If you were looking for a reason to wake up at 6:30 a.m. ET to watch the preliminary card for the UFC’s latest return to Macau, China, on Saturday, well, I’ve got nothing for you.
That’s a little early in the morning when all you have to look forward to is Danny Mitchell vs. Wang Sai in a preliminary “main event.”
The idea of a main event for a preliminary card is one of the dumbest things the UFC has created in recent years, and it is even sillier when it features two men named Danny Mitchell and Wang Sai.
But if you are the obsessive type and are still riding a high from Saturday’s mostly-excellent fight card from Maine—or perhaps Sunday’s even-better WWE SummerSlam—then perhaps it is worth waking up at 9 a.m. ET to see Michael Bisping and Cung Le invade The Venetian Macau.
As with most UFC international events, Michael Bisping vs. Cung Le is only available on Fight Pass, and that means you’ll need to become a subscriber.
This is a worthwhile investment if you are a fan of fighting because Fight Pass has many hours of fighting available at your fingertips. Events such as Bisping vs. Le are the cherry on top.
For the most part, they are tiny cherries. These are not events designed to capture your attention in the same way the UFC’s pay-per-view efforts are. They are created solely to expand the UFC’s global footprint and as such are filled with fighters you have never heard of.
Apologies to the families of Wang Anying and Yuta Sasaki, but I am not intimately familiar with the particulars of their career. In this, I suspect I am in the majority.
Still, when it comes to selling you on the fight, Bisping is giving it the old college try. The college try is what he does, both in his efforts to build up interest in his fights and the fights themselves. He has consistently been one of the UFC’s more entertaining speakers since he made his debut in 2006, but he has never been close to its top star.
In the Octagon, he beats the guys he’s supposed to beat but can’t get over the hump against credible challengers.
There are always excuses afterwards, of course, because that is another thing Bisping does well.
“Kennedy had a game plan to hold me down and he executed that game plan well. In hindsight, I should never have accepted a fight just seven weeks after getting cleared to return to the gym after my eye injury,” Bisping said in an official UFC email sent to Bleacher Report.
“Yes, I was anxious to get back in there and earn my first paycheck in over a year but, with hindsight, I needed several months in the gym getting rid of ring rust. Instead, I made a huge mistake in taking on a wrestler like Kennedy without putting the work in—and I paid for it.”
Kennedy held him down. Bisping still wasn’t all that healthy, even though he accepted the fight. He sure wasn’t healthy enough to face a wrestler because wrestlers are boring and don’t fight the way Bisping wants them to. Which is to say, they beat him with regularity.
But now, it’s on to Le, a 42-year-old fighter/actor who has recently discovered—and then drank the entirety of—the fountain of youth.
It is good this fight is taking place in China, because the social media photos floating around which display Le’s brand-new body would make any commission worth their salt stand up and wonder if he is still, in fact, part human.
“I may be 42, but my mind and body tell me I can still do this,” Le said. He neglected to mention that his new body is only 21 years old.
Bisping had things to say about Le, but none of them focus on Le’s new look. Instead, he went to the heart of the matter by taking shots at Le’s movie career. Because nothing makes fans want to see two dudes fight more than pithy insults about someone’s standing in Hollywood, right?
“Listen, Cung Le is basically back in the UFC to boost his brand and remind everybody of his existence. He hasn’t fought in a couple of years, so I’m guessing his profile has dipped, he’s probably not getting too many embarrassing kung-fu movie offers right now and—probably worst of all for him—Channing Tatum has stopped retweeting him,” Bisping said. “I’m going to put a beating on him, and he can disappear again back to B-movies.”
Tatum has stopped retweeting him. I bet you guys that will make Le so mad and he’ll want to punch Bisping in the face. And, man, he really cut right to the core of Le’s social media heart, didn’t he?
The anticipation is at an all-time high.
I wonder how much a last-minute flight to Macau would cost me?
Look, Bisping vs. Le should be a fun fight. There will be fireworks. Someone might get knocked out. It doesn’t need contrived insults to get people to watch.
Those dedicated enough to get up early in the morning to watch a fight card from China likely won’t care about dumb insults anyway. They’ll watch because it might be a fun fight and they enjoy fighting for what it is.
Or, they’ll watch because they want to see Tyron Woodley vs. Dong Hyun Kim. That’s the most important fight on the entire card. It has meaning.
And neither man needs to insult the other about their friendship with Tatum to get me to watch.
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