Nothing controversial about Palhares' win, but image campaign just beginning

By the time I got around to watching Rousimar Palhares’ submission victory in Saturday’s WSOF 9 headliner (via the magic of DVR), I’d already heard rumblings of another heel-hook controversy. So imagine my confusion when I turned on my TV, fast-forwarded to Palhares’s welterweight title fight with Steve Carl, and saw what looked like a pretty standard submission stoppage.

Palhares latched himself to Carl’s leg, as he’s known to do, cranked for the submission, then stopped when referee Yves Lavigne put his hands on him. That’s about as non-controversial as you can get, so why are we even talking about this?

Palhares’s manager, Alex Davis, thinks it’s because we (and by “we,” he mostly means the MMA media) love to beat up on the poor guy.

“Negative stuff always sells better than positive,” Davis said after the bout. “People try to make him a villain because it sells. I’ve said this a thousand times. It gets hits on their sites.”

There’s some truth in that, but there’s also a whole lot that Davis is conveniently leaving out. For one thing, it’s not like we picked Palhares’ name out of a hat and decided to make him into the media’s punching bag. He did that to himself with a disturbing pattern of behavior that was impossible to ignore.

Sure, if you’re on his team, it might seem like he’s been unfairly maligned. If you’re one of the dudes whose knees he wrenched long after he’d been told to let go, you might think he’s getting his comeuppance.

But this time Palhares (17-6) is innocent. He might have held the heel hook after Carl (21-5) tapped, but so does every fighter with any sense. You’re supposed to let go when the ref tells you to, which is what Palhares did. He also got the one submission all his opponents know to look out for, and got it almost immediately, which is kind of incredible.

I can understand why Palhares and Davis are frustrated that people aren’t more interested in talking about that, but they need to remind themselves how we got here.

Palhares’s history was a story before this fight. It was a story when he was first signed by WSOF. You didn’t need Nostradamus to know that people would be watching him very closely in his first post-UFC outing, especially if he managed to lock on his submission of choice. The fact that some saw controversy in such a run-of-the-mill finish only tells us that Palhares was, at least to some extent, doomed before he began.

Is that unfair? Yeah, a little. It’s also not entirely unearned.

It’s unreasonable to expect people to forget Palhares’ past so soon. It’s also unreasonable to expect Palhares to play by different rules now just because he screwed up (several times, but still) in the past. Against Carl, he held on exactly as long as he needed to, and not a moment longer. He did absolutely nothing wrong. At the same time, you don’t get extra credit just for following the rules.

If you’re as good with heel hooks as Palhares is, however, you do get a shiny new WSOF welterweight title belt to take home. So that’s something. If he puts a little more distance between himself and his history of bad habits, the MMA world might even eventually allow him to forget how he ended up there in the first place.

For additional coverage of WSOF 9, check out the MMA Events section of the site.