(Sometimes the metaphor is just … too perfect. PicProps: Showtime)
So … not to be overly cynical … but we find it pretty hard not to start snickering from the very first line of USA Today’s recent holiday weekend interview with the Strikeforce CEO, when the newspaper boldly (read: blandly) proclaims: Scott Coker is approaching 2011 with optimism.
Well yeah, no shit. We’d be stoked about the new year too if we’d just witnessed our MMA company spend much of 2010 looking like a scared stray dog trying to work its way across a busy four-lane highway during rush hour traffic. Just to recap, this year Strikeforce — among other fails — staged an enormous brawl on national television, watched its awesome-sounding middleweight tournament go tits up before it even got past the planning stages, gave its middleweight champ to the UFC, stood dumbfounded when Fedor Emelianenko fucking lost to Fab Werdum, gaped while two Brazilian dudes nobody has ever heard of captured gold in two different weight classes, showed a complete and total inability to book the right fights and continued to slap itself on the proverbial forehead while suffering the whims of its largely absentee heavyweight champion.
Somehow, the stray dog made it to the other side of the Interstate but frankly we’d rather hit our own dick with a hammer than endure a year like the one Strikeforce just had. So forgive us if we can’t quite take Coker at face value when he implies that 2011 is “about more than surviving” for his company. It’s actually all about surviving and as much as the boss promises a 33 percent increase in Strikeforce programming next year, we can’t help but notice that for the bulk of this interview Coker just sounds like a dude who is taking it one day at a time.