In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, more aging legends get matched up against young buzzsaws, and we are forced to consider what life might be like after MMA’s biggest star gets a monster payday as a boxer. You know, hypothetically.
All that and more in the TMB. To ask a question of your own, tweet to @BenFowlkesMMA.
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Hey, come on. Perk up, buddy. There’s always a chance that Anderson Silva will go out there and put some capoeira upside Kelvin Gastelum’s head in their recently announced matchup, and then announce that he’s really retiring for real and will spend the rest of his days as the owner and operator of the world’s greatest paintball field (free admission for anyone who can prove they bought the UFC 112 pay-per-view, because even he can admit now that you didn’t get your money’s worth).
If instead it goes the other way and Gastelum does to Silva what he did to Belfort (unlikely it’ll be that one-sided, but possible), then yeah, you should be sad. That would be a sad thing to witness. But that is one of the things the fight game is intent on selling us, is a heaping helping of sorrow to go with the elation and triumph. It also thrives on that little voice in your head saying, “But maybe … ”
If Conor McGregor does end up in a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather, I think he gets tooled up. Remember when Michael Jordan wanted to switch sports and wound up getting fanned by minor league pitchers? It’ll be like that, but better since boxing is a skill McGregor has cultivated along with his MMA training, but also worse because Mayweather is more like a Cy Young winner than a minor leaguer.
But you’re right; he’d made several buttloads of money even in defeat, and at that point, who needs MMA? Unless your ego is severely bruised and you can’t possibly let yourself fade from view with that image of defeat and embarrassment lingering in people’s minds.
That’s a fair question, and I suspect there are several answers. For one, there’s probably a big psychological difference between challenging for the UFC middleweight belt after three years off and defending the welterweight title over and over again for five straight years.
There’s way less pressure on Georges St-Pierre now. If he comes back and loses to Michael Bisping, hey, he was rusty and going up a weight class. So what? A loss back when he was the greatest welterweight of all time and the UFC’s go-to pay-per-view star, that would have been a major upheaval in the established order.
There’s also the fact that, even if St-Pierre wins the middleweight title, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll spend his foreseeable future defending it. This is a different UFC than the one he left. St-Pierre seems like he’s mostly interested in going wherever the money is at this point. Can you really picture the UFC’s new owners vetoing those plans over concerns about divisional relevance?
There may be no major sport that treats its athletes worse than MMA. There’s also no major sport that can replicate the feeling of a big fight. Combat sports are special that way.
It’s the only sport that’s not a game. It’s the only sport in which every competition at every level has a certain baseline significance, if only to the participants. You can roll in hungover five minutes before a rec league basketball game, and it’s no big deal. But if you’re in an amateur fight at the fairgrounds, your desire to not get beat up in front of a bunch of people is still roughly equivalent to an experienced professional’s.
It’s also a sport where so much can be accomplished through sheer force of will. In most other sports, there’s a series of institutions you have to pass through and gain the approval of, coaches and recruiters who decide who’s good enough and who isn’t. And while fighting has its share of insider maneuvering, it’s still ultimately about showing up and kicking someone’s butt. There’s a certain simplistic purity to that.
Recently I was reminded of what I love about MMA when I interviewed Marloes Coenen about her retirement. The way she talked about some of her fights, that intimacy of shared energy between competitors, it reminds you that for most fighters, this is much more than just a way to get on TV and get paid. It has to be, considering all the crap they’re willing to go through in order to do it.
I’d be more in favor of Yoel Romero waiting it out if we could say for sure what he’d be waiting for, but it’s not. I don’t care what anyone at the UFC says, there are no guarantees that he’ll get the winner of Bisping vs. GSP.
That’s true if he waits or fights. Bisping could retain the title and then go looking for another money fight elsewhere. St-Pierre could win it and then set his sights on McGregor. Either one of them could retire at any time.
With so many ways to get denied, Romero might as well keep fighting and keep collecting paychecks. Every win is another chance to get on the mic and roast the champion with oddly threatening declarations of love.
I know from several conversations with Andy Foster, the executive director of the California State Athletic Commission, that weight-cutting is an issue he really wants to address. Foster’s a former fighter himself, and I believe he understands better than most the problems presented by the weight-cutting culture in MMA.
Still, you’re not going to fine your way out of this problem. It seems like the hope here is that if fighters can be made to fear the financial consequences of a botched weight cut, they’ll be encouraged to cut less weight and compete closer to their natural weight. Then again, the added fine might just encourage them to stick with an extreme weight cut that they would have otherwise given up on once it started to go badly.
Foster has said he has more measures in mind that the CSAC will look at this spring, so I wouldn’t judge the commission’s effort to combat weight-cutting by this one action alone. I appreciate the fact that at least one commission is taking the issue seriously and trying to come up with new ways of addressing it. I wish them luck, because it’s not going to be easy.
For the love of the MMA gods, can we not do the rising-prospect thing? We saw how that went in Brazil last weekend, and there’s always some icky about watching young fighters feed on the carcasses of the old. If Vitor Belfort is really going to hang up the gloves after this (huuuuuuge if, in my opinion), give him something fun. By which I mean a fellow old guy.
There’s no point in having him fight another up-and-comer now. The shine the young guy would get from beating Belfort is much dimmer now that he’s lost three straight and four of his last five. And if he beats a prospect on his way out the door (cough*to Bellator*cough), all you’ve done is stunted the advancement of a younger fighter for no good reason.
Might as well give him someone around his own age and at roughly the same point in his career. You could even lie to him and tell him it’s the first “Legends League” fight. Why not let him walk out there feeling happy one last time?
That’s the scariest thing about it. We’ve all seen what’s been going on in Bellator, right? If you put two recently famous but now over-the-hill fighters in the cage together on cable TV, we will watch.
I feel about this idea the same way I felt when I discovered Girl Scout cookie ice cream. Basically, I wondered how it had taken this long to come up with the idea, and I instantly wished I had never learned of its existence, because there’s no way it could lead to anything good.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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