Champ Daniel Straus: I’m still searching for Bellator’s respect

For Bellator MMA featherweight champion Daniel Straus, news that the promotion was mounting a rubber match between him and former champ Pat Curran wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Straus said Bellator Chairman and CEO Bjorn Rebney told him during a recent call that his next opponent would either be Curran or Patricio “Pitbull” Freire. Rebney, he said, was checking on his knee, which got banged up in his title-winning fight with Curran  this past November at Bellator 106.

But when Straus recently received word that it was Curran for sure, and that the fight was booked to take place essentially in Curran’s backyard, he took to Facebook to voice his frustrations.

“My perception is that Bellator wants him as champ so bad not only does he get immediate rematch but gets it in his hometown damn near,” he wrote. “Any thoughts?”

In a subsequent interview with MMAjunkie, Straus’ feelings hadn’t dissipated much. While he was hesitant to “bite the hand that feeds him,” he said, he called the Curran fight “a slap in the face” to him and other Bellator fighters.

He added that the message sent by putting the rubber match in Hammond, Ind., which is 90 minutes away from Curran’s home base, was “sickening.”

“It’s like, what, you don’t believe in me being a champ?” said Straus, who hails from Cincinnati but trains in Coconut Creek, Fla., at the famed American Top Team.

As announced Monday by Bellator, the third bout headlines Bellator 112 on March 14. The event takes place at Horseshoe Hammond Casino with the main card on Spike TV following prelims on Spike.com.

Straus (22-4 MMA, 8-1 BMMA) dethroned Curran (19-5 MMA, 9-2 BMMA) this past November in dominant fashion with winning scores of 49-45, 48-46 and 49-46 (Curran received a point deduction for an illegal knee) in a rematch of a 2009 bout, which Curran won via knockout.

Up until that point, Curran, who knocked out Joe Warren for the title in March 2012, was one of Bellator’s most heavily promoted fighters and considered a “face” of the company.

Straus isn’t the only one unhappy with the call for the immediate rubber match. Freire beat Straus to win the Season 5 featherweight tournament and, following a loss to then-champ Curran this past January, earned another title shot by winning the Season 9 competition. That is, until Bellator exercised an immediate title rematch clause it put into place in 2012, when one of its biggest stars, current lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez, contemplated leaving the promotion after losing his title to now-ex-champ Michael Chandler.

“I told them I should get the shot, and then they just said that’s the direction the company is going and for me to just keep doing what I’m doing,” Freire told MMAjunkie. “If Bellator doesn’t believe in me – if they don’t want me to be champion and to do things right – I’d like to just ask them to let me out of my contract.”

Straus is nowhere near the point where he’d like to go elsewhere, and in any event, he’s currently under contract with the Viacom-owned promotion. But he said the decision sends the wrong message to other fighters within the Bellator stable.

“No one wants to say anything bad,” he said. “We want to do our job. Our job is to come out here and fight. Now, if you lay down a f–king path that we need to follow, and we’re following that path and we’re doing what we’re supposed to, you need to do the same.

“To fight a guy, beat a guy, and have me turn around and fight the guy again and not go through the tournament, that’s bulls–t. Even if he does get through a tournament, to fight him in damn near his hometown, like, what the f–k is that? It just makes me want to fight harder.”

And that, Straus said, will be the end result of his frustration with the situation.

“This is nothing toward Pat,” he said. “I like Pat; he’s a good dude. But we didn’t have a close fight. I won four out of five of those rounds, decisively. And to turn around and give him a rematch, that’s like a slap in the face to the system of Bellator, and it’s a slap in the face of people who are waiting in line.

“I don’t understand it. If I lose, I guarantee you I must go back through a tournament. But it is what it is, and it’s only going to help me win.”

Asked whether a change of venue might lessen his frustration, Straus said it would help.

“Had I fought him in Cincinnati, it’s like, OK, the champ gets a rematch close at home,” he said.

Bellator officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Curran could not be reached for comment.

Despite winning the title in dominant fashion, avenging a loss, and also rising above a trying stretch of legal problems owing to a March 2013 arrest for drug possession, Straus said he hasn’t taken much pleasure in the life of a Bellator champion.

But from the sound of it, he was more focused on accomplishing his goals than having fun along the way. Now, there’s another obstacle to overcome.

“I don’t feel like I have the people’s respect, and I don’t feel like I have Bellator’s respect,” Straus said. “I’ve done quite well in this sport. (I have a record of) 22-4. You can’t say I’m fighting bums. You can’t say I’m a guy that takes guys down and humps them. I’m not going to deny it that I’m not a walk-in knockout artist. That’s not me. But I do fight a good fight, and I just want to be respected for that. I’m out here trying to capture everybody’s respect.”

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