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Mixed Martial Arts: Random Thoughts

-On Strikeforce pressuring Joe Riggs into signing a contract with a smaller paycheck for his most recent fight:

Strikeforce’s contractual shenanigans with Joe Riggs are not right. As a promotion, they should either honor contracts or not sign them in the first place. If they don’t think that Riggs is worth X price anymore, then releasing him would be more ethical than trying to screw him out of the amount-per-fight for which they signed him.

-On Strikeforce's one-night women's MMA tournament, in which the semi-final bouts were changed from three rounds to two rounds just a few days before the event:

Strikeforce’s disorganization strikes again.

If Strikeforce had actually prepared for this event ahead of time instead of throwing it together in the past couple of weeks, they could have learned months ago that Arizona’s athletic commission was not going to allow any fighter to fight more than five rounds in one night.

With that knowledge, they could have made the tournament semi-finals two rounds of five minutes each (instead of three minutes), and they could have made the tournament finals three rounds of five minutes each (instead of three minutes).

Instead, they had to change it at the last minute to make the semi-final fights two rounds instead of three, and if they changed the rounds to being five minutes long, that would have been another last-minute change thrown at the fighters, who had been told to train for three-minute rounds.

So, we ended up with semi-final fights that could last a maximum of six total minutes. A six-minute fight is like a YAMMA fight with a round break / stand-up in the middle of it.

-On the subject of Joe Riggs’ ignorant comments about #1-ranked women's bantamweight fighter Sarah Kaufman:

Kaufman deserves to be on major Strikeforce events a lot more than Riggs. Kaufman is the #1 fighter in her weight class. Riggs is nowhere near the top ten in his weight class. Given those basic facts, the only justification for Riggs being more deserving of a “major show spot” is that Riggs is a man and Kaufman is a woman. (Or, as Riggs put it in his own sexist way, "We're the show. The men are what people are here to see... She's lucky to even be on TV.")

Strikeforce apparently doesn’t disagree with this line of thinking too much, as they put both Sarah Kaufman and the women’s tournament finals in non-main-event spots on Strikeforce Challengers shows, while Riggs somehow got a main event spot on a Strikeforce Challengers show.

-On the 30-day suspension that the Quebec athletic commission gave to Paul Daley:

What a joke of a punishment for Daley, especially since he just happens to have a fight scheduled immediately after the conclusion of this convenient 30-day suspension.

The only way in which Quebec's athletic commission could have made their ruling more of a joke would be if they said, "Your suspension is for 30 days... unless you have a booking in three weeks. Do you? We could make it a 20-day suspension, you know. Maybe you'd like to fight two weeks from now. That would be no problem. We'd just make it a 13-day suspension in that case. The most important thing is that we do whatever is most convenient for you, the guy who sucker-punched someone after a match was over."

-On the fact that K-1 still hasn't paid Gary Goodridge for his fight from last New Year's Eve against Gegard Mousasi:

It's bad enough that Goodridge, at his age, still has to fight in order to make a living, but it's just reprehensible for K-1 to stiff him on his paycheck. Goodridge was on the wrong end of a huge mismatch, but still took the fight on short notice, and this is how they treat him?

Other fighters should take a stand and refuse to fight for promoters who stiff fighters on pay, such as K-1/Dream, Shine Fights, and ImpactFC. If for no other reason, they should do it because of the fact that they could be the next fighters to not get paid.

Labels: K-1 / K-1 MMA News, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 12:22 AM

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