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Mixed Martial Arts--- Affliction & WEC Thoughts
by Ivan Trembow

-Affliction Thoughts: Fedor Emelianenko brutally defeated a top-five-ranked heavyweight for the second time in seven months, further establishing himself as the greatest of all time. And yet I’m sure that in just a few months, the Kevin Ioles of the world will still be questioning who Fedor has ever fought...

Who were those announcers? Those guys were actually pretty good. (I mean Sean Wheelock and Jimmy Smith, not Tito Ortiz.) They made a couple of ridiculous statements (”Renato Sobral is one of the top light heavyweights in the world now!”), but for the most part they were surprisingly good.

I don’t understand why Affliction didn’t show the Jay Hieron vs. Jason High fight. They had plenty of PPV satellite time left. For the fights that happened earlier in the night on HDNet, it's possible that HDNet had the exclusive rights to those fights, but Hieron vs. High had not actually happened at that time. It happened after Fedor vs. Arlovski (ie, after the PPV went off the air) because of time constraints. Why couldn’t they have shown that fight?

-WEC Thoughts: As usual for a WEC event, the show itself was very good. I hope that the WEC keeps Jens Pulver. Yes, he has lost three fights in a row, but those three fights were against Urijah Faber, Leonard Garcia, and Urijah Faber again. There's no shame in that. And what was he doing having a major fight just one month after one of his long-time best friends (Justin Eilers) was murdered?

Craig Hummer’s question, “Are you still relevant?” was not a good question for a post-fight interview immediately after a fight. Pulver has been beaten twice in quick fashion by two world-class fighters (Leonard Garcia and Urijah Faber). Did Joe Rogan ask Chuck Liddell if he was still relevant after his third loss in four fights? Did Joe Rogan ask Wanderlei Silva if he was still relevant after his fourth loss in five fights? No. There’s no shame in losing to world-class opposition, and it doesn’t make one irrelevant.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who was thinking this, but what in the hell was wrong with the crowd in San Diego? That has to have been one of the most ignorant MMA crowds in recent memory.

The crowd was booing for no reason throughout the night, even though they were seeing a pretty damn good MMA show.

A good example: Danillo Villefort. What were they thinking? "Boo! You just won a fight decisively and impressively by TKO! Boo!" Villefort got booed out of the building as if his opponent was a hometown guy, but he wasn't (Villefort's opponent was from Massachusetts).

Then, in Varner-Cerrone fight, one fighter (Cerrone) threw an illegal knee to the head of his grounded opponent, and the other fighter (Varner) was unable to continue as a result of that illegal knee. So, the crowd strongly boos Varner and strongly cheers Cerrone. The ignorance was astounding.

The ignorance of many MMA judges also continues to be astounding. Alejandro Rochin was the judge who inexplicably had the Varner-Cerrone fight scored 3 rounds to 2 in favor of Cerrone.

On a semi-related note since it delayed the start of the WEC broadcast by eleven minutes, The Sports Soup is a horrible show, even though its sister show (The Soup) is a great show. Someone needs to tell the people at The Sports Soup that just airing clips of people in various sports getting seriously injured and then laughing at those people for getting seriously injured is not the least bit funny.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 2:37 PM

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