Ronda Rousey
In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, is the very strong likelihood that Ronda Rousey will utterly destroy Bethe Correia at UFC 190 a feature or a bug? How about Wanderlei Silva, who seems to have gone on perhaps one rant too many? And is the most intriguing fight this weekend being almost completely overlooked?
All that, plus much more. If you’ve got a question of your own, fire it off to @BenFowlkesMMA on Twitter.
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You’re asking me personally? I cover this sport for a living, so skipping a Rousey fight isn’t really an option for me. I’m going to watch no matter who she fights, and then I’m going to expense the cost of the pay-per-view and get reimbursed by my employer.
But for the average (meaning not independently wealthy) MMA fan, I could see how Rousey’s tendency toward quick annihilation of her opponents might discourage them from reaching for the credit card when she fights.
Take Rousey’s last fight against Cat Zingano, for instance. We all made a big deal out of how flawless the performance was, how efficient. And yet the whole thing fit very nicely into GIF form. Within a few hours of the fight, those GIFs were all over the Internet. They still are. You didn’t need to pay to see that fight. You just needed to wait and Google it.
There are some drawbacks to that strategy. For one, if you go scouring the internet for a GIF of the fight, you almost can’t help but spoil the ending before you see it. Of course, if you’re pretty sure you already know how the fight will end, maybe that’s not such a deterrent. That brings us to the other downside, which is that you don’t get to see the rest of the main card.
That’s where Rousey could use some help from the UFC. The main card at UFC 190 has a lot of fights (seven of them, in fact), but not a ton of drawing power. The big names – Rua, both Nogueiras, “Bigfoot” Silva and, sure, even Stefan Struve – are pretty much all fighting to salvage some shred of continuing relevance. Then there are the “TUF: Brazil 4″ fights that most North American fans don’t know enough to care about, and the women’s strawweight bout between Jessica Aguilar and Claudia Gadelha, which, outside of the main event, might be the fight with the most meaningful title implications here.
If money’s tight – or if you have a weird hang-up about staying up all night, trudging through the tedium of some TUF Finale pageantry you don’t care about, just to see a fight whose outcome seems more or less predetermined – I could see why you might skip this one. I guess it comes down to how badly you want to experience Rousey’s dominance live and in real time, and what that feeling is worth to you.
First of all, you’re aware of what’s going on in other UFC divisions, right? Alexander Gustafsson is getting a UFC light-heavyweight title shot coming off a knockout loss. Carlos Condit could very well get the next crack at the UFC welterweight title, despite posting recent losses to two of the guys who the UFC seems content to skip over just to get to him.
Compared to that, giving a title shot to an undefeated fighter like Correia, who’s won three straight in the UFC, seems positively unimpeachable.
But second, look around the women’s bantamweight class. There’s no one else for Rousey to fight right now. If there were, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a third fight with Miesha Tate after this squash match. Face it, Correia’s opponents may not have done much in the UFC, but at least she beat them all. For the time being, that makes her the best we’ve got.
I think it’s partly because the other allegations Silva made against the UFC were of a general nature, leaning heavily on his own personal opinions. Accusing the UFC of putting on fixed fights is a very specific accusation, not to mention a potentially very harmful one.
Fight-fixing would, I hope, be the kiss of death for any MMA promoter. UFC executives would have to be out of their minds to even consider it. For a former UFC fighter to accuse them of it, that’s serious business. They’re well within their rights to address that in court.
What they shouldn’t be able to do, however, is hold Silva in this permanent limbo. In that sense, it’s almost hard to blame him for lashing out with wild accusations that I highly doubt he can prove. Between the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s bizarre decision to ban Silva for life, and the UFC’s refusal to let him out of his contract, he’s effectively been blackballed from the industry in which he’s spent his entire adult life. And for what? For avoiding a drug test?
You tell me that running from a test counts the same as failing a drug test, and hey, I’ve got no objection. Fine him. Suspend him a year or even two, whatever the market rate for failed drug tests was at the time, and then let the UFC decide whether to offer him a fight or let him go. But to keep him in this purgatory, to keep him from making a living while fighters with far more egregious offenses on their records are allowed to fight on, that’s flat out wrong.
If Silva could only limit himself to making that case, rather than hurling every accusation he can think of at the UFC in the hopes that something will stick, it might be easier for us to sympathize with him.
Actually? Now that you’ve reminded me that this fight is even happening? Yeah, I am forced to agree.
Any Rousimar Palhares fight at this point is weirdly intriguing, even if it’s for most of the wrong reasons. And the fact that he’ll be facing a submission grappling ace like Jake Shields at WSOF 22 on Saturday night, that only makes it more so.
So yes, for the fight fan who’d rather save some money and wait on the Rousey GIFs, this is a very viable alternative Saturday night plan. I just wonder how many people even know it’s an option.
