It’s a rare thing that Bellator gets out in front and really, truly pushes the UFC. It’s even more rare that it all happens on the same weekend, with both promotions reeling off fight cards in hopes of securing fan interest.
It happened thi…
It’s a rare thing that Bellator gets out in front and really, truly pushes the UFC. It’s even more rare that it all happens on the same weekend, with both promotions reeling off fight cards in hopes of securing fan interest.
It happened this weekend, though. And, perhaps shockingly, Bellator came out on top.
Possibly a lesser shock is that they did it in the most Bellator fashion possible.
Their success wasn’t pure. It wasn’t a product of excellent matchmaking or a deep card filled with a collection of Fight of the Year contenders. And it wasn’t even a true success in some ways.
Their success, such as it was, came from unadulterated zaniness. It was the result of steering into the waves of unpredictability and chaos that one will only find in MMA.
Heather Hardy—a boxer-turned-mixed martial artist with alliterated H’s that might make one think she’s the promotion’s answer to Holly Holm—got some (bloodied) face time on her way to a scintillating TKO win late in her debut.
They slapped Lyoto Machida’s brother on Spike TV against a poor man’s Conor McGregor and had them jerk the curtain for two UFC washouts main-eventing for the light heavyweight title.
Delightfully, the whole thing was called by Mike Goldberg, because who else is right to call MMA on Spike TV?
When the pay-per-view portion started, only the second of its kind in Bellator history, things began with an entirely-too-serious title fight between Lorenz Larkin and Douglas Lima. Lima won an interesting bout between two legitimately excellent welterweights before things turned weird again.
Moments later, Brent Primus dethroned the face of Bellator, Michael Chandler, when Chandler rolled his ankle and couldn’t continue. In getting to that point, though, Chandler almost KO’d Primus on one leg and then had someone comically pull his corner stool from underneath him during a typically inappropriate mid-fight NYSAC regulatory charade.
All of that happened before Wanderlei Silva and Chael Sonnen locked up to end the evening, a bout that saw Sonnen maul Silva with takedowns and aggression before boldly claiming he hates New York only seconds after being declared the winner.
It was all wonderful in its own silly way—the type of enjoyment that you’ll never find in a UFC event but that remains worth your $50 anyway.
And that’s the rub.
In order for Bellator to win a weekend away from the UFC, they have to pull everything they have out of their bag of tricks. Out of that, almost every outcome they could account for must be undermined and everything they ruled out has to happen, just so people can enjoy the preposterousness of it all.
Only then will people pay attention, and it’s still close even with the UFC running a card of relative unknowns headlined by a “not-quite-contenders-now-but-maybe-someday-they-will-be” bout in Oklahoma.
It shows the gulf between the entities in the MMA market share, and it shows how far Bellator still has to go. This was a nice weekend for them, and there’s reason to think there might be a few more such successes coming down the line. But it’s the UFC’s world right now, and everyone else is living in it.
Still, as the likes of Freeman, Primus, Mitrione and Sonnen might tell you: A win is a win is a win.
After a night when chaos was the only constant for Bellator MMA, company CEO Scott Coker remained predictably understated.
To look at him at the postfight press conference Saturday at Madison Square Garden, you would never know some of Coker’s&nbs…
After a night when chaos was the only constant for Bellator MMA, company CEO Scott Coker remained predictably understated.
To look at him at the postfight press conference Saturday at Madison Square Garden, you would never know some of Coker’s biggest stars had just coughed up a string of bizarre and baffling losses during Bellator’s first pay-per-view event since 2014.
You’d never know a lot of his best promotional plans had likely just crumbled to dust when—after years of hype—super-prospect Aaron Pico lost his professional debut in 24 seconds.
Or that two-time Bellator lightweight champion Michael Chandler had suffered a freak ankle injury and handed the title to virtual unknown Brent Primus just 2:22 into the first round.
Or that Matt Mitrione and Fedor Emelianenko had come millimeters from a wild double knockout in the opening moments of their featured heavyweight fight, only to have Mitrione regain his senses and pound the legendary Emelianenko into a TKO loss in 1:14.
At the very least, you’d never know whether Coker was bothered by any of it.
“That’s the thing about the fight business, is that you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, flashing the placid demeanor that has been his calling card since his days going head-to-head with the UFC from 2006-2011 at the helm of Strikeforce. “The people who were supposed to win tonight won. I think all of them will go back to training camp in a week or two and start calling me in a couple weeks saying, ‘When am I going to fight again?'”
