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CagePotato Ban: Having Your Champion Fight in Non-Title Fights

Remember: The real champion is the guy on the right. Seriously. Both images via Sherdog.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, Bellator’s Light-heavyweight champion Christian M’Pumbu lost his non-title super fight against journeyman Travis Wiuff on Saturday night. Yes, a champion actually lost one of those super fights that are supposed to show the general public how badass he is. Now that we’ve had an additional twenty four hours to digest the incident since we first reported it yesterday, let’s put the fight into perspective: Wiuff decisively beat Bellator’s light-heavyweight champion, Christian M’Pumbu, in a light-heavyweight fight under the Bellator banner on Saturday night. For his efforts, he has more than likely earned a slot in next season’s light-heavyweight tournament. If he wins said tournament, his reward will be a title shot against the best light-heavyweight in Bellator, Christian M’Pumbu. You know, the guy he just defeated Saturday night.

Wait, what the fucking what?

Having your champion fight in non-title super fights is a dubious idea in the first place. We’ve seen other organizations employ it before with less than spectacular results. Now that the worst case scenario played out at Bellator 55, it’s officially time to give this idea the ban that it deserves.

There are three main reasons why:

Remember: The real champion is the guy on the right. Seriously. Both images via Sherdog.

Wait, what the fucking what?

There are three main reasons why:

You’re setting the fight up for mediocrity. The purpose of these non-title fights is to showcase how dominant the champion can be, yet they are inherently designed to do the exact opposite. As Overeem vs. Werdum taught us, putting your organization’s champion in non-title fights is a recipe for mediocrity because the champion has next to nothing to lose, while the challenger has next to nothing to gain. Aside from the L on his record, what did Christian M’Pumbu have to lose on Saturday night? No matter what the outcome, he’d still be the Bellator Light-heavyweight champion. He’d still get the exact same amount of time off before his next fight. That said fight would still be against the winner of next season’s tournament. He couldn’t move down in Bellator’s rankings with a loss, because he’d still be their champion regardless.

For that matter, what does the challenger have to gain in these fights? A potential title shot, which is nothing he can’t already earn from a victory against a lesser fighter in the organization. Can you really expect either fighter to take the fight as seriously as a title fight? Of course not, which explains why most champions do just enough to win without getting injured during these non-title fights. Believe it or not, unmotivated champion plus challenger with nothing significant to gain is not the formula for a memorable fight.

It’s usually a blatant admission of a squash fight. Can someone explain to me how a victory over Kalib Starnes set up Falaniko Vitale for a fight with Hector Lombard? Better yet, how did a 0-1 record in Bellator put Ryan Roberts across the cage from Bantamweight champion Zach Makovsky? Neither fighter posed any threat to the champion at all whatsoever, as evident by how Hector Lombard toyed with Vitale before knocking him out in the third round and by Makovsky’s first round north-south choke over Roberts. It’s almost like promoters know this when they book these non-title fights with their champions. Oh yeah, the betting lines when champions are involved in non-title fights usually hint at this, too.

As a promoter, it is your job to match your champions up with the best talent available. It’s one thing to allow an up and coming prospect to crush some cans to pad his record, but your organization’s champion has to fight the best, most deserving fighters in order for the belt to mean anything. By the very nature of having somebody fight your champion, you’re telling the fans that he is the best fighter available. But by refusing to put the title on the line, you’re essentially admitting the opposite- that the challenger has no business standing across the cage from the champion. The bottom line is that if the challenger can pull off the upset against the champion, he deserves to be rewarded with the organization’s title. If you don’t want to risk the challenger becoming your organization’s champion- for whatever reason- then don’t book him to fight the champion. Besides…

The fans will consider the winner to be the rightful champion regardless. Those of us who aren’t ashamed to admit to watching some pro wrasslin’ back in the day can tell you: In order to be the man, you gotta beat the man. I’ll wait for you all to “WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” before I continue.