If you’re looking for diminished fighters – particularly diminished Brazilian fighters – UFC 190 has got you covered. Between Mauricio Rua, his opponent Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, and Lil’ Nog’s brother, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, we have at least three fighters on the card who could retire at literally any moment now without anyone worrying that it was too soon.
Rua’s not even that old, just 33, which seems impossible. Still, the career he’s had makes him sort of like that great old car you’ve had forever, which you love, but which only starts on the first few cranks about half the time now, forcing you to resign yourself to the fact that one of these days it won’t start at all.
And you’re right that the sport evolved, but I don’t know if Rua’s decline is a result of not keeping up with that evolution. If anything, it’s a consequence of relying on a young man’s style while inhabiting a (prematurely) old man’s body.
Before I answer your question about whether the forthcoming IV ban (the ins and outs of which I covered in this story last week) is worth it, let me address the unstated assumptions in your question, because they’re pretty damn big ones.
For one thing, you assume that drastic weight cuts will be harder on fighters if they can’t use an IV solution to rehydrate once they get off the scales. That may or may not be true, depending on the fighter and the resources at his or her disposal.
The MMA-specific diet and weight cut specialists I spoke to mostly said they didn’t like using IVs to rehydrate their fighters, since oral rehydration was just as if not more effective when you know what you’re doing. That’s part of USADA’s argument as well, is that IVs simply aren’t necessary for “mild dehydration.”
The problem, as you hinted at, is that especially in instances where fighters accept bouts on short notice, the dehydration required to make weight at the last minute might be relatively severe. So if they know they can’t IV it up after weigh-ins, will that make them less likely to accept those late-notice replacement bouts, which, in the case of Chad Mendes stepping in against Conor McGregor, helped save the entire card?
I suspect the answer is no, which is where the potential for added danger comes in. Guys like Mendes, who stood to make a big payday and potentially jump straight from contender to interim champ by agreeing to step up on short notice, they’re probably not going to turn that down on the basis of weight issues alone. More likely, they’ll endure the rough cut and take their chances – either with the IV, betting that USADA won’t catch them, or without it, betting that they can sufficiently rehydrate on their own.
If they’re wrong on the first one, they get fined and suspended, which is bound to hurt. If they’re wrong on the second one, however, the potential consequences could be a lot worse.
Dominick Cruz has made some solid points about the UFC bantamweight division as a whole, but not so much about its champion, T.J. Dillashaw.
It’s true that the bantamweight division is a little thin right now. For a while, Dillashaw and Renan Barao were the only two interesting fighters in it, with Urijah Faber hopping in and out as the mood struck him.
When Cruz said that there aren’t many compelling match-ups to be found for Dillashaw now that he’s beaten Barao twice, he was mostly right. When he said Dillashaw needed him to “make his career worth anything,” he was mostly wrong. Yes, there are some similarities in style between the two men, but they aren’t so similar that it’s impossible to imagine Dillashaw developing that style in an alternate universe where Cruz never existed.
Similarly, if Cruz never comes back, if he tears out both ACLs and vomits up a lung trying to get into fighting shape, I don’t think we’ll end up feeling like Dillashaw’s title reign is a hollow one. Don’t get me wrong; it’d be great to see Dillashaw vs. Cruz. That’s the fight to make right now, if Cruz can get healthy and shake off whatever rust might have built up. But if it never happens due to Cruz’s terrible luck with injuries, I don’t think it will be that hard for us to accept Dillashaw as the true 135-pound champ.
I also think, due at least part in to the aforementioned rust, that if Cruz returns this year and jumps straight into a title fight? Dillashaw probably beats him.
That’s a tricky one. UFC President Dana White is a man with the virtues of his faults.
His bombastic, never-back-down, in-your-face style was very important to the UFC’s rise from obscurity. For much of the UFC’s history, he’s been the tireless bulldog who would charge right through the many, many obstacles standing between MMA and mainstream acceptance. He’s also been a petty, immature bully who treats the truth like a malleable means to an end, and in that sense he’s also become one of the barriers to mainstream acceptance.
As for whether the UFC has outgrown him, I’m not sure. On one hand, he does seem more unhinged than usual lately, which is saying something. His antics over the last few weeks have done more to harm the UFC’s public image than any political opponent in recent memory. You know how he likes to selectively compare fighters to people with regular jobs, especially when justifying why he fired them for misbehaving? Ask yourself how many company presidents in fields other than professional cagefighting would still have a job if they acted like White.
At the same time, who would replace him? He’s a fight promoter, which makes him part carnival barker and part used car salesman. You need a big, borderline absurd character to fill that role. That’s what gets people to pay attention long enough to learn that there’s a fight on TV this Saturday night.
At the same time, if you’re going to be a double-edged sword for the company you run, you’d better make sure you aren’t cutting the wrong way too often.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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