After nearly three decades promoting kickboxing and MMA bouts, Coker has earned a reputation as perhaps one of the fight game’s least fiery personalities. Especially when juxtaposed with his closest industry counterpart—UFC President Dana White—the 54-year-old executive oozes professional calm.
Coker’s critics—if there were such a thing—might say he’s boring. In the days before the UFC bought Strikeforce and stripped it for parts in 2011, it became a running joke among MMA reporters that no matter what you asked Coker, his response would always be some version of: “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
But on nights as weird as the one Bellator had Saturday, during the promotion’s most crucial fight card since Coker took over the organization three years ago, maybe it’s good to have a steady hand at the wheel.
Because make no mistake, when Coker says “the people who were supposed to win tonight won,” he meant it only in a fatalistic kind of way.
This wasn’t how Bellator drew it up in the dirt when it decided to make the jump back to PPV.
The last time the organization tried to run a for-pay event was May 17, 2014, when Quinton Jackson and Muhammed Lawal headlined a card from Landers Center in Southaven, Mississippi. That show went down one month before Coker took over for deposed former Bellator boss Bjorn Rebney, and it garnered a paltry estimated buyrate of 100,000, per Steven Marrocco of MMAjunkie.
By comparison, Saturday’s Bellator NYC seemed like a much bigger deal and a much bigger risk for North America’s second-largest MMA promotion.
Bellator’s complicated tangle of relationships—with its parent company, Viacom, and broadcast partners at SpikeTV—make it eternally difficult to gauge the organization’s health or potential longevity.
Simply put, the fight company is likely only as sustainable as Viacom and Spike think it is.
To that end, this card was an important litmus test for whether Coker and his band of misfit toys can begin transitioning its higher-profile tent-pole events off cable and on to the more lucrative pay-per-view. That means it will be impossible to get a good handle on how successful Bellator NYC was until industry insiders start estimating sales numbers.
When the event was announced back in March, Coker promised it would be the first in a new series of PPVs for Bellator, though he kept the schedule conveniently loose.
“We’re not going to do monthly pay-per-view just to do pay-per-views,” Coker said, per MMA Fighting’s Dave Doyle. “We’re going to build up to big fights more like the boxing model, and when the time is right, we’ll do the big, big fights. So when we put the big events together, like we have on June 24, then we’ll do it on a PPV event.”
With three title fights split between the SpikeTV prelims and the PPV main card, Emelianenko vs. Mitrione and a headliner pitting Chael Sonnen against longtime archenemy Wanderlei Silva, many observers predicted Bellator NYC would get a solid promotional lead-up.
Coker made a batch of personnel moves designed to add to the big-fight feel to the event, bringing in former UFC play-by-play announcer Mike Goldberg to work the desk and combat sports stalwart Mauro Ranallo to call the action.
This was in keeping with Bellator’s recent policy of adding fading UFC stars like Sonnen, Silva and Tito Ortiz and snapping up high-profile free agents like light heavyweight Ryan Bader and welterweight Rory MacDonald.
The new hires mostly had the desired effect. People like MacDonald and Bader crossing the aisle have raised eyebrows. Bringing in Goldberg and Ranallo and switching up the format from Bellator’s normal broadcasts did indeed give Bellator NYC a special feel.
In the bigger picture, if there were ever an opportune moment for Bellator to begin chipping away at the UFC’s dominance, it is likely now. With White and the larger fight company scuffling and lacking a clear direction under new owners WME-IMG, there was room for Bellator to at least try to get itself some high-profile wins.
In the weeks preceding Bellator NYC, however, the expected hype largely failed to materialize. Silva skipped several of the pre-fight press events, and while Sonnen did his best to run his normal shtick on his own, it largely felt like he was just going through the motions.
Pico’s coming-out party and the promotional debut of boxer Heather Hardy made some waves. A feature on Pico by Brett Okamoto held down the top spot on the ESPN.com homepage as the PPV kicked off, and a story about Emelianenko’s return to the United States was the lead story on Bleacher Report.
Hardy won her women’s flyweight fight against Alice Yauger via hard-fought third-round TKO on the prelims, but on the main PPV card, the 20-year-old Pico laid an unthinkably big egg.
Will any of these bad-luck calamities and missteps matter for Bellator?