After watching Christian M’Pumbu get bullied by Travis Wiuff for the majority of their fight on Saturday night, does anyone actually consider the guy to be the best light-heavyweight in Bellator? Of course not, unless we’re going with the John Wooden mentality that M’Pumbu was on his way to winning the fight but ran out of time (we’re not). So then how can anyone not consider Travis Wiuff the rightful champion? He beat the man. He beat the fighter that Bellator proudly declared to be the best fighter at light-heavyweight. If we’re going along with the mentality that being the organization’s light-heavyweight champion means you’re the best light-heavyweight in the organization, we simply can’t call Christian M’Pumbu the rightful champion after losing a light-heavyweight fight. And if we aren’t going with that mentality, then what’s the point of naming a champion?

I don’t want to end on a sour note for Bellator. I like Bellator. They put on some great, exciting fights. But Bjorn Rebney: I know you read CagePotato. Your promotion is better than this whole “champions in non-title fights” stuff. With your help, we can send this preposterous idea to the YAMMA Pit of Misfit Toys where it belongs.

-Seth Falvo

CagePotato Ban: Saying You’re an ’0-0 Fighter’ When You’re Not

(Props: MMAFighting.com)

Ben Rothwell‘s stint in the UFC hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped. After a TKO loss to Cain Velasquez during his Octagon debut in October 2009, the former IFL standout followed it up with a unanimous decision win over Gilbert Yvel that cost him his ACL. Now, 15 months later, he’s coming into his UFC 135 match against Mark Hunt this weekend with a completely new mindset. As he told Ariel Helwani:

“I don’t even feel like I’m the same person now. I feel like in one year I’ve really made some major changes, and it’s gonna be pretty obvious September 24th what I’m talking about…I’m definitely coming into this fight [and] I’m 0-0. This Ben Rothwell is 0-0 coming in the UFC.”

In a way, this is the inverse of bringing back your old self. Rothwell isn’t looking to re-live the past. He wants to come back as a brand-new Ben — a clean slate, removed from all the real-life setbacks he’s suffered over the last three years. A fictional character, in other words.

(Props: MMAFighting.com)

Is Rothwell the first fighter to look to the future by ignoring the past? Not at all. In fact, this “0-0 fighter” thing is becoming a running gag in MMA. Melvin Guillard claimed to be 0-0 after losing to Nate Diaz. (He’s 5-0 now, if you’re keeping score.) Tyron Woodley called himself 0-0 after his lackluster win over Nathan Coy. Phil Davis thinks of himself as 0-0 every time he fights, as does Johnny Hendricks. So why all the hate for official records?

In the case of Rothwell and Guillard, I think it shows a bit of disrespect for the fighters who managed to beat them. Cain Velasquez and Nate Diaz should be proud of those victories — but the implication is that those guys beat inferior, outdated versions of Rothwell and Guillard, and if they fought again today, well, it would be a different story.

Look, Rothwell isn’t 0-0, he’s 31-7. And he’s come a long way since the days of beating the crap out of fat kids at local shows for gas money, which is something he should take pride in. Still, this “completely different fighter” routine needs to be retired. Unless Rothwell comes out shooting fireballs from his eyes and levitating around the cage, it’ll always feel like an exaggeration. No fighter is exactly the same from one match to the next.

If you’re going to devote your life to MMA, you have to accept that it will be filled with ups and downs, and those downs are going to suck. But there’s no reset button on life, as much as you’d like there to be. So own it.

Got any other ideas for CagePotato Bans? Let us know in the comments section…

Make It, Take It: Heart is Awesome

So”heart of a champion” is just a meaningless phrase? PicProps: Esther Lin

Heart is awesome. Guts are more important to cage fighting than Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Balls sell more tickets than Olympic medals. Heart is an intangible, an ethereal quality that fighters seem to either have in abundance, or sorely lack. And while intangibles may offend the sensibilities of those who would analyze fights like they’re backward engineering a damn nuclear centrifuge, it’s that very quality that motivates fans to buy tickets, buy shirts, buy pay per views, buy hotel rooms. It isn’t simply some writer’s trope that we use to fill space; this is an attribute that, however hard to pin down, has a demonstrable effect.

