So, about last night…
Bellator MMA rolled into Houston for the first time earlier this week, bringing along its particular brand of something that resembles MMA but is mostly anything but. And that works here. I was born and raised in the Houston area, and if there’s one thing we enjoy more than beer and rodeos, it’s big entertainment, filled to overflowing with a touch of the ridiculous.
And that’s what we got last night at the Toyota Center. Boy, did we. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, because these “fun fight” Bellator events have become something of a surprise grab bag. You really never know what you’re going to get, but you know it probably won’t be normal, and you know it’s going to be memorable. That’s the perfect descriptor for Bellator’s entire week in Houston, really.
There was Kimbo’s now legendary #babynuts performance at the pre-fight press conference. And then there was the scene at Dave and Busters on Friday night, when early-days UFC veteran Mark Hall tried to get Ken Shamrock to fight him by passing out flyers discussing how the fight would be a great fit for the Bellator or Pride organizations.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him Pride has been gone for nearly a decade, especially when he was thrown out of Dave and Busters by security for charging fans $5 for his autograph and a picture after having to take the time to tell them who he was in the first place.
There was Tito Ortiz and “King Mo” Lawal, who confronted Ortiz after the fan autograph session at Dave and Busters. Lawal told me Ortiz did not want to fight him because he felt Lawal was “too ghetto,” and Lawal wanted to have a few words with him once the fans were mostly gone. He did not want to make it a thing, but it was a thing all the same.
Kurt Angle was there—kind of. He is one of my favorite professional wrestlers of all time, and so it hurt me to see him hobbling around, hunched over with bad knees and a bad back and bad neck and bad brain. He walked with the grace and posture of a 92-year-old man, and I was left to wonder how he is still ambulatory, much less able to climb in a wrestling ring every so often. You can put to rest any lingering notion of Angle stepping in the Bellator cage with Shamrock or any of the other oldies that Bellator has on the roster; no commission in the world would clear him for a fight.
And then came fight night, and what a thing it was. Let’s get one thing out of the way: Kimbo vs. Dada 5000 was the worst fight I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It will exist forever in a pantheon of horrible sporting events gone wrong. Neither man is good at fighting, and clearly neither man has stepped foot on a treadmill in the past decade. It was supposed to be a street fight, and instead we got Kimbo Slice (!) scoring a takedown early in the fight before moving into full mount.
That’s where everything went wrong, of course. When they eventually struggled back to their feet, Slice and Dada were as tired as any men have ever been, perhaps even more tired than me after a 20-minute workout, and the whole thing quickly went from farce to absolute crapfest.
The amazing thing is, I’ve never had a better time watching a fight. I was sitting there on press row with my colleague Jonathan Snowden, a man who has quite literally written the book on the history of this sport, and we howled with laughter. When Kimbo was stood up from full mount by referee John McCarthy—the second time this has happened to an opponent of Mr. 5000, by the way, a feat that will never be equaled—we came awfully close to cheering, a thing that is forbidden on press row.
We watched as former professional wrestlers Booker T and Stevie Ray, once known as the WCW tag team Harlem Heat, laughed so hard tears streamed down their faces as they gasped for air. Bellator commentator Jimmy Smith struggled not to laugh. Even one of the Texas judges—a man who was supposed to be scoring the fight, though Texas is historically lax on things like rules and forming a real athletic commission—was red-faced, with tears rolling down his cheeks.
McCarthy, standing between Slice and Dada as the inexplicable third round was set to begin, had the look of a man who wondered what life choices he’d made that had led him to this moment in time, right now, here in Houston, with these two men who could barely breathe.
And the way it ended…oh, the way it ended. Dada leaning against Slice. McCarthy realizing Dada was already unconscious despite being vertical. McCarthy gently separating the two and then, in a moment I will never forget until the end of my days, Dada turning and doing the slowest knockout tumble I have ever seen. I do not know if the television cameras caught the look on Dada’s face as he went down, but I have never seen such a face, nor do I think I will ever see such a face again.
Make no mistake: This was the worst fight I’ve ever seen. It was multiple levels of terrible. But it was still wildly entertaining, even if it was the kind of entertainment you couldn’t force yourself to look away from. This is Bellator’s niche. The UFC has the best athletes and most skilled fighters in the world. Bellator can’t match it in the roster department.
It can’t compete by being UFC-lite, so it has to do something different to stand apart. It has to pull as many eyeballs as possible, and sometimes that means doing things that look like a dumpster fire.
What Bellator does may be insulting to the frail sensibilities of the hand-wringing hardcore mixed martial arts set who believe Friday night “set the sport back 20 years,” but everyone seems to forget this isn’t a sport. It’s sports entertainment. Even for the UFC, it is about selling a product to the largest audience possible. If there can be some great athletic competition in there between world-class athletes along the way, well, that’s fantastic.
But that isn’t the point and has never been the point. It’s entertainment first, always and forever.
These things have limits, of course. The news I reported Saturday—that Harris’ heart had stopped during an overnight hospital stay after he was transported there following the fight—will cause many to look at Bellator’s practice of putting older fighters—and perhaps men who are not mixed martial artists at all—in the cage.
According to a statement released by his family, Harris suffered severe dehydration, exhaustion and renal failure as a result of cutting over 40 pounds for the fight. He is not, has never been and never will be a mixed martial artist. A willingness to get in the cage for money and a big television rating should not be the ultimate tool Scott Coker uses to decide who he signs and who he does not.
If a fighter can pass a legitimate physical examination—one that includes a brain scan, and one that does not take place under the auspices of an inept and corrupt athletic commission like the one in Texas—I am fine with these freak-show things.
I am more than fine, in fact. They are a refreshing and entertaining change of pace from the mostly boring and corporate nature of the UFC, in which there are dozens of shows each year that are almost completely indistinguishable from one another. They feel so very different.
Different is good, and I am a fan of different. I am not a fan of dangerous, however, and the onus is now on Bellator to be more diligent and selective about the men it allows to step in the cage, no matter what age they are. If it does that, and if Coker proves there are lines he is not willing to cross when it comes to booking fighters, I have no problems with these “fun fights” continuing. I’d watch Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock again, even though I know it would be pretty terrible and likely still produce the same result as every other time.
I’d watch it because it would get me out of the kind of rut any long-term job can create, and because it would remind me of the things that drew me to this sport in the first place, and because it would remind me that those things that drew me here in the first place had nothing to do with sport or competition but rather the sheer spectacle and the unknown and the ridiculous.
Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
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