Will it matter that Chandler—whom the broadcast lauded as “the face of Bellator”—lost his title and slipped to 4-4, dating back to his landmark clash with Eddie Alvarez in 2013?
Will it matter that the once-great Emelianenko continued the slow, painful slide into mortality that began during Coker’s time running Strikeforce? Or that Silva and Sonnen didn’t take the cage until after midnight in New York and then spent 15 minutes looking like a couple of 40-year-old men who were just there to get their paychecks?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If nothing else, the bedlam of Saturday night gave the company some storylines moving forward.
Pico will have to regroup and return to try to prove he was worthy of the protracted period the MMA world spent salivating over the day he’d finally start fighting.
Chandler will have to have a rematch with Primus once his ankle recovers.
Sonnen got on the mic and challenged Emelianenko following his unanimous-decision win over Silva.
Mitrione is now 3-0 in Bellator and looks as worthy as anyone of taking over the company’s vacant heavyweight title.
Any one of those bouts could make a better-than-average cable main event on SpikeTV.
But will any of them wind up on future pay-per-views?
After the chaos of Bellator NYC, will the buyrate numbers come back strong enough that Coker can make good on his promise of a new era for the organization, wherein its “big, big fights” hold their own alongside the UFC on PPV?
In life, there are those magical nights when everything goes according to plan.
Other times, literally everything goes wrong.
And not just wrong in a normal kind of way, but in the kind of way that makes you think someone close to you crossed a deity o…
In life, there are those magical nights when everything goes according to plan.
Other times, literally everything goes wrong.
And not just wrong in a normal kind of way, but in the kind of way that makes you think someone close to you crossed a deity of some sort.
Wrong in the kind of way where you rolled into the Big Apple with a full head of steam and a heart full of dreams, only to find yourself leaving town the next day, muttering under your breath.
Because when things go wrong in mixed martial arts, they usually go all the way wrong. For BellatorMMA, there’s no better place to begin than at the end, because the main event at Bellator 180 between ChaelSonnen and Wanderlei Silva was, for lack of a better word, the most normal thing that happened Saturday night at Madison Square Garden.
Which is to say that Sonnen essentially dominated Silva—while also getting dropped by Silva’s strikes, because it wouldn’t be a ChaelSonnen fight without him nearly giving up the ghost in a bout he’s handily winning—and then cut a heel promo on the New York crowd before getting pushed by sore loser Silva on his way out of the cage.
This was fine, and it was a fine result. I guess the most notable part about the main event was Tito Ortiz—in a move that surprised literally nobody—doing everything in his power to get on camera and make himself the center of attention because that’s what Tito Ortiz does.
Here’s a little story about Tito that also won’t surprise you: I was in Boston a long time ago to cover a UFC event, and we were hanging out at the hotel after finishing work one night. Tito Ortiz, who isn’t even on the card, comes down to the lobby, wearing his fight shorts, an awful Punishment T-shirt, tube socks and running shoes, and he proceeds to do sprints. In the hotel lobby. Back and forth he went, making sure every fan and athlete there could see how hard he was working and how Tito Ortiz he was being.
And I say all of that to say this: Ortiz acting like a buffoon and making everyone hate him? Well, that’s just kind of what he does. The man is retired and still doing the Tito thing.
But at least Tito was entertaining, which is more than anyone can say about Ryan Bader‘s light heavyweight title win over Phil Davis. Both of these fighters promised us this bout wouldn’t be like their first meeting, because it was awful in a way few fights are awful. They promised an exciting fight. They were lying.
But at least Bader vs. Davis was kind of what we expected, which is more than we can say about Aaron Pico‘s professional mixed martial arts debut. Friends, I bought into the Pico hype. I was overwhelmingly excited for this kid’s debut. Poor Zach Freeman, the new Bellator version of Barry Horowitz, right? And then Pico gets dropped by the first punch thrown his way and tapped out. The super prospect with an intense media glare and unprecedented hype gets dusted in 24 seconds. That was less than ideal for Bellator.
But at least it was quick and clean for Pico, which is more than we can say for Michael Chandler and his Oh My God Look At His Ankle It’s Flopping Around Oh I’m Going to Vomit. That fight between Chandler and Brent Primus sure was exciting for the couple of minutes it lasted between the first bell and me trying not to throw up after watching Chandler’s ankle just flopping around as he tried to stand on it.