There is something about competition in sports that speaks directly to primal emotions in all of us. Ok, apparently not all of us, but still. Fans tend to be emotional people, and not always rational. So a non-tangible quality like “heart” is important, if for nothing but a fighter’s popularity.

Guys like Ox Wheeler or Leonard Garcia or Scott Smith that seem to just go out there and wing it, wind up getting in a war with some guy and they beat the piss out of one another and everybody in the crowd goes bonkers and throws their hotdogs in the air and the collective cry is a noise like the damn building is yelling–that’s why that happens. And everyone goes home horny and it’s generally a good time had by all. It’s a purely emotional response, and base, and uneducated…and it’s totally valid.

So”heart of a champion” is just a meaningless phrase? PicProps: Esther Lin

Keep in mind, without those newbs and meatheads who come in droves and fall in love with “sloppy” fights and “gutsy” fighters, there is no growth to the sport. Yes, new fans can be can be annoying, so you’d do well to help them learn, rather than piss on their parade about what a shitty fight that was that they just enjoyed so much.

Note to MMA hipsters: yes, your knowledge of obscure brazilian fight leagues and Russian grappling tourneys is impressive. But it’s not wise to demand that a fan have a certain level of knowledge before they’re allowed to enjoy the sport alongside you. Just sayin’.

***

If you’ve seen Jared Hess fight, you’ve probably gotten a pretty good look at what heart looks like. Like Shane Carwin, Hess took a pretty nasty beat down, a seventeen-minute session from Hector Lombard in the first Bellator middleweight finals, almost exactly two years ago. Doctors stopped the fight, but Hess never quit. Did he, like Carwin, have very little chance of winning that fight? Yes, very small chance indeed. And heart is what carries a fighter through, holding on to that very small chance.

Heart is what made Hess sign on for another tournament, and another potential shot at the man who had beaten him so thoroughly. Foolhardy? Perhaps, but his resolve is admirable. Hess won his way back to the finals the next season, and faced the Russian hurricane, Alexander Shlemenko. Hess dominated the fight for two rounds. In the third, he continued to dominate, until he landed awkwardly and a everloving cataclysm happened inside his knee. He dislocated pretty much everything from the knee down — and he continued to dominate the fight. It was two minutes later, with Hess close to taking an easy decision win, that the ref noticed that Hess couldn’t stand on his leg because it was no longer functional and called the fight. And Hess had the balls to argue with him. He showed heart.

Heart makes you do awesome things, it just doesn‘t always go the fighter‘s way. Diego Sanchez’s Traveling Slam of Positivity? That came from heart. Anyone can pick a guy up and slam him on his back with enough training. It takes guts to hoist a grown man on your shoulders and jog him back to your corner while you roar like a silverback gorilla. I guess ‘roids could do it, too.

But it didn’t feel like steroids. It felt like Sanchez charged up, communed with some spirits or something, and then carried Paulo Thiago an unnecessary distance before planting him. (See? More of that emotion crap.) Then Sanchez looked like this after BJ Penn got done with him, but he never quit. He never caught too much to just roll over and tap. He took his beating like a man, if you don’t mind that possibly-chauvinistic piece of color. He showed heart.

No, heart is something that you can’t quantify, or test for, or even train for. Statisticians and odds-makers be damned, but fighters will continue to show heart, and hoards of fans will continue to love them for it. Everyone loves an underdog, and fans will still love him when he loses, because he went down swinging. No one is denying the loss, or masking some truth: sometimes fighters are outgunned and overmatched, but he gutted it out anyway. He showed heart.

