I’ve seen a lot of MMA over the years. A lot. Putting together The MMA Encyclopedia, I watched footage from all over the world, from the despondently bad to the resplendently life-changing.
And I’ve never seen anything quite like the pull-apart brawl b…
I’ve seen a lot of MMA over the years. A lot. Putting together The MMA Encyclopedia, I watched footage from all over the world, from the despondently bad to the resplendently life-changing.
And I’ve never seen anything quite like the pull-apart brawl between Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar at Bellator 123.
This segment was so bizarre, I didn’t feel confident enough to discuss it alone. So, joining me round-table style, are Bleacher Report’s lead MMA writer Jeremy Botter and MMA editor Brian Oswald.
Snowden: The moment Spike TV cameras caught a glimpse of an overweight masked man sitting next to former UFC star Stephan Bonnar, I suspected something gloriously terrible was going to go down. And boy did it ever.
Bonnar stepped into the cage wearing a Sears special gray suit to challenge Tito Ortiz and revealed his secret weapon to a baffled television audience. Almost no one recognized Justin McCully. And why should they?
An obscure hanger on, he’s likely familiar only to the hardest of hardcores. If the point was to get people talking, Bellator succeeded. If the point was to get them to say nice things, well…
Botter: You say gloriously terrible, Jonathan, but I say just downright glorious. And I’ll tell you why. We already have one mixed martial arts promotion, and we all know Bellator isn’t going to touch the UFC.
Even with Bellator as Strikeforce 3.0, it just won’t get the kind of traction it needs to compete against the brand leader. They can put on fun fights and pretend they’re in the same sport, or they can create some new wrinkles like having old, terrible mixed martial artists show up wearing pro wrestling masks. I know which one I’d prefer.
Is it terrible? Yes. Does it give you that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you’re watching TNA wrestling? You know the feeling. I know you do. TNA is terrible because they are terrible at pro wrestling. But Bellator being TNA? That’s what I call a fun alternative.
Give me Herschel Walker vs. Bobby Lashley. Give me Alberto Del Rio wearing a mask, making his return to mixed martial arts. Give me something different, and I probably won’t care how terrible it is.
Oswald: So bad it’s good. It’s a tagline that Bellator seems primed to embrace.
Signing a past-his-prime UFC Hall of Famer (who should have never been inducted into the HOF) so he could call out a past-his-prime former UFC champ (who should be in the HOF).
Pitting them in the cage for a face off and shoving match. If all that weren’t enough, there was a man in a mask. Under that mask was another mask. And under that mask was a worn face that only the hardest of hardcore fans recognized.
It was contrived. It was was confusing. It has me wondering just how low will Bellator go. How about putting Tito Ortiz vs. Stephan Bonnar in the main event over a title fight featuring Michael Chandler vs. Will Brooks. That is a pretty good start in a race to the bottom. Count me in.
Snowden: How far can Bellator take this before it becomes “too far”?
Should McCully be named special guest referee? Will he loom ominously over Bonnar’s shoulder during every televised interview?
Make no mistake—this is pro wrestling theater. They’ve taken it to a place no one ever has before. I hope they keep pushing boundaries, if only to see enraged fans on Twitter decrying the death of “pure sport.”
UFC President Dana White likes to win. His goal, publicly stated, isn’t just to be a successful mixed martial arts promoter. It’s becoming a global force in the sports. “World f*cking domination,” as he puts it. Nothing more, nothing less.
That dr…
UFC President Dana White likes to win. His goal, publicly stated, isn’t just to be a successful mixed martial arts promoter. It’s becoming a global force in the sports. “World f*cking domination,” as he puts it. Nothing more, nothing less.
That drive has helped White to demolish the competition over the years. He, famously, used to keep a faux tombstone in his office. Every time a rival promotion died, a name was added to the dearly departed. Those who didn’t go out of business because of their own stupidity, the UFC gleefully purchased, adding toys to a toy box already brimming with great martial artists.
No rival has withstood the rigors of MMA promotion for long. Successful boxing promoters, comic book entrepreneurs and online gambling provocateurs have all attempted to run a Pepsi to UFC’s Coke. All have failed dramatically.