And then, after the fight, came the perfect way to illustrate Bellator‘s night in New York City. Chandler, full of gusto and courage, stood up from his stool to show the doctor that yes, my ankle might be nonexistent at this point, but I am ready to continue fighting even with this one good leg I have left. And then he sat back down but not before his corner pulled the stool out from under him, sending Chandler sprawling on his ass.
I felt bad for laughing, but then I thought: This is MMA, and it plays no favorites. Even if you are The Last Emperor, beloved by fans for nearly two decades, you are not special. Even if you are Bellator, the little guy trying to do something different in a fight against a monolithic industry titan, you are not special. Even if you are a 20-year-old wunderkind who has prepared every day since the age of six for this moment, you are not special.
Bellator will be just fine over the long haul, and it’ll keep improving its product wherever it goes. But on this night, in that sacred arena, it learned it will take a little more than just fun fights and a good underdog story to make it in New York City.
Just 42 seconds into her first professional fight, Heather Hardy was in trouble. Stunned by a right hand from Mikayla Nebel, she found herself butt first on the canvas, standing quickly to watch helplessly as referee Benjy Esteves counted methodic…
Just 42 seconds into her first professional fight, Heather Hardy was in trouble. Stunned by a right hand from MikaylaNebel, she found herself butt first on the canvas, standing quickly to watch helplessly as referee Benjy Esteves counted methodically to eight.
But Hardy, a rising boxing star who makes her MMA debut Saturday for Bellator at Madison Square Garden, wasn’t born to quit. Her great-grandmother came to America from Ireland, caring for 14 brothers and sisters. Her grandmother was the first female gym teacher in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach. Her mom?
“Bad ass tough,” Hardy remembered, her heavy New York accent bordering on caricature. “She didn’t take s–t from anyone.”
With those women providing both nature and nurture, Hardy wasn’t about to give up without a fight. She’d survived sexual assault, a divorce and an electrical fire that had recently forced her to return home with her parents. She was 30 years old and running out of time. Her life was hard. Fighting? Fighting came easy.
“I remember thinking ‘Holy s–t, Heather. You sold all those tickets. Your whole career is on the line right now.’ I decided to hit that girl like she was standing in the way,” Hardy said. “And I just went off. I got up and beat her up so bad.”
By the end of four rounds, announcers were openly wondering if the fight should be stopped. Hardy was unyielding, skinny arms and blonde braid whirling non-stop, a force of nature that poured over Nebel, enveloping her in punches that felt anything like love.
“That moment in the ring when I won, I just felt like ‘Wow, I could do this forever. This is what I’m here for.’ I knew it was in there,” Hardy said. “Imposing my will on another person. Saying ‘Not only am I better than you, I’m stronger than you, I’m faster than you.’ And I am the champion inside this ring.”
She’d discovered fighting two years earlier when her sister, Kaitlyn, with whom she shared an illegal apartment, gave her a gift certificate to try cardio kickboxing at a karate school that had opened in the neighborhood. Busy working multiple jobs to support their two kids, Heather needed some way to release stress and tension.
“I was kind of like the dad, going off to work. She was kind of like the mom, taking care of everyone, including me,” Hardy said. “She said, ‘You need to get your ass out of the house. All you do is work and b–ch.’ So, I started kickboxing. And within three weeks of taking cardio classes, I actually had an amateur fight and I won.”
What followed was a love affair with boxing. Her first attempt at love hadn’t gone so well. Her husband, she says, ran off on her and her daughter, Annie, taking their small savings with him. As with so many others, the distinction between working class and poor was often tenuous. In the ring, however, Hardy was in control of her life in ways that were simply impossible outside the confines of the squared circle.
“Most people are wrong when they think martial arts and boxing empowers women by allowing them to impose their strength on another,” Hardy said. “It empowers women by making them know how strong they are. I can take what you give me and I’ll be fine. I feel in control of myself. It means not letting someone else impose their will on me.It’s not so much what I’m doing to you, it’s what I’m not letting you do to me. It’s very powerful.”
Two months after her first pro win, a second fight followed, another taste of victory. And then, five days later, Hurricane Sandy landed a blow that wasn’t so easily shaken off. The Hardy sisters had already been forced back to their parent’s home when their apartment was destroyed. The storm took even that away, as Gerritsen Beach was ravaged and left without power for more than a month.
