Friday night’s head-to-head battle with the UFC and Bellator ended up showcasing two very different visions of mixed martial arts. It also set up a second go-around in November with those same differences. The UFC presented its typical Fight Night show. With so many shows, and so little time to promote the shows, the UFC almost comes across like something with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. We’re putting on a show. We have some good fighters, some of which you may know, some of which you don’t.
More often than not, the fights will be good. And this week it’s free. If you miss it, next week we have another show. Bellator doesn’t have the depth of fighters so it relies on attention grabbing. And Friday night’s fall season opener, the first of ten straight weeks of fights before the new vision of Bellator begins in 2015, was a weird amalgamation. It featured a serious quality main event title fight, and a couple of name fighters going in no particular direction. It also featured the most talked about thing on either show, whatever it was that Stephan Bonnar, Tito Ortiz and Justin McCulley were doing.
In many ways, it felt like this missing link between pro wrestling and sport MMA. It was a little bit of both, and a lot of neither. Bellator has three fighters that dabbled in the past year as pro wrestlers for TNA, Spike’s pro wrestling company, in Rampage Jackson, Tito Ortiz and King Mo Lawal. A fourth, Bobby Lashley, is a full-time pro wrestler, and TNA’s current champion, who debuted in Bellator on Friday. Lashley (11-2), who scored a dominant win over Josh Burns (8-8), said that he’s not dabbling in MMA, but making a serious run at the sport.
A fifth, McCulley, is a former UFC fighter who also has his own background as a pro wrestler. A sixth, Bonnar, had no pro wrestling background, but of late, has been training at the World Wrestling Entertainment Performance Center in Orlando, Fla What happened in the cage, with Bonnar doing an interview with a masked man (McCulley) by his side, trying to promote the Nov. 15 Bellator fall season finale in San Diego that promoter Scott Coker dubbed the battle of MMA Hall of Famers, felt more like a wrestling pull-apart brawl.
Fortunes changed for five in Friday night fights
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