Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce
There’s no such thing as “the heavyweight champion of the world” in mixed martial arts. That’s a title that various promoters can bestow on their fighters, but the reality is that the promotions have their own heavyweight champions. If those champions won’t fight each other, then we never really know, for sure, who the champ is.
But there is usually a consensus opinion among MMA fans and the MMA media about who the top heavyweight is. For years, the top heavyweight was Fedor Emelianenko, which meant that the No. 1 heavyweight resided outside the UFC. The combination of Fedor’s loss to Fabricio Werdum and Cain Velasquez‘s victory over Brock Lesnar, however, solidified Velasquez, in the eyes of most observers, as the No. 1 heavyweight.
None of the fighters participating in Strikeforce’s eight-man heavyweight tournament will get the opportunity to wrest control of the mythical heavyweight crown away from Velasquez inside the cage. But the tournament will give the winner a lot of ammunition for an argument that he is, in fact, the best. And the tournament gives Strikeforce its best chance of making a legitimate case that its champion — and not the UFC’s — is the best heavyweight.