“I lived at Gleason’s Gym where I worked as a physical trainer and saw as many clients as I could,” Hardy said. “The owner Bruce Silverglade and his wife helped so much I could never repay them. My daughter stayed with family. My mom taught me when I was young, ‘Sometimes you do what you’ve got to do.’ We just figured it out.”
Hardy won three fights while homeless, then 16 more, along the way becoming a bit of a local sensation. But life for a woman in boxing isn’t easy. Hardy had to hustle for everything she had. Everything was grassroots and nothing came easy. In a sport that often pays women just $100 a round for brutal fights, she earned her place on fight cards by selling tickets—literally.
Between training sessions and after work, Hardy would pick up stacks of tickets and sell them on the street. She’d organize parties in the neighborhood to sell tickets, tend bar at local joints just to get the fight buzzing and pack dozens of T-shirts in a suitcase to take with her to the bouts, all while working multiple jobs to keep the lights on and her family fed.
“In boxing, promoters rarely make money off their female fighters. So they don’t like to invest in them,” Hardy said. “The television networks don’t air our fights or pay for them, so the promoter has no way to make back their investment. Selling tickets is the only way we can get on cards. Essentially buying our spots. I have a promoter, Lou DiBella, and he takes care of me. But even with a promoter, I go out and sell those tickets to give him a reason to want to take care of me.”
The growth of women’s boxing has been a slow but steady. A revolution in mixed martial arts has made women an integral part of boxing’s sister sport, including launching Ronda Rousey as a mainstream celebrity. A rising tide raises all ships, and Hardy herself made national television for a fight with Shelly Vincent. She broke down in tears when her friend, Claressa Shields, won a second Olympic gold medal and became a national figure. Women were on their way—but they hadn’t arrived just yet.
“I’d like to see money follow,” Hardy, who still has to work at Gleason’s Gym between fights, said. “We’re still in that area where they’re kind of telling us, ‘You’re lucky to have the spot. Let’s see where this goes.’ We’re still proving ourselves…I had so many fights and wasn’t really getting anywhere. Boxing isn’t a fulltime job. It would be nice. But the same men who were in charge back when Christy Martin was fighting are still in charge. They’re stuck in their ways and boxing is just not evolving.”
This growing frustration with the sweet science led Hardy to train MMA, first with an eye toward a backup plan in case boxing never paid off. She stuck with it later because she found herself enjoying the challenge of learning wrestling, Brazilian jiu jitsu and the myriad of techniques required to master fighting in a cage. Working primarily at Renzo Gracie’s Brooklyn academy under the guidance of Daniel Gracie and Jamal Patterson, she’s quickly discovered a primal side even boxing didn’t bring out.
“I’ve always been tough. Now I’m getting mean,” Hardy said. “Boxing is beautiful. If you watch two people who know what they are doing, it can be like watching a dance. In MMA, it’s like only one of us is getting out of this cage alive. It’s either me or you and it ain’t going to be me.”
Already 35, with five years invested in the game, she knows time is running out on her chances to break big. While Shields, Cecilia Braekhaus, Amanda Serrano and a handful of others attempt to provide promoters proof of concept for women’s boxing, Hardy is taking a different path—attempting to prove the Heather Hardy brand can attract a crowd. She is hoping MMA success might lead to bigger fights in boxing and vice versa.
“I’m not leaving boxing. There’s still girls I want to fight,” Hardy said. “The problem is, the girls I want to fight are the titleholders from other countries who don’t want to come here because promoters don’t pay money in America like they do in Canada or Argentina. I want to bring boxing to America. Where it should be.”
But while MMA may have started as yet another side hustle to sell herself in boxing, it’s grown into something more. She’s not willing to discuss her future in the sport too extensively. After all, she is quick to point out, she’s a novice without a single fight under her belt. But she’s also quick to point out she’s making more money for her MMA debut against Alice Yauger than she’s ever made in a professional boxing ring.
“They tell me to do what comes natural. And it’s worked for me. Like, if someone stole my wallet on the street, that’s what comes out in the cage,” Hardy said. “I’m really, really loving MMA. More than I thought I would. I’m really excited for this fight and what’s going to come after it.”
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
Did you forget that the greatest heavyweight in MMA history fights in the United States for the first time in nearly six years Saturday?
No shame if you did.
