Filed under: Strikeforce
Depending on who you talk to, Strikeforce is either dying a slow death or in need of a life-saving procedure. Either way, things don’t look great for the promotion that just a few months ago, seemed poised to steal some of the UFC‘s spotlight.
After being purchased by the UFC’s parent company, the company has seen some of its best parts cherry-picked away for the bigger brand. Its heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem is gone. Its welterweight champion Nick Diaz is gone. Its light-heavyweight champion Dan Henderson is likely to be gone soon enough.
This is good and bad of course. Those transactions are likely to lead to superfights in the UFC, but they are just as likely to damage Strikeforce or put it out of business altogether. Most of this is simple business. Zuffa now has UFC under a brighter spotlight, and so it makes sense to have all its resources available to its bigger promotion. And when it comes to Strikeforce, Zuffa wants shows to turn a profit, and that’s no simple task when events include highly paid fighters. Because of those reasons, it seems logical to move its biggest names to UFC if possible. But what about those who remain?
Saturday night’s World Grand Prix semifinals showed that Strikeforce’s remaining athletes have plenty of fight in them yet, with a series of bouts that delivered. It’s a shame that more people didn’t see them. According to reports from the U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, the event was sparsely populated, though at least those who attended made their share of noise.
My colleague Ariel Helwani reported on fight night that there may have been 1,500 people in the stands. Contrast that to the opening night of the Grand Prix back in February, when the excitement surrounding the tournament drew 11,287 fans to the Izod Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and you can clearly see the dropoff has been fast and precipitous.
Though that is the case, we can’t really blame the fighters. There have been plenty of memorable moments in recent months, from Paul Daley and Nick Diaz producing possibly MMA’s round of the year, to Dan Henderson knocking out Fedor Emelianenko to Miesha Tate upsetting Marloes Coenen.
It was more of the same on Saturday, which boasted an overall event that — fight-for-fight — could rival the excitement level of nearly any card all year.
Just in the main card, there was Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal knocking out Roger Gracie, Luke Rockhold shocking Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, submissions by Pat Healy and Josh Barnett, and Daniel Cormier blasting his way through Antonio Silva.
While in recent Strikeforce events, there still seemed to be a bit of uncertainty about the future, now the promotion’s athletes seem to be a little more sure that they see the end coming. A week prior to the event, Lawal infamously compared the organization to a “dying cancer patient,” saying, “We’re just waiting for it to die, to pass.”
But, he added, “As long as I can get my fights in and they’re still around, I want to get them in.”
That seems to be the prevailing thought of every fighter competing under the banner. Barnett and Cormier lobbied for Strikeforce to name the Grand Prix winner as the heavyweight champion. After all, Overeem essentially vacated the belt when he was moved over to the UFC. The pair never got an answer to their request, but the winner might as well be the de facto champion, and both performed well enough to make you wonder how they would have done against Overeem had he stuck around.
Whether they do or don’t, it’s obvious that the fighters will continue to do what they do. As anyone who has worked at a company in trouble probably knows, it’s not always easy to concentrate on your job when the future is in doubt. At this time next year, anything is possible. Maybe Lorenzo Fertitta finds a way to make the math work and Strikeforce is still running, or maybe Showtime doesn’t want to give up on mixed martial arts and extends its option. Or maybe neither of those things happens, and Strikeforce is just a memory, with its talent absorbed into the exploding UFC.
Either way, the fighters continue to leave us with good memories. It shouldn’t be possible to take away so much talent and not hurt the product, but as Cormier, Rockhold and the rest showed on Saturday night, you can take away the fans and the spotlight, but you can’t take away their pride.