Tag: Bellator on Spike

Four Reasons Why You Should Watch Bellator’s Spike TV Debut Tonight


(Pat Curran, King Mo, and Michael Chandler — co-nominees in the “Best Kiss” category. / Photo via Getty Images)

Bellator’s eighth season kicks off tonight on Spike TV (10/9c), and now that the promotion has left Friday nights, you might even be thinking about watching the show. Here’s why that’s a good idea…

1. Michael Chandler is the second-greatest undefeated fighter in the world. Since winning Bellator’s lightweight title from Eddie Alvarez in November 2011, Chandler has competed exactly once — a 56-second TKO of Akihiro Gono in a non-title mismatch last May. Now carrying a perfect record of 10-0, Chandler is once again facing a legit challenge in the form of Rick Hawn, the former Olympic judoka and Bellator mainstay who dropped down from welterweight last year and swept the Season 6 Lightweight Tournament.

2. Pat Curran is also an entertaining son-of-a-bitch. Undefeated at 145 pounds, Curran also competed just once last year, when he very nearly ended Joe Warren’s life to win Bellator’s featherweight title. We’ve been itching to see him back in the game, and he’ll be leading off tonight’s Spike broadcast with a belt-defense against Patricio “Pitbull” Freire. Speaking of guys who have been sidelined for a while, Pitbull hasn’t been in the cage since he won the Season Four Featherweight Tournament in 2011, partly due to a broken hand suffered in training last year.


(Pat Curran, King Mo, and Michael Chandler — co-nominees in the “Best Kiss” category. / Photo via Getty Images)

Bellator’s eighth season kicks off tonight on Spike TV (10/9c), and now that the promotion has left Friday nights, you might even be thinking about watching the show. Here’s why that’s a good idea…

1. Michael Chandler is the second-greatest undefeated fighter in the world. Since winning Bellator’s lightweight title from Eddie Alvarez in November 2011, Chandler has competed exactly once — a 56-second TKO of Akihiro Gono in a non-title mismatch last May. Now carrying a perfect record of 10-0, Chandler is once again facing a legit challenge in the form of Rick Hawn, the former Olympic judoka and Bellator mainstay who dropped down from welterweight last year and swept the Season 6 Lightweight Tournament.

2. Pat Curran is also an entertaining son-of-a-bitch. Undefeated at 145 pounds, Curran also competed just once last year, when he very nearly ended Joe Warren’s life to win Bellator’s featherweight title. We’ve been itching to see him back in the game, and he’ll be leading off tonight’s Spike broadcast with a belt-defense against Patricio “Pitbull” Freire. Speaking of guys who have been sidelined for a while, Pitbull hasn’t been in the cage since he won the Season Four Featherweight Tournament in 2011, partly due to a broken hand suffered in training last year.

3. The card features an orgy of UFC light-heavyweight castoffs. In LHW tournament quarterfinal action, Renato “Babalu” Sobral will be making his Bellator debut against Mikhail Zayats, and Seth Petruzelli will face Jacob Noe, in his first appearance since KO’ing Ricco Rodriguez in August 2011. In addition, the Spike.com prelims (8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT) feature a match between Jason Lambert and Hector “Sick Dog” Ramirez. (I had to check Wikipedia to make sure those two didn’t previously fight on a UFC card sometime in 2006-2007. They didn’t.) Nobody would mistake these guys for top-ranked 205′ers, but they do have a proven track record of exciting slugfests — and at least you know who they are.

4. Mike Guymon continues his lightweight comeback. Joker’s 2010-2011 stint as a welterweight in the UFC ended in a disappointing 1-3 tally, with all three of his losses coming by first-round submission. Since then, Guymon has dropped to lightweight, picking up a pair of rebound wins for BAMMA USA. Now he’s back on a bigger stage, facing journeyman Savant Young on the Bellator 85 prelims. A win here could revitalize his career.

Honorable mention: Jamie Yager, one of TUF‘s most aggravating heels of all time, will be making his Bellator debut against Joe Williams during tonight’s prelims. Who knows — maybe he’ll get his ass kicked.

Bellator Premieres “Vote for the Fight” for Spike Debut Featuring War Machine, Ben Saunders, Douglas Lima, and Paul Daley

Although the UFC has easily secured the top position for “Most Interesting News of the Day,” their rivals over at Bellator have recently revealed a pretty unique feature of their own for their upcoming season on Spike TV. Besides the fact that they are completely exploiting War Machine’s less than positive personal history as a hype tool for his promotional debut*[AWESOME], Bjorn and the boys have debuted an interactive web series dubbed “Vote for the Fight,” which allows you to, wait for it, vote for the very first fight of their 2013 season on Spike TV.

Fans will be given the option to match up any of the following four fighters: Ben Saunders, Paul Daley, Douglas Lima, and our boy War Machine. In addition, Spike TV will be airing a new episode of the web series — which will provide some background and behind-the-scenes info on each of the participants — each Thursday.

Part 1 is above and Part 2 awaits you after the jump.

Although the UFC has easily secured the top position for “Most Interesting News of the Day,” their rivals over at Bellator have recently revealed a pretty unique feature of their own for their upcoming season on Spike TV. Besides the fact that they are completely exploiting War Machine’s less than positive personal history as a hype tool for his promotional debut*[AWESOME], Bjorn and the boys have debuted an interactive web series dubbed “Vote for the Fight,” which allows you to, wait for it, vote for the very first fight of their 2013 season on Spike TV.

Fans will be given the option to match up any of the following four fighters: Ben Saunders, Paul Daley, Douglas Lima, and our boy War Machine. In addition, Spike TV will be airing a new episode of the web series — which will provide some background and behind-the-scenes info on each of the participants — each Thursday.

An interesting side note is that none of these gentlemen will be appearing in Bellator’s next welterweight tournament. In fact, only two of them have ever met inside the cage before — Lima and Saunders — with Lima defeating Saunders by second round knockout at Bellator 57. One would think that Saunders would want a chance to earn some redemption against Lima or possibly face off against his fellow TUF 6 alum in War Machine, but according to his Twitter account, Saunders would much rather test the waters against arguably the most dangerous striker of them all: Paul “Semtex” Daley, who is fresh off a first round stomping of Rudy Bears in his Bellator debut. Lima, on the other hand, recently rebounded from his failed title bid against Ben Azzzzkren with a first round TKO win over Jacob Ortiz at Bellator 79.

But you don’t care about any of that. What you care about is who will War Machine be fighting next and will he actually make it to said fight without incarcerating himself in the mean time. The last time Machine aka Prison Mike was released from the clink, he broke Roger Huerta’s ribs and TKO’d that nail painting ninny in the third round, so you best believe that whoever he faces is going to get torn through like a bologna sandwich. We’d prefer if that someone was Askren, because everyone knows that the only one way to defend his narcolepsy-inducing lay-n-pray is with the savage, prison-based form of fighting known only as ape-n-rape, which War Machine has all but mastered by this point in his career. But we digress.

So what do you think, Potato Nation? Is Bellator’s new interactive feature a good thing for fans, or will they only screw things up worse than when they picked David Cook over David Archuleta? BUT D-ARCH WAS SOOO DREAMY!!

*Because when you think about it, prison is basically a limitless training facility to improve your MMA game if your willing to fork over the sanctity of your butthole every now and again. Reach for the stars, kids!

–J. Jones