Fedor Emelianenko doesn’t send shivers down the spines of fight fans quite the same way he onc…
Did you forget that the greatest heavyweight in MMA history fights in the United States for the first time in nearly six years Saturday?
No shame if you did.
Fedor Emelianenko doesn’t send shivers down the spines of fight fans quite the same way he once did.
On top of that, there’s no shortage of reasons why Emelianenko’s co-main event bout against Matt Mitrione is flying under the radar just a few days before Bellator MMA heads to Madison Square Garden to take its latest swing at pay-per-view.
Considering the stakes, this event has been lightly promoted by the U.S.’s second-largest MMA company. In addition, Emelianenko’s Bellator debut has already been postponed once, and the more we see The Last Emperor in the cage, the more we question how long he should soldier on.
If you’re still following the winding string of Emelianenko’s 41-fight career, you’re probably either a Fedor superfan or you’re starting to feel a little worried for the guy.
Or both.
Last time we saw Emelianenko on U.S. soil was July 2011, when he capped a three-fight losing streak with a crushing first-round TKO defeat by Dan Henderson. That loss ended a disastrous 1-3 run through the now-defunct Strikeforce organization that obliterated Emelianenko’s 10-year unbeaten run and killed any lingering notion he was the world’s most feared fighter.
Since then, he’s won five bouts in a row, fighting exclusively in his native Russia and in Japan. He’s also retired and unretired once, and the nature of the victories didn’t do enough to distract us from his declining physical skills.
If anything, Emelianenko’s most recent appearance—an iffy majority-decision win over UFC washout Fabio Maldonado at EFN 50 in St. Petersburg in June 2016—only cauterized our view of him as well past his prime.
So why will fans tune in Saturday to see the 40-year-old legend take on the 38-year-old Mitrione at Bellator: NYC?
If they do, it’ll be because he’s still Fedor—albeit an admittedly downgraded version. He’s still the same stoic knockout artist who held the Pride FC heavyweight class in his terrifying sway from 2002 until 2006.
He’s still the guy who toppled former UFC heavyweight champions Mark Coleman, Kevin Randleman, Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovski.
Still the guy who downed Mirko “CroCop” Filipovic and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (twice) back when that trio arguably comprised the top three heavyweights on the planet.
Maybe MMA fans will tune in to this PPV with the weak glimmer of hope that the old Fedor will show up at MSG.
Or maybe they’ll buy this PPV because we all know full well Bellator’s strategy of propping up its tent-pole events with over-the-hill stars in the final days of their careers, and we’ve made our peace with it.
Still, it remains unclear how much Emelianenko has left in the tank or what kind of an asset he’ll be in supporting this event’s all-important PPV buy rate.
To his credit, he remains as humble and inscrutable as ever, telling Ariel Helwani on the The MMA Hour ahead of Saturday’s event that he never bought into his own hype as one of the greatest fighters of all time.
“I never considered myself to be the best one,” Emelianenko said (via MMA Fighting’s Chuck Mindenhall). “A fighter can lose at any moment—and there are some fighters that…will be better than me in some techniques.”
For its part, Bellator appears content to promote the Fedor legacy more than the man who will climb into the cage Saturday:
Will fans open their wallets to watch?
That remains to be seen.
This entire Bellator card seemed poised for bigger things when company CEO Scott Coker announced it back in March.
With Chael Sonnen vs. Wanderlei Silva as its main event, three titles on the line and the debut of super-prospect Aaron Pico, some observers were cautiously optimistic Bellator could make a modest splash as it returned to PPV for the first time since 2014.
Yet so far, the expected pre-fight fireworks haven’t materialized.
By all rights, the purported blood feud between Sonnen and Silva should have had a weekslong build that culminated in a tense on-stage standoff. Instead, Silva skipped the event’s first two press conferences.
The first time, he said it was because he was too busy training for the fight. Then, when Silva no-showed a second Bellator presser, the organization said he was “under the weather,” per Steven Marrocco of MMAjunkie. Later, the fighter revealed he just didn’t want to be there with Sonnen, per MMA Fighting (h/t Milan Ordonez of Bloody Elbow).
Hard to sell the fight when one guy won’t show up the promotional events.
Those missed opportunities leave a short window to try to market this PPV during fight week, with Emelianenko and Mitrione playing second-fiddle to a main event fight that hasn’t done its share of the heavy lifting.
