It used to be when Bellator rolled out a “new season” of television, what it really meant was it was about to roll out another series of tournaments filled with fighters you’d never heard of.
The tournaments were a nifty concept back when they started. But, they were always more of a hindrance than a help. They pushed logical matchmaking to the side because Bjorn Rebney had crowed about tournaments being the only legitimate way to crown a champion, and he couldn’t really go back on that. And then, of course, he did go back on that. By the end of Rebney‘s tenure as czar of Bellator, he was avoiding the tournament results when convenient in order to make the fights people really wanted to see in the first place.
You know, like he should’ve done from the very beginning.
But a new season of Bellator is once again upon us—only this one feels more like a new season, in the way that actual seasons turn the scenery from a sea of snow into a bright and shining summer landscape. Rebney is gone, and in his place is brilliant promoter Scott Coker, matchmaker Rich Chou and many of their old friends from the now-defunct Strikeforce.
This new Bellator, it is not like the old Bellator at all. There are no more tournaments. Chou has begun trimming some of the fat from Bellator‘s bloated and sickly roster. And they’re kicking things off next week on Spike with a card filled with fights the fans want to see. I’m all in for a repeat of Michael Chandler vs. Will Brooks. King Mo vs. Joe Vedepo? It is not ideal, but it will do. And the mere mention of Joe Schilling and Melvin Manhoef—two world-class kickboxers who will be kickboxing under MMA rules with MA gloves—well, that positively sends chills up and down my spine.
And then there’s the main event. Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar, two relics of the UFC’s past, doing battle in the main event of the UFC’s biggest competitor’s most important show to date.
It is a curious thing, this one. I know how I feel about the fight, and I can tell you in pretty simple terms: I like it a lot. But I also understand what it is, and I understand why Coker and Chou put it together. It’s not a fight to determine the future of Bellator. It is not a fight to determine a Bellator light heavyweight champion, though given the dearth of talent in the division as a whole, giving the winner of this fight the strap might not be such a bad idea.
This is a fight created for one purpose: to draw eyeballs to the Bellator product. Coker is banking on the idea that casual fans have probably heard of Ortiz and, perhaps, of Bonnar. And he’s right. Ortiz and Bonnar are stars of the UFC’s yesteryear, but they are stars all the same, and that is something Bellator lacks. And so the hope is that casual fans will see Ortiz and Bonnar on the top of the poster, and they’ll tune in and see other great mixed martial arts action with Lawal and Chandler and Brooks and everyone else on the card.
The shenanigans leading into the Ortiz and Bonnar scuffle? They were memorable, though, perhaps, not in the way Bonnar thought they would be when he came up with the idea to put Justin McCully in a mask. You have to give Bonnar an A for effort, but they would have been much more effective if anyone in the world really knew who McCully was, why he has a relationship with Ortiz and why in the blue hell he was wearing two masks.
Was one mask not enough? I’ll never understand that part of the angle. But it doesn’t matter if you understand it. All that matters at this point is that you remember it, and we do. Does it make me want to see Ortiz and Bonnar fight? No. Not at all. But it gives us something to latch onto. It gives us a reason, however flimsy it might be, to tune in and watch.
And that’s something Bellator has been missing since the very beginning of the product on television: a continued reason for fans to tune in.
I don’t know what the new era of Bellator holds. I know that the promotion is in good hands with Coker and Chou, and all the other holdovers from Strikeforce. I know the people at Spike have plenty of experience in working with televised mixed martial arts. But nobody knows how it’s going to play out, whether there is room for another competitor for the UFC or whether the UFC’s insistence on international expansion will leave them vulnerable—much like the World Wrestling Federation was overtaken by World Championship Wrestling in the 1990s.
The future is murky, but here is what I do know: Ortiz vs. Bonnar is a good thing, and it is the right fight at the right time.
You can laugh, and you can point at Bellator putting a bout between two aging light heavyweights above their own lightweight championship on a fight card, but you’ll tune in. All of us will.
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