Three main events for the price of one

Not long ago, Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White was incensed by a boxing promoter’s claim that pugilism was safer, and that mixed martial arts at times resembles a tough man contest.

Tonight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, White makes his counterpoint by unveiling a loaded UFC 92 fight card with three big matches, the likes of which boxing has routinely fallen short of for years.

Indeed, it’s possible to make a convincing case that tonight’s main event should be the non-title third fight between light-heavyweights and former MMA champions Quinton “Rampage” Jackson of Irvine and Wanderlei Silva.

“I’m expecting ours to be the best fight of the night,” Silva said.

That bout will instead be a three-round warm-up act of sorts for two other title fights scheduled for five rounds.

The UFC show will be anchored by the first light-heavyweight title defense by Forrest Griffin against unbeaten Rashad Evans, who most recently knocked out UFC legend Chuck Liddell with a devastating punch.

Tonight’s other big bout is the interim heavyweight championship between interim champ Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and former champ Frank Mir, who submitted Brock Lesnar in his UFC debut earlier this year. And the winner gets a 2009 date against new heavyweight champ Lesnar.

Griffin-Evans is a matchup of graduates from the Spike TV reality series “The Ultimate Fighter.” Griffin won the first edition memorably, defeating Stephen Bonnar in a toe-to-toe battle that White cites as a watershed moment. White said it clinched his company’s road to profitability and significantly moved the sport toward mainstream success.

“It was just a fight for me, a very hard one for me,” Griffin said.

Griffin’s surliness and dislike of small talk is part of his charm. He was asked in a conference call recently about the difficulty of training around Christmas and responded, “I don’t really like the holidays, anyway.”

But he does enjoy fighting, and after he was knocked out by Keith Jardine in 2006, he urged White to give him the first shot at the UFC’s high-profile signee from Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships, Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. Griffin wore down Rua in a Honda Center fight and won by rear naked chokehold, then topped that by wresting Jackson’s light-heavyweight title away earlier this year by tiring him on the mat.

“Obviously, [the belt] is a form of validation,” Griffin said.

Evans, a strong wrestler, has defeated Liddell and Michael Bisping and fought to a draw with Tito Ortiz in his last three fights.

Nogueira and Mir served as opposing coaches in this fall’s the Ultimate Fighter 8. The veteran fighters both became champions by defeating Tim Sylvia. Mir snapped Sylvia’s arm to win his belt in 2004 but was involved in a serious motorcycle accident later that year and was ultimately stripped of the title. His career languished badly until he beat Lesnar in February.

Nogueira has been knocked down in the first round of both of his UFC fights, but has won both.

Against Sylvia in February, he took the bigger man to the mat in the third round and produced a masterful guillotine choke to end the fight, causing Sylvia to lament in respect that it was a “typical” Nogueira effort defined by the fighter’s overall MMA skills.

As Lesnar awaits that winner, the Silva-Jackson victor should expect his next fight to be against the champion of Griffin-Evans.

Silva has rallied from a bruising stand-up affair with Liddell to beat Jardine, and he stopped Jackson twice before the second round in both of their prior PRIDE fights by strikes and knees.

“This is a different time,” Silva said. “I know that. I’ve trained a lot for this. It’s a great opportunity. I think there’s a belt in my future, but I first need to beat ‘Rampage.’ ”

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lance.pugmire@latimes.com