We’ve seen the future of MMA—and the future is the past.
Naturally, Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar are to blame for this. When those two old codgers met last November to coast around the Bellator cage for three tepid rounds, nobody expected it to be the year’s most influential fight.
But while the action was retrograde, the ratings took us back to the glory days.
Suddenly, 40-year-old pensioners are the new hot prospects. It’s strange to think that our sport so eagerly goes in for nostalgia when its own modern history dates back less than 25 years, but as 2015 crawls past the first quarter turn, that’s what’s up.
How else to explain the fact that heavyweights Mirko Cro Cop and Gabriel Gonzaga—combined age 75, combined experience 26 years, combined record 5-7 in their last dozen bouts—will meet on Saturday in the main event of UFC Fight Night 64?
How else to explain that Bellator MMA is preparing to offer up Kimbo Slice vs. Ken Shamrock as the headline attraction of its “tent-pole” event in June?
Or that world’s two largest MMA promotions are currently embroiled in a legal tussle over 36-year-old professional malcontent Quinton “Rampage” Jackson?
In case you missed it, it's brave new world out there, people, and that world is graying around the temples.
If nothing else, Bellator’s recent throwback hiring strategy has proved some of the old guys can still draw. They are, in fact, big business—bigger even than many of their younger, better counterparts. For whatever reasons, evidence suggests there are millions of fight fans out there who will gladly tune in for the slower, more deliberate action of the senior tour, while letting altogether more relevant attractions pass unnoticed.
Have to admit, there’s a certain comfort in the familiar names. Maybe they remind us of a time when our sport felt new and exciting, when it felt like required viewing. If those names are attached to faces just slightly flatter than we remember, pecs a touch droopier and knees a bit creakier, perhaps it only adds to the fun.
Cro Cop-Gonzaga II is a rematch eight years in the making and one nobody asked to see, but it should fulfill the relatively low-stakes entertainment quota of a Saturday afternoon on the UFC’s digital subscription service.
Cro Cop is back in the UFC after a three-and-a-half year absence and already four fights removed from a short-lived retirement. His first run in the company began with sky-high expectations in 2007, after a long and distinguished tenure in Pride. There was a time when he could legitimately be considered one of the two or three best heavyweights in the world, but he slumped to the kind of 5-6-1 UFC record where the losses were far more memorable than the wins.
By the time he closed things out with three consecutive defeats in 2010-11, we figured we’d seen the last of the feared striker whose “right kick hospital, left kick cemetery” quip was the "don’t be scared, homie" of the early 2000s.
Now he’s back, having found himself a lucky beneficiary at the singular intersection of motive and opportunity that is MMA in 2015. Can you still fight? Do people know who you are? You're hired!
Conspiracy theorists might speculate the UFC re-signed the 40-year-old kickboxing legend just to keep him from joining Bellator’s growing stable of old warhorses. Maybe there’s some truth in that, too. Cro Cop vs. Ken Shamrock? Cro Cop vs. Kimbo Slice? Cro Cop vs. Cheick Kongo? It stands to reason the honchos at Zuffa don’t want us getting our grubby paws on those fights.
Think of the ratings!
But let’s not kid ourselves, the UFC also has more pressing issues than the matchups that may or may not be scrawled on Scott Coker’s dream board.
The fight company still needs warm bodies to fill out its hard-charging live-event schedule. It’s a plus if those bodies come equipped with hairlines recognizable to most MMA fans, and it's a full-on Yahtzee if they maintain marketable personas in the far-flung parts of the world where the UFC insists on holding its Fight Pass exclusives.
All things considered, the UFC probably couldn’t find a much better headliner than Cro Cop for its first foray into Poland. Sure, the guy is actually Croatian, but chances are he’s still a draw in the region, and when has the UFC ever worried about the details?
We’re talking broad strokes here, baby, and that includes matching Cro Cop up with the man who sent his first Octagon tenure into tailspin with an unexpected—and painful! And painfully ironic!—head-kick knockout way back at UFC 70.
Gonzaga has also been on a downward slide of late. He’s just 2-3 in his last five and will come into this bout on the heels of a 2014 where he dropped two straight (to Stipe Miocic and Matt Mitrione, if you’re keeping score).
He’s also been cast here primarily for sentimental purposes, affording Cro Cop the opportunity to avenge that bitter and embarrassing loss on something close to home soil.
But Gonzaga also has a better-than-average chance to win this bout, and so he may end up playing the additional role of enraging the Polish fans by just taking Cro Cop down and submitting him. He’s currently going off as a bit more than a 2-1 favorite, according to Odds Shark.
Nobody is at all sure what to expect, and that's probably part of the appeal, as well. We will watch them fight, and the action will be great or it will be terrible or somewhere in the middle. We will laugh or cry or just type "meh" into Twitter and then go about our weekend business.
But at least for a little while, it will feel like we're among friends.
It remains to be seen if either Cro Cop’s or Gonzaga's UFC career will extend beyond the weekend. If the Bellator conspiracy talk holds any water, perhaps the UFC will be forced to hold onto them, and either way maybe they can join guys like Ortiz, Shamrock and Slice in unexpectedly bright and lucrative futures.
Then again, the future seems less and less important these days.
At least, not nearly as important as the past.
