(Gif of the Means/Spratt ending via MMAFighting.)
With Bellator 99, World Series of Fighting 5 and, oh yeah, Mayweather vs. Canelo all transpiring this past weekend, you might not have heard that Legacy Fighting Championships — the quiet, unassuming, off-off-off Broadway MMA promotion to the stars — held an event as well. Despite featuring a few names that only the hardest of hardcore MMA would recognize (Richard Odoms! THE Carlos Vergara!!), LFC 23 set the stage for a couple notable moments. Mainly, Leonard Garcia picking up his second straight win since being ousted from the UFC and Pete Spratt retiring following his first round KO loss to fellow UFC vet Tim Means in the evening’s main event.
Unfortunately, while we were in the midst of drafting up another “And Now He’s Retired” article to commemorate Spratt’s departure after nearly 50 professional bouts and 15 years in the sport (!), Spratt done went and unretired. After a 48 hour retirement. Vinny Magalhaes was all like “He did *what* now?” and we were all like “Not this shit again,” but it seems that Spratt will be moving forward with his CP ban-violating decision nonetheless. Here’s why:
That was a retirement thing based on a guy who got hit in the back of the head, that was still groggy thinking about his family and that type of stuff, without having had the opportunity to review what actually happened in the fight. If I looked back at it and my skills had diminished, that would be different. But that wasn’t the case.
Me, I was thinking I just went in there and got my butt kicked, which isn’t what happened after I watched the fight.
Oh boy, the old “I was wronged” defense.
Look, we are obviously not in the place to decide whether Spratt’s skills have diminished over the years (although his barely above .500 record would seem to indicate that they have) or to declare whether Means’ elbows were illegal or not (my vote is that they weren’t. Also, I’m always right about these things). That being said, Spratt’s reasoning for unretiring seems to be based on decisions as hastily-made as the ones that led him to retire all of three days ago. If the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation doesn’t overturn the loss, does that mean that Spratt will accept that he “Got his butt kicked” and re-retire once and for all?
Again, our opinion probably means fuck-all to a pioneer of the sport like Spratt, who insists that he is still “having fun” competing in MMA at the tender age of 42:
I’m having fun with the competition and at the same time I’m still learning and enjoying testing myself against these younger guys. If I wasn’t 42, people wouldn’t be talking about me retiring, or being in the twilight of my career. I never drank, never smoked, never abused my body negatively for me to be diminishing in my skills. Which I’m not.
Currently 4-6 in his past 10 fights, we would say that “The Secret Weapon’s” best days are most certainly behind him. If he is unwilling to admit that, that’s fine. But who knows? Maybe the fact that the UFC is giving a mentally unstable B.J. Penn the keys to the gun cabinet has convinced Spratt to make another run at the big time, because who the hell is going to stop him? We just hope for his sake that it won’t take another brutal knockout loss (or series of brutal knockout losses) to remind Spratt that his original decision was the right one.