Mitrione exited the UFC on the heels of back-to-back losses in 2016, but he’s won two straight contests since coming to Bellator. He’s the slight favorite here, according to OddsShark, but considering Emelianenko’s recent inactivity, there’s no way to anticipate how they will match up.
The two heavyweights were originally supposed to meet in February before Mitrione pulled out with kidney stones, and this rescheduled bout has naturally lost a little momentum.
And Mitrione says he’s struggled to keep his eye on the prize.
“It is difficult to do that,” the former New York Giants defensive lineman told Dan Pizzuta of Big Blue View. “I’ve done the exact same movements, counters, combinations, visualizing. … I’ve done all of this for a really long time. It’s difficult to stay motivated during this, especially in the waning weeks of the camp.”
To recap: Saturday’s Bellator PPV is headlined by one guy who didn’t show up to the introductory press conferences.
Meanwhile, the co-main event features one guy who steadfastly claims he’s not the best and one guy who admits he had a hard time staying motivated for this one.
Then again, perhaps thinking about it that way is to judge this fight too harshly.
Each time Emelianenko steps in an MMA cage these days, we know it might be for the last time. Fans are running out of chances to see the man who was once the most dominant heavyweight fighter the sport had ever seen.
That seems like something to mark your calendars for.
Chael Sonnen fights on Saturday, and the whole damn thing is getting pretty old.
All of it.
The flexing, the witticisms that have been in the can for nearly a decade, the proclamations of being undefeated and undisputed without ever holding a belt and …
Chael Sonnen fights on Saturday, and the whole damn thing is getting pretty old.
All of it.
The flexing, the witticisms that have been in the can for nearly a decade, the proclamations of being undefeated and undisputed without ever holding a belt and racking up 15 professional losses in his career.
It’s painful, most of it the product of a bygone era when salesmanship was linked to verbal ingenuity and such ingenuity was lacking so badly in MMA that any amount of colorful wordsmithing was enough to get attention.
He wrote stuff or had people write stuff, and he delivered it with the precision and polish of an ’80s wrestling heel, and it made him rich. When his reinvention started in earnest after a 2009 loss to Demian Maia, most of it was founded on moderately exciting ground-and-pound and majorly exciting trash talk.
People loved it, hated it or loved to hate it, but it got people talking about him, and it was one of the earliest and best examples of how a mixed martial artist gets paid in the sport in modern times.
It got him across from two of the best, and it made him rich in the process. He fought Anderson Silva twice and might be more responsible for the Brazilian’s mainstream breakthrough than Silva himself, and he fought Jon Jones entirely by talking his way there—and to the associated pay cheque.
So this isn’t about hating on Sonnen. Quite the contrary.
He’s a lovable lug in his own way, a guy smirking from one side of his mouth while selling wolf tickets from the other, carnival barking ludicrousness in hopes of separating the average rube from his dollars.
But the shtick is old. It’s tired. It’s time for some new material.
How about, as an example, a win? Sonnen hasn’t posted one of those since 2013.
Granted, some of those years were taken away by failed drug tests and an associated retirement (interestingly one of the few things Sonnen has approached with considerable seriousness in his career) that would still hold a lot more clout than ripping off Superstar Billy Graham to the joy of a collection of media.
Saturday provides a chance for Sonnen to produce that new material.
Bellator: NYC opponent Wanderlei Silva is eminently beatable, a fellow 40-year-old who was never much for defending tireless wrestling and has had his own PED perils over the past few years.
He hasn’t done much since he tornadoed Brian Stann into the dirt only a few months before Sonnen scored his last win, and no one is expecting much from his Bellator debut. The fight itself is the attraction, the idea these two will finally throw hands after years of being abstractly tied to one another.
And perhaps that’s why Sonnen is as he is.
He hasn’t provided value inside the cage for an incredibly long time, but he’s still a name that looks great in the bright lights of the World’s Most Famous Arena.
All the sass and swagger he manicured for years as a UFC fixture, making him so capable as a podcaster and analyst—areas many would suggest he’d be better off retiring to for good, win or lose against Silva—are still enough to make him rich in the realm of paid fisticuffs.
It doesn’t change the fact underscoring all the bluster, though: Chael’s shtick is getting old, and without it, there isn’t much else to be said about him.
It’s a rare thing that Bellator gets out in front and really, truly pushes the UFC. It’s even more rare that it all happens on the same weekend, with both promotions reeling off fight cards in hopes of securing fan interest.