All but Bellator.
Now under new management, Viacom’s little promotion that could is approaching its sixth year in the MMA business. With former Strikeforce boss Scott Coker leading the way, expectations are sky high. Bellator isn’t a rival for the UFC yet—but if anyone can give White and company a run for their money over time, it’s Coker.
That’s what makes Friday’s dueling fight shows on Spike and Fox Sports 1 so compelling. Separated by just 15 minutes, the two promotions both enter Connecticut with something to prove. Bellator is trying to show the world it is a show worth paying attention to. The UFC, meanwhile, wants to show that it can, when properly motivated, still put on one heck of a fight card.
The result is a gold mine for MMA fans. But which show is better? Though the best fights don’t overlap, most fans will likely choose one or the other to watch live. Along with fellow lead MMA writer Chad Dundas, we’ll look at each promotion’s main card offering, judging them head-to-head based on their fight card position.
Will Bellator, with featherweight standout Pat Curran and pro wrestling star Bobby Lashley, lead the way? Or will the depth of UFC’s offering carry the day? Chad and I render our verdicts. You can have your say in the comments.
You can’t tell from Saturday’s UFC 177, but there was a time every pay-per-view was an event. Even as cable television took the Octagon into America’s living rooms, the sport was built around these monthly UFC extravaganzas, rightfully and proudly proc…
You can’t tell from Saturday’s UFC 177, but there was a time every pay-per-view was an event. Even as cable television took the Octagon into America’s living rooms, the sport was built around these monthly UFC extravaganzas, rightfully and proudly proclaimed “the Super Bowl of mixed martial arts.”
This weekend’s show would barely be recognizable to a fan from 2010, let alone 2005. Once populated by known commodities up and down the card, a bragging point when comparing the sport to prehistoric one-fight boxing shows, the modern UFC pay-per-view is turning into a wasteland.
The landscape of the combat sports world has changed—but it’s a change the UFC has resisted with all its considerable might. The WWE has abandoned the pay-per-view market entirely, focusing instead on distributing their super shows on a streaming service of their very own. Boxing has limited their pay-per-view output to a handful of fights a year, those featuring only the biggest of megastars.
Only the UFC has held on to the pay-per-view model with what I fear could be a death grip. Every month they trot out a show and ask an increasingly smaller base of hard-core fans to shell out $54.99 for increasingly smaller star wattage. It’s a system that has reached a breaking point.
In the years following the debut of The Ultimate Fighter in 2005, there was an abundance of talent, fighters who fans respected and cared about who also delivered in the Octagon. With fewer fight cards to stock, the promotion could make sure every show counted.
More than that, the UFC itself became the most powerful star of all, selling the brand ahead of any individual, a strategy UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta told The Atlantic was good for everyone involved:
I believe that what we built here is an incredible machine and an incredible brand. You hear a lot of criticism, ‘these guys all they care about is the brand, it’s not about the fighters.’ Well let me tell you what. This brand has made a lot of money for a lot of fighters who in and of themselves didn’t have a brand of their own before they fought in the UFC. So the brand creates a lot of value for these guys.
For years it was an approach that worked. That’s not just idle talk or the mad ramblings of a longtime journalist keen to remember the good old days. The proof is in the box-office receipts. In 2010, the UFC’s 16 pay-per-view shows averaged 561,250 buys. This year the average sits at 295,000. The decline started gradually, but in the last two years the spiral toward rock bottom seems to be increasing in speed.
Today, there are fewer stars than ever.
The culprit is unclear. Is it an increasingly taxing schedule, creating a glut of fighters who blend together to the point that no one can stand out from the group? Is it the UFC’s style of matchmaking, a sport-first style that matches fighters tough from the jump, allowing few to gain any kind of momentum before being forced back to the pack? Or maybe, as fans became more sophisticated, the importance of the UFC brand declined as discerning buyers were more willing to pick and choose which shows to buy?
I don’t purport to have all the answers. But, while causation is unclear, the effect is not. True standouts are a dying breed. Chuck Liddell, Brock Lesnar, Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre are either gone entirely or fading, with no replacements emerging to fill their void at the box office. Those few stars that remain, those capable of moving the needle, are spread thin over an ever-increasing number of shows. Once so proud of its top-to-bottom excellence, the UFC now too often delivers one-fight shows—and sometimes even that one fight leaves much to be desired.
