Luke Rockhold and Ovince St. Preux more than earned their keep last weekend.
During back-to-back UFC events that featured some 21 fights, Rockhold and St. Preux turned in the only truly impactful performances. Rockhold thumped Michael Bisping en route to a second-round submission, while St. Preux shocked Mauricio “Shogun” Rua with a 34-second TKO.
In fact, if last Friday and Saturday nights proved anything, it’s that—now more than ever—guys like Rockhold and OSP have tremendous significance for the UFC. For all the talk of oversaturation, their fine showings reminded us that when the fighters are recognizable and the stakes clear, the product in the Octagon is still better than ever.
Too often when we talk about the value of fighters, we use narrow and perhaps increasingly outdated metrics. Traditionally, we’ve concerned ourselves exclusively with pay-per-view buys, meaning that only those at the very top of the food chain were regarded as having any value at all.
But as the UFC’s live event schedule continues to swell and as its broadcast platforms multiply, that single evaluator doesn’t seem to fit so snugly anymore. In fact, the more the fight company expands its schedule and stretches its roster, the more important known, but unspent commodities like Rockhold and St. Preux become.
At Friday night’s UFC Fight Night 55, all 11 bouts ended with stoppages, and the event itself was considered a great success, airing exclusively on the UFC’s digital subscription service. Reviews of Saturday’s televised Fight Night 56 were not so rosy, after four out of five main card bouts went the distance, and the action dragged deep into the night.
Still, a few weeks from now we’ll likely have forgotten most all of it—regardless of how exciting or tedious it seemed at the time. That’s the reality of our new, breakneck MMA landscape, where there are so many events and the fighters appear so interchangeable, there isn’t much chance to linger on any one thing.
But we’ll recall those Rockhold and St. Preux fights.
We’ll hold onto their memory not because the fights were sensational or because they were main events, but because they shaped up as relevant bouts featuring people we actually knew—and then two of the fighters gave us something to remember them by.
When it comes to making these mid-tier UFC events successful, that’s really all you can expect. By simple virtue of the fact they are even remotely known to us, guys like Rockhold and St. Preux make for quality main event attractions.
If the UFC means to go on doing nearly 50 shows a year—indeed, if it means to make a larger and larger part of its product these strange pit stops in places like Uberlandia, Brazil, and Sydney, Australia—it needs fighters like Rockhold and OSP. They are becoming invaluable to a company that seems hell-bent on testing the limits of its own roster while simultaneously losing many of its proven draws to injury and advanced age.
Before Saturday night, this was mostly true of Rockhold. We’d witnessed his rise through Strikeforce from 2008-2012, watched him win the middleweight title and defend it twice before the company folded. We cringed as a testosterone-crazed Vitor Belfort knocked him stiff in his UFC debut, but in two subsequent appearances he rekindled his stock as an exciting up-and-comer.
Before he even took the cage against Bisping, we were excited about him as a potential 185-pound title challenger. He’d already main evented two previous UFC Fight Night events and came into this one facing an established but fading star in a must-win situation.
His impressive one-armed submission of Bisping obviously only increased our interest.
St. Preux was lesser known but still managed to leave an impression, taking advantage of his status as a late injury replacement and blitzing Rua in the first round. Like Rockhold, OSP had spent a couple of years kicking around in Strikeforce. We hadn’t attached the same kind of feelings to him, but at least we knew his backstory. At least we regarded him as a work in progress, a fighter with tremendous potential who had yet to really find his stride.
Even if you tuned in to these events to see Bisping or Rua you likely left them more interested to see what happens next for Rockhold and St. Preux. Both now have storylines and expectations associated with their names. Whether we knew it or not prior to last weekend, we’re now at least a little bit invested in their careers. We want to see where they go from here.
In a UFC schedule that often seems unrelenting, it feels like victory just to accomplish that much.
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