How did Dennis Siver get in there?
I think I speak for everyone when I admit this was my initial response to seeing the latest UFC Magazine cover. The two-panel foldout features the fight company’s newest harangue—"The Time is Now"—laid out over a collage of the biggest stars from its early 2015 slate.
There’s Jon Jones and Ronda Rousey. There's Chris Weidman and Anthony Johnson. There’s Conor McGregor checking his fancy watch to make sure the time really is now. Oh yeah, and there’s Siver, too, looking like he snuck into the photo shoot and nobody had the heart to ask him to leave.
I kid! I kid, but it was legitimately jarring to see Siver photoshopped in there alongside all those main eventers, since we've been given no reason to believe he belongs.
The truth is, we all might’ve been more excited to see Siver score that magazine cover spot had we known it would be one of the last times we’d see him before his main event bout against McGregor at Sunday’s UFC Fight Night 59.
As of this writing, the lead-up to this fight has been very—shall we say—McGregorian. The teaser trailers have been about McGregor, the 30-minute documentary specials on Fox Sports 1 have been about McGregor and the SportsCenter interview slots have been reserved for McGregor, too.
If at any point you blinked—or didn’t pick up the UFC magazine at your local newsstand—you might’ve missed Siver’s involvement entirely.
To hear UFC brass tell it, this one-sided focus was not an accident.
UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta told MMAJunkie’s John Morgan this week:
It was a whole plan of timing. ... Also we just wanted to get you guys (in the media) riled up. Because we’ve done it so very few times, it stands out. We did it with Tito Ortiz in the early days. But because we don’t do it that often, I think it’s worked well. It’s got people talking.
People, that is, aside from Siver. So far we haven’t heard much from him at all.
In fairness, the UFC says it plans to bust out some Siver-centric promotion this week, and on Wednesday we got a few minutes from him in the latest episode of the company's Embedded web series. Even still, it might be too late to shake the notion that the German fighter exists here only as the pole McGregor will use to vault himself to the top of the featherweight rankings.
Especially when McGregor’s head coach pretty much said as much out loud to Ariel Helwani on this week’s The MMA Hour.
“Well, there's no other way to say it: Dennis is there to make Conor look good,” said John Kavanagh, via MMA Fighting.com’s Marc Raimondi. “He's gonna get cleanly knocked out, which will set up a nice highlight reel and set up a nice main event title fight in Ireland."
In this instance, I suppose you can’t blame the UFC public relations machine if it leaned a bit toward McGregor. The 26-year-old Irishman has been a revelation in and out of the cage while compiling a 4-0 promotional record. Odds Shark sees him as an enormous betting favorite again here, and he’s already been promised a shot at Jose Aldo’s 145-pound title if he can just get this one to play out according to chalk.
Maybe that’s part of the problem, though, too. As Fertitta nearly points out above, this isn’t the sort of matchmaking we’ve historically seen from the world’s largest MMA organization.
The UFC made its bones by putting the best in the cage across from the best and then living with the consequences. Its treatment of McGregor feels like something else entirely.
Coupled with the recent signing of CM Punk (who will certainly need some preferential treatment in even finding an opponent) and the booking of Anderson Silva vs. Nick Diaz (a fight Silva will certainly win unless he’s totally lost his fastball) it’s enough to make you wonder if we’re dealing with a shifting promotional philosophy in 2015.
Perhaps after a difficult 2014, the UFC feels it needs to pull out all the financial stops this year, and that includes leaving no salable fight unbooked, no promotable personality untapped.
It's Dennis Siver's birthday today. If it were Conor McGregor's birthday, FOX Sports 1 would be running an all-day marathon of his fights.
— CagePotato.com (@cagepotatomma) January 13, 2015
Indeed, the UFC’s relationship with McGregor has long been atypical. UFC executives certainly haven’t been shy about expressing their excitement over the guy. It's been a fun ride, but the feelings that he’s being rushed into a title shot and set up with fights we all know he should win have also been a bit disconcerting.
Take UFC president Dana White’s latest bit of PR magic, where he takes the McGregor-focused marketing campaign for this fight—which we must assume he and Fertitta played a part in creating—and uses it to spin a potential tale of redemption, not for the Irish golden child, but for the forgotten Siver.
White told Morgan:
We just got a quote from Dennis Siver, and Dennis said, ‘I’m coming to Boston, and I’m going to punish Conor McGregor.' When you’re a guy like this that’s been s--t on—and I’m sure not only does he think he’s been s--t on by Conor McGregor, I’m sure he feels like he’s also been s--t on by the UFC—now he’s coming in here looking to knock this kid’s head off.
It’s genius, really, even if White’s exact wording makes me think he hasn’t personally talked with Siver in a while, either.
