Griffin-Bonnar. Pure Mixed Martial Arts
at it's best? No. But a hell of a lot of fun to watch? You know it.
That is where my love affair with MMA
really began. I had seen some here or there growing up, the worlds of
Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie, without understanding any of the ins
and the outs of what made this sport. And I watched that first season
of The Ultimate Fighter, more out of my love of reality television
than anything else. There I found myself cheering, more against Josh
Koscheck than for anyone specifically. When the finale came, Forrest
Griffin and Stephan Bonnar took my piqued interest and then made my
head explode with their well documented war of attrition.
Two seasons of The Ultimate Fighter
and a solid interest later, a coach/competitor trio of Tito Ortiz,
Michael Bisping and Kendall Grove solidified MMA as one of my very
favorite sports with the best season to date of the show.
That third season was seven years ago.
Bisping has gone on to give me 2-3 heart attacks per fight since and
I have continued to follow Grove move by move after his up/down UFC
career ended.
And Tito Ortiz, the first ACTUAL
fighter to enthrall me? He is currently a major player in the
bastardizing of the sport he helped me grow to love. Why? No, not
just because the aging Ortiz will take on the also aging, completely
slower-than-his-prime Rampage Jackson this November. But mostly
because last Thursday, on a live episode of TNA Impact Wrestling
(yes, that is the “scripted” type of wrestling), Ortiz showed
up....likely to begin an on-screen and scripted battle with dual
entertainer Jackson, who is already been on Impact regularly now.
For most people, age in this future
Bellator MMA pay per view main event is the biggest slap in the
forehead factoid. For me, it is merely a turnoff. It isn't 2004 or
2005 or 2006 and nobody cares about Tito Ortiz fighting Rampage
Jackson. I have always been a fan of both of them as fighters, but I
also don't want to see Karl Malone go one-on-one with Scottie Pippen
in 2013. It is going lack athleticism, they will either not engage or
it will be the sloppiest fight ever, and they will both be gassed by
the second round because you can't get your cardio very high when you
are on the geriatric end of your professional sports career,
regardless of the sport.
So forget a slap in the forehead. Age
isn't the most disrespectful thing in play with this fight.
What is disrespectful is how Bjorn
Rebney and the geniuses at Viacom have blurred the lines of this
legitimate sport (growing and gaining more general appeal daily) and
the male soap opera circus that is professional wrestling.
People, including Ortiz and Jackson,
are often so critical of Dana White for a variety of reasons. But
never has he really put the integrity of the sport in such limbo.
With the possible exception of hiring Brock Lesnar after only one MMA
fight, Dana is careful about who he brings in to fight in the UFC,
what those people do while they are there and how they behave. He
brought in James Toney, only to prove a point. But other than that,
he has avoided making his brand and the sport a circus by avoiding
pitfalls of “fighters” like wrestlers Dave Bautista and Bobby
Lashley, an interested Shaquille O'Neal, an aged NFL-veteran in
Herschel Walker and even (for the most part) the “hot-commodity”
backyard brawler Kimbo Slice.
By not only allowing, but supporting
and full-on promoting his fighters as professional wrestlers, Bjorn
Rebney has not just blurred the line here, he has stomped and danced
all over it.
I like professional wrestling to a
degree. I have watched it since I was a little kid and still watch it
on and off to this very day. But a bleach blonde surfer Sting to a
reptilian-like Randy Orton don't match up in actual man-to-man combat
with GSP or Jon Jones. I won't disrespect professional wrestlers by
saying they aren't athletes. They are. But they are entertainers who
are athletic, even if it is to a high degree. Professional wrestlers
to mixed martial artists is like the cast of Coach Carter to the NBA.
Professional wrestling is fiction; it
is Lost, it is Law and Order, it is General Hospital. And that is OK
Rampage Jackson and Tito Ortiz wanting to participate in this medium
is also OK It is no different than when Jackson portrayed B.A.
Baracus in the A-Team movie.
But how any person can think it OK for
them both to portray their professional wrestling characters building
up for a fight AT THE SAME TIME they are building up for an actual
fight, is completely ridiculous and I for one, as a MMA fan, am
disgusted by it. And I'd love to blame Viacom. Look back at their
history, they aren't very bright in general. And that is where
Bellator's front man Bjorn Rebney, needs to put on his big boy pants
and tell someone no.
But instead, he is locked up in a
desperate attempt to make money, that he not only ignores that fact
that his first pay per view will be headlined by two guys who haven't
won a fight since Ortiz upset Ryan Bader TWO YEARS AGO. Two guys, who
in fact, have gone 9-12-1 since Ortiz first captured my attention the
aforementioned seven years ago. By the way, seven of those wins are
Rampage's and he shouldn't have won his last two fights, boring
decisions over Matt Hamill (Ortiz lost to him by the way) and Lyoto
Machida (the king of losing questionable decisions). I don't expect
Rebney to accept a fact that we all, outside of Bellator, know:
sooner or later, Bellator will be Affliction, it will be Elite XC, it
will be Strikeforce. This is reality and I know that. And I don't
believe that Rebney should buy into that because when he actually
does, will be the final straw in a demise that is likely in the grand
scheme.
So go Bjorn Rebney and make money. But
DO NOT disrespect a sport that you didn't even help build by blurring
the lines and giving all of the MMA detractors more fodder by making
it look like your professional fighting organization is fixed,
whether that is really the case or not.
There are plenty of guilty parties
involved, but in the end, Rebney, Ortiz and Jackson should know
better. But because of their foolish attempts to make money and
remain relevant, they are bastardizing and making a joke out of a
sport that I, and millions of others, have grown to love. As much as
Mixed Martial Arts has become the fastest growing sport across the
globe in the last ten years, more stunts like this will force this
beautiful sport to halt it's growth and make those detractors grow
while supporters shrink. It is sad and it is going to affect everyone
from War Machine and Ben Askren on Spike to Chael Sonnen and Junior
Dos Santos on FOX, to the guys fighting down the road every third
Saturday night, trying to feed their kids.
Seven years ago, Tito Ortiz found two
other guys for his team that helped make me really love MMA. Today,
he and two other “teammates” have found a way to make me question
what the future of this sport will hold if they have their selfish
ways. And it makes me sick