Heart is awesome. And hating on heart? That’s just some cynical bullshit. Screw that. I’m going to go watch Huerta-Garcia.

[RX]

PS: Sam Sheridan would like a word with you.

CagePotato Ban: Giving It Up for ‘Heart’

(Shane may have had heart, balls, guts, and a chin, but they were no match for Junior’s elite-level anatomical-metaphor defense.)

We’re almost a week removed from the magnificent beatdown that Junior dos Santos laid on Shane Carwin, and it’s probably safe to assume that all of the post-fight articles have been written about the main event at UFC 131. Well, all but one.

This article is not specifically about UFC 131 or Shane Carwin — it’s about a certain phrase that has been tied to Carwin’s performance following his three-round beating, and that phrase is “He showed a lot of heart.”

Do a Google search on MMA “showed heart” and look at the names associated with the term: Shane Carwin, Paul Daley, Roy Nelson, and Andrei Arlovski, just to name a few. Any fighter that stood in there and took a beating, yup, he “showed a lot of heart.”

It’s time to retire that phrase, and here’s why…

(Shane may have had heart, balls, guts, and a chin, but they were no match for Junior’s elite-level anatomical-metaphor defense.)

It’s time to retire that phrase, and here’s why…

It’s lazy. I’ve been guilty of using the phrase myself, but I will no longer use it and I encourage anyone covering MMA to do the same. We see a fighter get beaten bloody, but he doesn’t tap, he doesn’t get KO’d and he doesn’t quit, so we attribute his performance to this mythical thing called “heart.” It’s an easy way out, and too often replaces actual analysis of the losing fighter’s performance.

It’s essentially meaningless. How do you measure heart, guts, and chutzpah? You can’t; it’s all perception. One man’s version of heart is another man’s version of sheer stupidity. Not to pick on Carwin – God knows he was beaten enough on Saturday night — but did he hang in there out of “heart” or out of the never-quit attitude that is pounded into wrestlers and other combat sport participants from a very young age? Do these fighters show this “heart” out of fear of looking soft? (As BJ Penn once said, “You tap from strikes, you’re a little bitch, that’s what I think.”) Besides, these are professional fighters we’re talking about. We don’t really expect them to run out of the cage screaming when things get tough.

It masks the truth. If I were going to write a story about UFC 131 using simple, everyday language and avoid any type of euphemism, the lede would read something like this: “On Saturday, Shane Carwin took a 15 minute beating at the hands of Junior dos Santos. At the end of the fight Carwin’s face was bloody and swollen, he was cut under both eyes and appeared to have a broken nose. Carwin was ineffective during the fight, landing 22 strikes compared to dos Santos’ 104. Carwin was never in the fight, but he showed that he can stand in there and take a beating.” No mention of heart, and you know why? Because it doesn’t exist, outside of the realm of metaphor. The truth is that Carwin can take a punch and he elected to take many of them over the course of the fight. That’s more a deficiency of strategy than anything else.

It leads to things like this. Carwin’s trainer, Trevor Wittman, who by all accounts is one of the best in the business, had the following to say to MMAMania after the fight, “To me, that was like watching a Rocky Balboa movie. Movies are made about stuff like that. As a trainer, I felt we won. We didn’t win the fight but we won as a person and as a team. He did not get beat mentally.”

I understand where Wittman is coming from in this – he has to take something positive away from the loss for his fighter – but to state that Carwin’s beating is the stuff “movies are made about.” Well, that’s a stretch. To say he won as a person and a team? How is that the case? Your fighter gets a loss on his record and he also received a trip to the ER. That’s a loss. The “moral victory,” like heart, is just a weak consolation. While Carwin may not have been beaten mentally he sure as hell was beaten physically and in a sport where you are judged with a W or an L, that’s what counts. There are no asterisks after a loss that say, “He showed a lot of heart.”

So please, let’s do away with “heart.” It was a lame power to have on Captain Planet, and has even less relevance in the real world.

[TR]