Chael Sonnen is seen as the pound-for-pound best trash-talker in MMA right now. but there’s no question that his sound bytes have been tame as of late, even on UFC Tonight and on his Twitter.
Has he still been funny and entertaining with his occasional verbal jabs at certain fighters, from Jason “Mayhem” Miller to Alistair Overeem to Anderson Silva? Absolutely. He has maintained the little spark of humor and the entertainment that has made him such a polarizing figure, but what about his ability to sell a fight?
We all remember when he fought Michael “The Count” Bisping earlier this year at UFC on Fox 2, and we all remember how Sonnen and Bisping, the latter being a substitute for Mark Munoz, were thought to have delivered at least on the pre-fight hype.
The time between the day Bisping replaced Munoz and the night of the fight, however, was just not enough time for a whole slew of trash talk from both, though Sonnen did carry “his” UFC middleweight title belt to the press conference and Bisping did take a shot at Sonnen a few times before the weigh-ins even went down. As a matter of fact, Bisping was originally supposed to face Demian Maia on the Fox 2 card, but he still fired some shots at Sonnen.
In any case, Bisping is really here nor there, and whether you honestly thought Sonnen lost against Bisping or not, the fact is that the archives have it down as a unanimous decision win for Sonnen, who always tries to bring some form of entertaining trash talk whenever he leaves his analyst’s bandanna at his home in West Linn, Ore.
Some may not like it, but Sonnen does know how to sell a fight, even when there’s not enough time to really go for the jugular or even when he uses freshly canned one-liners that often make his critics wonder if they’re watching a rerun of old-school WWE or the original ECW.
Even then, though, Sonnen’s ability to hype a fight hasn’t become tired.
Sure, his critics and strongest detractors are tired of Sonnen and want to see him silenced, but his ability to sell a fight and make people think he’s going to give the performance of a lifetime has not yet become tired, even if the lines he uses are, again, freshly canned and possibly refrigerated.
After all. it’s Chael P. Sonnen we’re talking about, folks. If that name alone can’t sell you a fight in 2012, then what fight can be sold in 2012?
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