Take, for example, this weekend’s UFC 177. The UFC expects fans who just saw two dreadful free shows the previous week to pay full price for the pleasure of watching T.J. Dillashaw and Renan Barao step into the cage just months removed from Dillashaw’s one-sided title win at UFC 173.
The first fight between the two men, like most pay-per-view shows headlined by a champion under 170 pounds, failed to make a splash at the box office. Worse still, it wasn’t even especially close. Dillashaw was firmly in control on all three judges’ scorecards before scoring a knockout in the fifth round.
While titularly the UFC bantamweight champion, Dillashaw is, in fact, a relative unknown. Before taking the title from Barao he had never even appeared on the main card of a UFC pay-per-view, let alone played an important role in selling one to the audience. As late as last October, he was a curtain jerker on Fox Sports 1, behind such luminaries as Joey Beltran and Matt Hamill.
Barao was sold to fans based on his 32-fight undefeated streak. That was certainly impressive—but would have been more so if all seven of his major league wins hadn’t come against opponents with a combined UFC record of 23-21. Removing the great Urijah Faber from the mix drops Barao’s combined opponent record below .500 to just 16-18.
Though far from tomato cans, his level of competition wasn’t quite what you’d expect for a fighter in the pound-for-pound discussion, mostly a collection of aging fighters and undersized bantamweights soon to seek refuge at 125 pounds. Something less than a murderer’s row, it did little to build Barao as a marketable name or someone worth caring enough about to follow him on his journey back to the top.
All told, it’s a nondescript fight with no box-office appeal and no particularly compelling reason for existing. And, remarkably, it’s by far the best bout on the card.
The card wasn’t always quite so bleak.
At one point there was another second string title fight between flyweight champ Demetrious Johnson and unknown challenger Chris Cariaso. Even that tepid fight, moved to UFC 178, was a treasure compared to what’s there now.
The co-main event features Tony Ferguson, a largely forgotten The Ultimate Fighter winner, against Danny Castillo, the fifth-most popular fighter from Team Alpha Male. Neither are ranked among the top 15 lightweights. Neither has appeared on the main card of a UFC pay-per-view before.
Two other fighters on the main card, Carlos Diego Ferreira and Damon Jackson, don’t have Wikipedia entries, a baseline level of notoriety. Jackson is such a nonentity that the UFC didn’t even have a picture to display in their promotional materials until just days before the fight.
In fact, beyond the main event, only Bethe Correia is ranked by the UFC’s media panel. And that ranking almost deserves an asterisk. There are just 29 fighters listed in the women’s bantamweight division, making an official ranking almost a default for anyone who shows up and wins.
Simply put, this show isn’t worth your money. It’s, frankly, a bit of an embarrassment. The UFC is teetering on the edge of something very dangerous here. Economically, the sport needs big pay-per-view events to survive. Although television revenue is an increasingly big part of the business model, the major shows are expected to be cash cows.
For years the UFC made sure fans got their money’s worth. Fans rarely left the arena or turned off the television feeling cheated. Shows in the Lesnar era built on the base of the successful events that preceded them. Bad shows can have the opposite effect. They create ill will and the feeling that a UFC show is hit or miss. It’s a feeling the UFC can’t afford to cultivate.
As hard-core fans, we’ve trained ourselves to purchase the monthly pay-per-view like clockwork. Good, bad or indifferent—it’s just something we do because we’ve always done it.
I say no more.
There was a time you could trust the UFC to deliver. No, not every fight was spectacular. But the promotion made a good-faith effort to give fans their money’s worth. That doesn’t feel like it’s the case anymore. This isn’t a question of taste or one writer being overly harsh. This is a bad card. We need to treat it like one.
The current UFC can’t deliver a monthly pay-per-view worth buying.
Unfortunately that isn’t stopping them from trying. Even as the floor for pay-per-view buys plummets, and despite UFC 174 delivering the lowest number in more than a decade, the promotion shows no signs of pulling back from the current paradigm. They will give us these dreadful shows until, as a fanbase, we refuse to accept them.
