With Vitor Belfort now set to fight Jon Jones at UFC 152, Alan Belcher was left without an opponent for UFC 153 in Rio. Many of us began to speculate as to who the UFC would call in to replace Vitor Belfort in a fight that had possible title implications. Nah, I’m just kidding, we were all way too busy talking about bitchassness, trolling your way into title shots and over-saturation to worry about Alan Belcher. Let’s get back to the real issues of today.
Not so fast. Alan Belcher released a video blog yesterday to discuss the whole Jon Jones saga. Interestingly enough, Belcher first discloses that he won’t be fighting at UFC 153 because he wants to let a back injury he suffered while training heal. In his words:
Rewind a little bit: Three or four weeks back, I had a real bad back problem. I went to the doctor, found out that I had a spinal fracture, so that put me out for three weeks. I didn’t bend my back, I just kept it straight. I’m like “I’m just going to get the rest I need to make this fight happen and push through it.” I was getting back in there training, and it took me a whole week to get my mind wrapped back around it, but I was like “This is a huge fight, I’m going to do it,” and there is no way I was going to back out of that fight. Once I started back and I got going, I put a lot of thought into it and I was going full-force ahead.
While that speaks volumes about the respect that Belcher has for both his fans and the UFC, that’s not what we’re focusing on now. Rather, let’s focus on who Alan Belcher wants when he’s ready to return to action. Aside from the standard training montages and shots of Belcher’s John Belushi tattoo (that’s who that thing is supposed to be, right?), Alan Belcher slips a call out of the middleweight division’s heir apparent, Chris Weidman, into the video. As he puts it:
Chris Weidman, I think that fight makes sense. Do I think he’s the number one contender? I don’t know about that, but I think that he’s definitely up there.
What’s strange about this call out is how out of place it is in the video. Belcher goes from talking about his back to randomly calling out Chris Weidman to immediately switching to his grappling training with pretty much no logical transitions between topics. He then goes on to say that if he was Anderson Silva’s manager, he wouldn’t let Anderson fight guys like him or Chris Weidman because they aren’t big enough names.
The Anderson Silva comments are around the 5:50 mark.
Basically, Belcher says he wants to fight Chris Weidman, but wouldn’t blame Anderson Silva for turning down a fight with the winner, because Silva deserves to be fighting big name guys like Jon Jones. Unrelated, Alan, but have you ever heard of Stockholm syndrome?
No one is saying that fighters have to be total assholes to properly promote a fight- the friendly banter between Josh Barnett and Daniel Cormier during Strikeforce: Tate vs. Rousey illustrated this perfectly. But when a guy randomly calls out another fighter and then says that the winner isn’t big enough to deserve a shot at the champion, it makes the call out look meaningless. It kind of makes you see where Anderson Silva manager Jorge Guimaraes was coming from when he called the middleweight division a bunch of amateur kids who can’t promote a fight. After all, if Belcher doesn’t think he deserves a shot at Silva, then why should we?
And that’s too bad, because Belcher vs. Weidman actually sounds like an excellent idea- to me at least. Do you agree? And who ya got?