(Matt Serra: MMA’s patron saint of lost causes.)
With tomorrow night’s UFC 145 main event slated as a 4-1 squash match, the CP gang is talking upsets for today’s installment of the CagePotato Roundtable. If you have a topic-suggestion for a future Roundtable column, please send it to [email protected], and share your own MMA-upset testimonials in the comments section…
This wasn’t a hard decision for me: My personal “greatest upset” would have to be Fabricio Werdum vs. Fedor Emelianenko.
While I normally disagree with that crazy fanboy (hey Sodak) explaining to me how Fedor is an intelligent machine, sent back in time to destroy craniums and assassinate Andrei Arlovski, I completely wrote off Werdum here. Like, no way a guy who hung out in Minotauro Nogueira’s guard for six days is going to get tapped by a dude who calls himself “Go Horse” and smiles like this, right? So yeah, I gave him no chance of pulling out a victory. I could be on tape somewhere saying that he had no chance, in an obnoxiously opinionated manner. I may also be credited with one of the worst predictions in CP history.
So yeah, that one stung a little bit.
David vs. Goliath MMA – Watch More Funny Videos
“Colemon, get the fuck over here, now!” It’s not every day that a phone call changes your little world, but it happens. It was 1995, I was in high school [yeah, I’m old], and though I didn’t know it yet, I was about to see something beautiful.
Upon entering my friend’s home I found him and another pal huddled in front of a paused TV-VCR combo, a half-naked giant frozen on the screen. “These two guys are about to fight. Who do you think is going to win?” The behemoth’s name, I would soon learn, was “Emmanuel Yarborough…Yarborough.” The placard held by the hooker circling the cage read “Sumo,” and I had no trouble believing it.
Though obviously in shape, the relatively tiny Keith Hackney inspired little confidence in me, tiger claw stance be damned, and so I chose the giant. Before hitting play, my friends, the lying bastards, confirmed that Yarborough did indeed beat the little guy into paste. Imagine my surprise when the fight ended two minutes (and one broken gate) later with Hackney clubbing the world’s largest professional athlete into submission.
I doubt there were any casinos taking action for that scrap, and on paper Hackney may have even had the advantage, but none of that mattered to a guy seeing those two stand side by side. There are far greater examples of an underdog getting the win in our sport’s history, but this one matters most to me. That one crazy fight was all it took — David beat Goliath, and I was hooked.
Ben Goldstein
It’s appropriate that Rashad Evans is fighting this weekend, because no MMA upset made more of an immediate impact on me than seeing Rashad absolutely demolish Chuck Liddell at UFC 88 back in September 2008. I remember the night well. Fate had taken me to Jay-Z’s sports bar, the 40/40 Club, where I met Matt Serra for the first time. But let’s face it, you don’t wanna get bored with how many MMA stars I chill with, that stuffs, how many celebrity-owned New York night-spots I’ve pounded beers in, how many plates of nachos I order for me and the ladies in my life.
The point is, Chuck was more than a 2-1 favorite over Rashad coming into the fight. He appeared to be reborn with his fantastic win against Wanderlei Silva the previous December, and the general consensus was that Rashad wasn’t quite ready to face a legend. Before the fight, Rashad might have even agreed with that assessment.
Liddell landed more shots than Evans in the first round of the match, and most likely took it 10-9 on the judges scorecards. But heading into round 2, you could see Rashad’s confidence swell. He had settled in. He had tasted Chuck’s power, but hadn’t wilted. He kept an eye out for the infamous Chuck-face that Keith Jardine had described to him in training, and when he saw it coming, he hit the Iceman with the most savage overhand right I’d ever seen.
As I recall, I grabbed the arm of Jesse Holland from MMA Mania, and shouted “SANFORD AND SON! THAT MOTHERFUCKER IS DOING THE REDD FOXX FAKE-HEART-ATTACK-THING FROM FUCKING SANFORD AND SON!”
I never hung out with Jesse again.
+1200. Heading into his UFC 63 fight with inaugural UFC lightweight champion Jens Pulver, Joe Lauzon was listed at +1200 by nearly all of the Vegas bookies. As the Etrade baby will tell you, those odds are the same as the likelihood of being mauled by a polar bear and a normal bear in the same day. But the man with possibly the worst nickname in MMA (next to Ron “H20” Waterman) managed to pull out the victory. And not only did Lauzon score the upset, he walked right through Pulver like he was the aforementioned Etrade baby.