Make a stand here. Tell the UFC that this show just doesn’t cut it.
Let’s send an unambiguous message—let’s make UFC 177 such an unmitigated failure that they have no choice but to hear us. The UFC won’t change the system. That’s going to be up to us.
When Benson Henderson fights, you can usually count on getting comfortable. There’s time to secure your popcorn, visit the loo and make sure your stamp collection is in order. There is no rush, no funny feeling in your stomach, no threat of imminent vi…
When Benson Henderson fights, you can usually count on getting comfortable. There’s time to secure your popcorn, visit the loo and make sure your stamp collection is in order. There is no rush, no funny feeling in your stomach, no threat of imminent violence. There’s just a man, a fence and a clinch. It’s a formula that’s led to nine decisions in his last 11 fights.
So you can forgive me for settling in for the long haul last night just as Rafael dos Anjos redrew the lines of an incredibly complicated lightweight landscape with an incredible flying knee. Dos Anjos, it seemed, wasn’t willing to wait for one of Henderson’s patented controversial decision finishes. It was late, he was hungry and there was no sense in delaying gratification.
A left hand followed the knee, and Henderson’s legs dropped out from underneath him, eyes going googly for just a split second as referee/icon “Big” John McCarthy approached. He had seen more than enough. And, though Henderson would politely protest by running in place immediately thereafter—his faculties returned after McCarthy’s timely intervention—it was the right call in the moment.
“I went there to fight five rounds, to be patient,” Dos Anjos told Fox Sports 1’s Heidi Androl after the bout. “But if I had the opportunity to finish, I was going to finish. Everything went perfect.”
It was the perfect finish for Dos Anjos—but not for anyone seeking clarity in the UFC’s suddenly crowded lightweight title picture.
Before the fight, Henderson had been ranked No. 1 in the division, just behind champion Anthony Pettis. Behind him was Gilbert Melendez, the Strikeforce champion. Undefeated Dagestani wrestling machine KhabibNurmagomedov followed, then adrenaline junkie Donald Cerrone, with Dos Anjos bringing up the rear of the top five.
That’s a lot of contenders. But that doesn’t begin to describe the morass. Khabib, you see, has beaten Dos Anjos, who beat Cerrone and Henderson, who beat Melendez, who has beaten no one in the midst of a contract holdout that ended in a guaranteed title shot.
And then there is newcomer Eddie Alvarez, the Bellator champion who makes his promotional debut against Cerrone in September at UFC 178.
It’s quite a crowded scene. So, where does Dos Anjos stand? He’s not quite ready to think about it.
“Right now I need to take some time off. It’s my third fight in four months,” he told Androl. “I need to give some attention right now to my family, my kids.”
It was a polite non-answer, but a non-answer isn’t going to make the question go away. Unfortunately, despite this knockout win, Dos Anjos has essentially none of the attributes the UFC looks for in a title contender. He’s not a dynamic communicator and, when all things are considered, will likely be pushed behind the winner of Cerrone-Alvarez, two men with charisma to spare.
And they must wait for Melendez and Pettis to finally enter the cage after almost a year on the sideline.
If Dos Anjos is going to step into the cage for the belt, it will likely be in late 2015—or beyond. That means he’ll have to continue fighting, and winning, to keep his spot in a long line. That’s okay, though. If the Henderson fight is any indication, he’s got the fighting part all figured out.
For 23 seconds it all came together for England’s Michael Bisping (25-6) at UFC Fight Night 48 in Macau on Saturday; he unleashed a glorious combination of 20 strikes that could have been lifted directly from an MMA textbook. None of them alone was eno…
For 23 seconds it all came together for England’s Michael Bisping (25-6) at UFC Fight Night 48 in Macau on Saturday; he unleashed a glorious combination of 20 strikes that could have been lifted directly from an MMA textbook. None of them alone was enough to finish opponent Cung Le (9-3), but the cumulative effect was staggering. In the end all Le could do was propel himself backward to the mat and pray for the referee to intervene.
This was Bisping at his best, albeit against a 42-year-old movie star who seemed to think increased musculature would solve the aging process for him.
