(Never surrender, except to leg kicks. VidProps: YouTube/ZP840)
If you can imagine a fight card populated by has-beens and no-accounts, filmed by the blind and narrated by the guys from “Flight of the Conchords” (except without the genuinely funny parts), then you have a pretty good idea what it was like to watch Impact FC’s first-ever pay-per-view on Saturday night. “The Uprising” was filled with plenty of the awkward pauses, even more awkward announcing, terrible camera work and retro graphics that we’ve come to expect from fledgling MMA promotions. As for the actual fighting? It played out about like you might have predicted, too.
Indeed when, just a few moments into the broadcast, nattily attired but totally incompetent ring announcer James White forgot his lines midway through his introductory remarks and had to stop cold to confess he’d drawn a blank, you knew it was going to be a long night. Despite how many times we were informed by the play-by-play team that the action in the cage was “thunderous” or “amazing” the show – filmed around noon local time in Sydney, Australia in a partially filled arena — felt so flat that the fighters themselves would’ve been hard-pressed to break the monotony. Luckily for them, it didn’t seem like they were trying too hard.