Opinion: Bellator MMA Meets Murphy's Law in NYC
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NEW YORK -- The Spike-televised portion of Bellator 180 started well enough, with two finishes in a row for prospects that the promotion is clearly pushing. One, Heather Hardy, won her pro debut with seconds to go in the most exciting bout of the night, while the other, Ireland's James Gallagher, emphatically ran through and choked out a pseudo-name in Chinzo Machida. The event felt like a big deal, the Madison Square Garden crowd was hot ... there was even momentum and everything!
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The Spike portion of the card was headlined by Phil Davis defending the light heavyweight crown against Ryan Bader. That this bout was set as the last fight before the pay-per-view broadcast never made sense; Bellator had to know going in that the hard sell fight was not exactly going to be Chan Sung Jung and Leonard Garcia, inducing extra buys prior to World Extreme Cagefighting 48.
It wasn’t and the fight was loudly booed. But hey, we expected
that. Hard sell factor aside, they were going to try to open the
card with a bang!
Douglas Lima defending the welterweight title against Lorenz Larkin! The fight that Jimmy Smith (rightfully) said was the one that all of the insiders were looking forward to! But it was, aside from the second round, not at all a “Fight of the Year” candidate. Lima finally got a victory to solidify him as a top-five welterweight regardless of the promotion, but he didn’t get to put an exclamation point on it.
At this point, Bellator needed some excitement and the promotion needed it fast. Unfortunately, they got it with quick finish of the most most hyped 0-0 fighter in recent memory and one of the promotion’s longest tenured stars.
Bellator CEO Scott Coker and matchmaker Rich Chou bear responsibility, at least for what happened to with Aaron Pico’s pro debut. Admittedly, you don’t matchmake every debutante the way you do a near Olympic-level wrestler with years of amateur boxing experience, legitimate MMA training with an elite team and even Pankration experience. But Zach Freeman, an 8-2 fighter coming off of a title shot in Resurrection Fighting Alliance, perhaps the top regional promotion in MMA prior to its merger with the Legacy Fighting Championship? All but one sportsbook declined to take bets on that fight and for good reason: the matchmaking was so in left field that it made the fight a gigantic wild card. Bookies were right to be worried: Pico got dropped almost immediately with an uppercut before being choked almost unconscious in almost 30 seconds.
In fairness to Bellator, the degree to which they have gotten heat for booking mismatches in the Coker era -- and the degree to which they were actually mismatches -- has been increasing for a while. It’s understandable that Coker and Chou felt they needed someone with a serious, winning record to take on an athlete of Pico’s caliber, especially with the fight being featured on the biggest card in the company's history. However, there’s a big difference between “having a winning record” and “just went the distance in a title fight for the top regional promotion around.”
“He wanted to test himself,” Coker told me after the event. “We said ‘Look, don’t feel like you can’t just go fight a guy who’s had two or three fights.’ He didn’t wanna do it. So they went after a guy who had a lot more experience, and Zach proved to be too much today.” As for the level of opponent Pico needs next time out, Coker says he’ll talk to Pico’s coaches about the specifics of what kind of record they will look for, but he does have something in mind.”
“Maybe fight someone that has five or under fights next time. Ratchet it down a little bit. Do it progressively.”
Then came the final title fight of the evening: Michael Chandler defending the lightweight belt against 7-0 Brent Primus. On paper, it seemed like the fight was booked to get Chandler an impressive win and keep his momentum going, making his recent three-fight losing streak an increasingly distant memory. Instead, he lost the title in odd fashion, one that somehow saw notoriously iffy referee Todd Anderson make the perfect call, albeit at a moment that made him look like an idiot.
Primus was mixing up kicks and feints right away before noticeably hobbling the champion with a low calf kick. He followed up on the hurt Chandler, but got rocked coming in. As the chaos continued, Anderson called time to fetch the doctor. Chandler was very animated, and successful, in trying to rile up the crowd when he stood up, but then it happened: right before he sat down, an inspector yanked the stool away, leaving a hobbled Chandler to tumble onto the mat. A few seconds later, Anderson called the fight, seemingly because Chandler fell down, which obviously wasn’t from the injury. The replays made clear that the fight should have been stopped, but the crowd -- even though they were audibly cringing at replays of Chandler’s lower leg injury -- didn’t understand or realize that Primus had actually caused it.
The crowd booed the new, undefeated champion. Coker, for his part, looked less than happy as he carried the belt over to the cage door.
“[Chandler] loads up on his right hand, all of his weight’s on that left leg, and I’ve been timing that,” Primus said to me after the event. “I’ve been practicing that for months. I felt my shin on his bone, I know my kick broke his leg.”
It’s not as if we haven’t seen this before, either: That kick is such an under-utilized technique that it seems like the vast majority of times we see it, it quickly piles up damage. Whether it’s James Krause breaking Jamie Varner’s ankle or the much more recent fight that Primus cited, Junior dos Santos hurting Stipe Miocic, we shouldn’t be overly skeptical.
“That low low kick, it only takes a few kicks, and people are hurt for sure,” Primus added.
But it was still shocking, sudden, and, thanks to Todd Anderson, called off at a comically incorrect moment. At least the refereeing in the next fight was good, because the proverbial MMA gods gave us a double knockdown. Matt Mitrione beat Fedor Emelianenko to the feet after they dropped one another and quickly knocked out the legend. In a fight that had very few bad outcomes for Bellator, you can make the argument that the fans being teased with a double knockout on an already weird card, then not getting it, might be one of them.
And so the swing fight went on next, robbing the card of its regained momentum, even if the actual fight was fine.
Chael Sonnen facing Wanderlei Silva lived up to the hype for a round, then consisted of Sonnen lying on “The Axe Murderer” for the remaining 10 minutes. The highlights had nothing to do with the actual fight. First, during the introductions, rock guitarist Dave Navarro doing a Spike tie-in with “Ink Master,” played “Star Spangled Banner” on electric guitar. Then, for the last few minutes of the main event, Tito Ortiz, at ringside, started playing to the crowd, inciting “F--- you Tito!” chants, among others during the middle of the headliner. It was the same exactly thing that Ortiz’s original MMA mentor, “Tank” David Abbott, used to make a habit of at UFC cards that he wasn’t fighting on.
It’s hard to know what kind of impression this card made without seeing the new television presentation with Mike Goldberg and Mauro Ranallo. However, the last mark made on the media was made at the press conference, which was delayed when Bellator needed to solicit replacement transmission hardware from the present media for their wireless microphones.
As a ringing noise blasting throughout the media room, seemingly from the mismatched gear, Roy Nelson, Bellator’s new big free agent signing, was brought to the podium before the presser proper could start.
Exactly one reporter bothered to raise his hand.
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