It did not.
“This is what I’m capable of,” Bisping told UFC announcer Kenny Florian after the fight, which he won via TKO in the fourth round. “And believe me I’m capable of better…I want to be world champion. I know I have the tools.”
Despite his best attempts to convince us otherwise, this win puts Bisping back into the ranks of middleweight contenders. While Bisping talked a big game about title fights to come, I suspect few were buying into the 35-year-old’s resolve.
Instead, it was a fight that confirmed exactly what we already knew about Britain’s top MMA star. With 15 wins in 21 UFC appearances, Bisping has always made light work of the world’s Cung Le’s. That he’s the last to realize that’s not quite enough for a run at the top is exactly what makes him such a compelling figure.
For years Bisping has been one of the sport’s great villains, a man who has mocked the disabled, literally spit on opposing cornermen and made a habit of insulting the LGBT community. But he also has a sly smile and genuine wit. He’s a master of the pre-fight battle of words, often getting underneath opponents’ skin by finding their weak spots and picking away at wounds before scabs can even form, let alone heal.
Usually a villain with Bisping’s tenure and success becomes a hero by default, with fans eventually learning to love him. That hasn’t been the case with Bisping as MMA Junkie’s Ben Fowlkes explains:
He’s arrogant, known to bend a rule or two, and he has a rare gift for insults. Slap a British accent on there and a semi-permanent sneer, not to mention a complete inability to understand how he is perceived and why – he’s the anti-Chael Sonnen, in that sense – and you have yourself a villain fit for pro wrestling. If the UFC didn’t have a Michael Bisping, it would need to invent one.
Bisping will always be the bad guy. And, with time, he’s finally OK with that.
“Absolutely, I like the fact that the majority of people boo me,” he told MMA Fighting’s Dave Meltzer. “There is a small percentage who really like me. Generally, people hate me, and I like that. I love going to the arena and feeding off the energy of the crowd, the people who cheer to see me knocked out. It’s good as long as people show emotion.”
But being a compelling figure isn’t enough for a run to the top. If it was, every UFC event would feature a Ken Shamrock vs. Don Frye match and BJ Penn would still be lightweight champion of the world.
Sure, Bisping can beat up the flat-footed and ancient Le. Likewise Brian Stann and fighters on that level. But, against the very best in the world, he fails to meet the challenge. Twice he’s been a single win away from a title shot.
Both times he’s come up short.
Bisping is a very good MMA fighter. And when you are exceptional in one facet of the sport, sometimes “very good” is enough to climb all the way to the pinnacle. But Bisping is exceptional nowhere.
His slick striking is negated by a lack of power. He moves well and strikes crisply, but his opponent can often change the tenor of a bout with a single blow. He doesn’t have that gift. His wrestling is mostly defensive in nature, and his jiu-jitsu is best described as competent.
All told, it’s a pretty impressive package—for a gatekeeper. It’s not the skill set of a true contender. And, at 35 years old, this is as good as it gets.
And you know what? That’s OK. Only six men have ever been UFC middleweight champion. That Bisping is not among them is no great crime.
In mainstream sports, failing to win a championship is the ultimate mark of shame. We create a false binary where an athlete is either great or terrible, with no in between. There are just two positions in this worldview—champion and loser. Lesser lights are able to openly mock greats like Charles Barkley and Dan Marino because they were never quite the best in the world. But there’s something to be said for coming close.
Bisping has been the face of MMA in Britain for nearly a decade. He’s performed admirably in that role, creating interest and a body of work he can be proud of. He might even be a UFC Hall of Famer.
Lauren Murphy hit Sara McMann a whopping 193 times last night in Bangor, Maine, banging her about the head over and over again over the course of fifteen minutes. McMann, in return, scored less than one-third as many blows, a relatively paltry 64 punch…
Lauren Murphy hit Sara McMann a whopping 193 times last night in Bangor, Maine, banging her about the head over and over again over the course of fifteen minutes. McMann, in return, scored less than one-third as many blows, a relatively paltry 64 punches landing cleanly on her opponent.
