Through a somewhat predictable turn of events, Bellator MMA’s pay-per-view debut is no longer, and the biggest fight card in the company’s history now stacks up the way that it always should have… for the most part.
News broke last Friday that Tito Ortiz had suffered a neck injury, forcing him out of his main event matchup with Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. A couple hours later, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney and the team at Viacom, Bellator’s parent company, announced that the remaining contests would be shifted from pay-per-view back to free TV, creating a terrific Saturday night fight card to enjoy this weekend.
Here’s the thing: when losing your main event eight days out makes the entire situation better, maybe it’s a sign that you really shouldn’t have been venturing into new territory in the first place.
Personally, I think Bellator caught a lucky break here, and the cancellation of their pay-per-view headed by a pair of organizational newcomers that have exceeded their shelf life in the sport is a chance for them to reset and roll out an event centred on the talent that got them to this point in the first place.
Their philosophical change regarding their roster never made sense.
After getting to a point where promising talents like Michael Chandler, Ben Askren and Pat Curran became champions and started to garner praise as “the best fighter outside the UFC” in their respective weight classes, Bellator basically slapped Askren in the face by saying they’d let him walk for nothing once his contract expired, and happily shuffled both Curran and Chandler behind veteran names that have yet to step into the Bellator cage when they wanted to attempt to take things to the next level.
And that’s nothing compared to the way they’ve mismanaged the situation with their light-heavyweight champion, Attila Vegh.
When the pay-per-view lineup was being put together and rolled out to the public, Bellator announced that high-profile signee Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal would face off with Emanuel Newton for the interim light-heavyweight title. It was a rematch of their tournament semifinal from the previous year and necessary because Vegh was sidelined with an injury.
But then Vegh came out and said he wasn’t hurt – rather he was asked to step aside in favour of booking the Lawal-Newton rematch. Bellator scrambled to defuse the situation, issuing a statement saying, in essence, that Vegh’s comments were taken out of context and covering their hindquarters.
Yet last Friday during his post-Ortiz injury press conference explaining the shift from pay-per-view to free TV, Rebney said they had been in preliminary talks with Vegh several weeks ago about being on standby in case a situation like this were to arise.
I’m sorry, but if your champion is healthy enough to be a potential fill-in on short notice, why is an interim title being introduced into the mix?
The obvious answer is that Bellator hopes to get a championship belt around the waist of one of their biggest stars (read: Lawal) and this was the easiest path to making that happen. Of course, Newton derailed those plans once already with a spinning backfist, so it will be interesting to see what happens when they meet Saturday for their wholly unnecessary interim title fight.
What is further confounding is the decision to schedule Lawal and Newton ahead of featherweight champion Curran, who defends his title against former tournament winner Daniel Straus in the second of four bouts scheduled to be televised on Saturday evening.
Curran is a rising star who has been on a tear since moving down to featherweight. He earned a title shot by winning three fights in three months in the summer of 2011, and then won the title with a blistering knockout of Joe Warren in March 2012 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjAGtQosof0). When the company shifted to Spike TV last January, Curran kicked off the first broadcast event with a thrilling back-and-forth title defense against Patricio Freire and then followed it up with a first-round submission win over tournament winner Shahbulat Shamhalaev.
The fact that he’s being pushed back in favour of Lawal (and Newton to a much, much lesser extent) is indicative of Bellator’s philosophical shift, as Curran represents their initial “title shots are earned, not awarded” ethos and the focus on building talent from within, while Lawal was their major free agent signing and signified the beginning of their change in direction.
The rub (there is always a rub) is that prior to signing Lawal and shifting course completely, Bellator was actually making up ground on the UFC. The gap was still sizable, but building from the ground up to where they were heading into last year was tremendous, and all they needed were for a few disgruntled, ranked fighters to depart the Octagon on a winning streak and bring further credibility to the company.
Instead of waiting for nature to take its course, they panicked, and started signing everyone they could… but passed on ex-UFC stars Jon Fitch and now Yushin Okami, which makes this even more laughable. Vladimir Matyushenko you sign, but not Okami? What?
Ditching the PPV for a great televised event is a win, but it’s one they backed into as a result of their earlier ridiculous decision making. It’s not like they said, “Let’s stack a late fall card with three title fights and just get people jazzed about us.”
They hitched their wagon to Tito Ortiz, his unreliable injury history and his 1-7-1 over the last seven years, and they’ve ended up with something great that takes the attention away from the horrible catastrophe they just averted.
Bellator – you make no sense to me, and if this doesn’t make you realize you’re headed down the wrong path, nothing will.