This fight will always be a personal favorite of mine, if only because it is a prime example of the unpredictability of MMA. Pulver was making his return to the UFC for the first time since his classic title-defending war with B.J. Penn at UFC 35. Having gone 9-4 against names like Takanori Gomi, Hayato Sakurai, Duane Ludwig, and Cole Escovedo, the UFC was basically setting up one of their most marketable lightweights with an easy victory. When determining Pulver’s opponent, I imagine Joe Silva asked himself the following:
1. Does he look like your average Best Buy employee with just as impressive a physique?
2. Is his nickname derived from a pop star, kid’s cereal, or amusement park ride?
3. Is his record impressive enough at face value to sway the CSAC into allowing this massacre to be carried out?
He must have thought he hit the proverbial jackpot when he came across Joe freaking Lauzon. But Silva, having never seen Revenge of the Nerds or Dirty Dancing before, made a classic mistake; he put baby in a corner. Lauzon came out swinging like he was fighting for the right to visit Skywalker Ranch, following up a couple close knees that would have surely decapitated “Lil Eagle” with a left hook that nearly did. And in a mere 47 seconds, Pulver’s glorious UFC aspirations came crumbling down around him.
Perhaps even funnier than the fight itself would be the following season of The Ultimate Fighter, which featured Baby Jay and Jens as coaches, and none other than Joe “Excelsior” Lauzon as a participant. He wasn’t chosen by Pulver, go figure, but when he finally had his preliminary matchup on episode 6, he quickly proved that his win over Pulver was no fluke, rag-dolling Brian Geraghty for a little over a minute before sinking in a rear-naked choke victory.
When reviewing the fight in an interview afterward, I remember Pulver’s assessment like it was yesterday. “At least I didn’t lose to some bitch,” he said. Indeed you did not, Jens. Indeed you did not.
For me, the greatest upset in MMA history has nothing to do with a “lucky” haymaker or an improbable arm-bar. However, there was an invincible favorite and an underdog that had no chance in hell of coming out on top. The two combatants waged an unlikely war and when the dust settled, the undisputed champion was left bloodied and beaten. This fight didn’t last 15 minutes or five championship rounds. No, this fight had been raging since November 12, 1993. That was the date of UFC 1, and it was the very beginning of the moral majority claiming that MMA competition was not fit for human consumption. Whether for sport or for entertainment, “society” assessed that MMA was profane, and the judge, jury and executioner were coming. It was literally “us” versus “them,” and if you have found your way to www.cagepotato.com, you are part of “us.”
I already know that a lot of people who are reading this were in diapers or grade school in 1993, but I wasn’t. I am not one of these poseurs that will tell you I actually saw UFC 1 live but you can bet your bottom dollar that I did give my old man $25 to order UFC 2 on PPV. That is when I saw Pat Smith vs. Scott Morris in the opening televised bout and that shit changed my life. I have only used the “love at first sight” proverb with my wife and kids, but looking back now, those few seconds also fit the analogy. Yes, it was brutal and yes it was unorthodox but it was the modern day Coliseum for me from that point forward.
Shortly thereafter, just like many of “us”, Senator John McCain saw a video-tape (pretty sure it wasn’t BETA-MAX) of a UFC event. He was outraged and he did his best to get MMA banned. The UFC was late-night news fodder and got kicked around like Jared Jones in the comment section of CP. McCain even said, “UFC is a brutal exhibition of machismo with no place in the modern world. It’s gory, and bloodthirsty and no better than watching a car wreck as it happens. It brings out the worst in its audience and should be banned for encouraging violence.”
Little did McCain know that he was doing all of “us” a great favor by enlightening the masses about the “human cock-fighting.” I will admit that the “open-weight and no-holds-barred” approach was pretty much . . . . . how do I put this . . . . . HUMAN FUCKING COCK-FIGHTING, but without McCain’s involvement there would never have been the Unified Rules of MMA that were adopted in 2000. The “them” intended to eradicate the sport but instead, they launched “us” towards respectability.
A lot has happened since the first “sanctioned” UFC took place back on November 17, 2000. And the biggest Johnny Cash middle finger came on August 18, 2011, when the UFC signed a multi-year contract with FOX. I felt vindicated knowing that I was a supporter all along and the irony was so fitting. The same channel that I can watch a potentially fatal car crash happen during a NASCAR race live on network television is the same channel I can now watch supreme athletes test themselves in the modern day Coliseum.
SCOREBOARD — “us”: 1, “them”: 0. WE WIN!!!!!!
I was going to write about how Randy Couture vs. Tim Sylvia was the upset that wasn’t, and therefore my favorite.
But since we’ve pissed off enough people this week, I’ll work on getting back in Gus Johnson‘s good graces and agree that Kimbo Slice vs. Seth Petruzelli was, in fact, the greatest upset in MMA history. Yep. No punchline to be made here.
*rides off into sunset*
[Ed. note: I feel sorry for your mother.]