On paper, with just those stats in hand, you’d expect an easy decision win. The blitzkrieg from Murphy was never-ending—in fact, she landed a strike every 4.66 seconds. But when the decision was read, McMann‘s name was called twice, Murphy’s once, a split-decision win for the heavily-favored wrestler. When the decision was read McMann‘s face lit up in an unabashed smile. Murphy’s fell, if only momentarily, as she lost her composure however briefly.
And me? I just shook my head. The wrestler’s bias, once again, had reared its ugly head, another fight stolen from the hands of the rightful winner. New week, same story.
It wasn’t always like this. The early days of MMA, in fact, were spent re-educating the audience about what a fight would look like if athletes weren’t confined by the artificial constraints of boxing. It turned out, surprising absolutely no one who had ever seen two lugs rolling around on the ground, that fights all too often hit the mat.
Slip and fall? Knocked down? Driven to the mat with a powerful takedown? In boxing or kickboxing, that meant a cessation of the action while everyone involved, the fighters, referee, fans, and even the judges, re-grouped to consider what they had just witnessed. Not in MMA. There the fight wasn’t ending when things hit the ground—it was just getting started.
One of the most interesting things we learned, as a collective, is that the fighter on the bottom is not always losing the bout. Though it violates all the rules of “big brothering” someone on the playground, Royce Gracie disabused us all of the notion that being on your back necessarily means you’re losing the fight.
At UFC 4 he snuck his legs up to the gargantuan wrestler Dan Severn’s neck, choking him out from the bottom position with a triangle. Maurice Smith, likewise, won the UFC heavyweight championship from top-control wrestler Mark Coleman, controlling his opponent from the bottom and landing a succession of elbow strikes and punches from a seeming disadvantage. BasRutten re-enacted the scene to win his own title at UFC 20 in 1999 against Coleman’s protege Kevin Randleman.
But, somewhere along the way, the primacy of top control became unquestioned. A fighter who could take his or her opponent down and keep them there, even if they did little else, was more than likely going to win the fight once it went to the judges. McMann didn’t create the system—she was just gaming it.
“I was very surprised that it was a split decision because I was sure I had beaten her every round,” McMann told Steven Marrocco of MMA Junkie. “When she was landing those shots in the first round, they may have looked effective, but you can’t really generate much power off your back like that. I was allowing her to throw those and concentrating on passing her guard.”
Who really won the fight? Everyone has an opinion, but it’s important to have an educated one. And that requires a glance at the actual rules in place for determining a victor. Maine, like most states, uses a version of the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, created in New Jersey at the turn of the century, the first real step toward MMA becoming accepted across the country as legitimate sport. Judges decide who won each round based on the following criteria:
Judges shall evaluate mixed martial arts techniques such as effective striking, effective grappling, control of the fighting area, and effective aggressiveness and defense.
Evaluations shall be made in the following order of most to least weight: effective striking, effective grappling, control of the fighting area, and effective aggressiveness and defense.
With that criteria alone, Murphy was the clear winner of the fight. While she gave up five takedowns, she also controlled the action even from her back, winning striking exchanges despite being on the bottom looking up. She outlandedMcMann whether counting total strikes or just significant ones. With effective striking considered first and foremost, her clear statistical dominance should have resulted in the win.
But, of course, it’s not as simple as that. The Unified Rules flip the script when a fight is contested mostly on the ground:
Judges shall use a sliding scale and recognize the length of time the competitors are either standing or on the canvas, as follows:
(a) If competitors spend a majority of a round on the canvas, then effective grappling is weighted first and effective striking is then weighted.
(b) If competitors spend a majority of a round standing, then effective striking is weighted first and effective grappling is then weighted.
(c) If a round ends with a relatively even amount of standing and canvas fighting, striking and grappling are weighed equally.
Now the picture becomes a little less clear. With this in mind, perhaps McMann did enough to win despite her relatively paltry output on the mat. She didn’t attempt a single submission or ever risk it all to win the fight with ground-and-pound. But she was on top. And, in MMA, like it or not, that’s often enough.
I’ve seen a lot of MMA over the years. A lot. Putting together The MMA Encyclopedia, I watched footage from all over the world, from the despondently bad to the resplendently life-changing.