How serious was that? Will it affect your training at all?
No, it was minor, it was actually some old scar tissue.

After the first round, your corner was getting on your case, yelling at you and swearing at you. Do you like that? Does that kind of approach motivate you to keep going? And how does being deaf affect how your corner communicates with you?
Duff (Holmes) and I have been training together for a long time. We communicate with our own form of sign language. Duff signs the first letter of each word as he says it and slips in some sign that he knows. I read his lips very well and we dont bring an interpreter into the Octagon so I can read his emotions too. He motivated me and I kicked it up in the second round.