Don’t worry — you weren’t the only one who missed it.
Amidst the frenetic pace of four UFC events in four weeks and the media cycle that accompanies each show, I too watched the end of Bellator’s initial three months of action on Spike TV come to an end with little fanfare.
With Alexander Gustafsson’s cut eyelid, Uriah Hall’s hype train getting derailed, another narrow title defence for Benson Henderson, and Jon Jones’ gnarly big toe, the UFC latched on to all the attention in the month of April, and it took Wednesday’s announcement of the first event in the 2013 Bellator MMA Summer Series to remind me about the little MMA organization that could.
And guess what? They can; they proved that in the first three months of the year, and will only continue taking positives steps forward this summer.
Bellator’s initial run on Spike TV was an undeniable success. The precipitous drop in viewership many worried about after the first few events never materialized. While the numbers fell from the high of their debut, the 10-event “first season” on their new cable home averaged 793,000 viewers, and never dropped below 700,000 viewers for the year.
What makes those numbers even more impressive is that they managed to maintain viewers throughout their initial 10-fight run on Spike TV despite things not going exactly as planned.
High-profile light-heavyweight acquisitions Muhammed (King Mo) Lawal and Renato (Babalu) Sobral both failed to reach the finals of the 205-pound tournament, with Sobral being knocked out — literally — in the first round of his opening quarter-final fight with Mikhail Zayats, while Lawal ate a spinning backfist from eventual winner Emanuel Newton in the semi-finals.
The welterweight tournament final was put on pause when finalist Douglas Lima suffered a broken hand in advance of his second encounter with Ben Saunders. Featherweight tournament winner Daniel Straus was felled by a broken hand as well and missed out on his opportunity to face off with champion Pat Curran for the time being. Recent tournament winner Shahbulat Shamhalaev stepped up instead; more on Curran and that encounter momentarily.
Despite missing some of their biggest potential draws and having a handful of events that were seriously lacking in star power, the series soldiered on successfully, continuing the positive strides the company made prior to relocating to the original cable home of the UFC.
“Frodo” Khasbulaev and Newton emerged as entertaining fighters fans can expect to see more from in the future, while returning fighters like Lima, Saunders, and David Rickels continued to impress and improve. Middleweight mainstay Alexander Shlemenko earned championship gold with a second-round knockout win over former UFC fighter Maiquel Falcao, and reigning champions Eduardo Dantas and Ben Askren delivered emphatic title defences that cement them among the best in their respective weight classes in the sport.
Undefeated lightweight champion Michael Chandler closed out the initial event of the year with a dominant performance against Rick Hawn and will be asked to kick off the Summer Series in style when he defends his title against tournament winner Dave Jansen on June 19.
But the star of the Bellator MMA’s first series of events on Spike TV was unquestionably Curran.
The featherweight championed opened the first televised event on the network with a back-and-forth battle against Patricio (Pitbull) Freire, edging out the Brazilian by split decision in one of the best fights of the year to retain the title.
Just 11 weeks later, Curran was back in the cage, defending his title against the surging featherweight prospect Shamhalaev, who had earned stoppage wins in five straight fights, and carried an 11-fight unbeaten streak into the contest.
Curran choked him out in less than three minutes. It was the type of performance that made fight fans sit up and take notice, and start wondering how Bellator’s featherweight champion would measure up against the best of the UFC 145-pound ranks.
As much as there are still areas where Bellator can improve, they’re making headway and continuing to improve each season. They also get a slight bump in credibility from the success the former Strikeforce fighters have been enjoying in the UFC as of late as well.
That may sound strange to some, but seeing the likes of Josh Thomson, Pat Healy, and Tyron Woodley (to name three) enter the UFC with explosive performances makes people re-think the whole “all the best fighters compete inside the Octagon” logic. If it hasn’t yet, it should, as Curran, Chandler, and Askren have all proven themselves to be legitimate top-10 talents in their respective divisions.
The Summer Series should keep the momentum going when it kicks off in June.
Instead of the standard eight-man tournaments Bellator has traditionally used in the past, they’re cutting the fields in half this summer, and rolling out four-man brackets in the heavyweight, light-heavyweight, and bantamweight divisions.
We’ll likely see title defences from Curran, Askren, Shlemenko, and light-heavyweight champion Attila Vegh, while Dantas and heavyweight champ Alexander Volkov could potentially appear in “super-fights” this summer as well. Lawal and Sobral have already been confirmed as entrants in the smaller-scale light-heavyweight tournament that kicks off on June 19, as has controversial welterweight War Machine.
Their opening set of events in 2013 fared pretty well on the whole and had some definite high points. They’ll be back in the same place this summer, still benefiting from being preceded by Impact Wrestling, and bringing back many of the names that featured prominently earlier this year.
Bellator is the real deal — they proved that with their first group of events on Spike TV earlier this year — and have the potential to take another step in the right direction with the Summer Series.
Sorry I didn’t get around to saying this earlier — I was distracted, but it won’t happen again. You’ve got my attention, Bellator MMA.