Issue 135

December 2015

There’s no room in our sport for dumb trash talk just to try and sell fights

Brandon Halsey

Bellator MMA’s middleweight star wishes some fighters would just keep their mouths shut

I’ve been in the fight game for a few years now and I’ve fought some big fights, gotten some good wins, but nothing comes close to the weirdness of my last fight. 

In case you don’t know, I’m the undefeated middleweight champion of Bellator. They took my belt away, but that doesn’t change anything for me. It’s my belt. They can say whatever they want, but we all know who the champ is. I earned it by choking out Alexander Shlemenko in less than a minute. Before that I snapped the arm off Brett Cooper. 

The lead up to my fight with Kendall Grove in May wasn’t anything I’d expected. It was my first encounter with the unprofessional, obnoxious behavior that fighters are engaging in to sell their fights. A few weeks out, Grove and Cooper went on Twitter and started accusing me of using performance-enhancing drugs. It’s bulls**t, but because I’m physically tough, it’s something I’ve dealt with my entire life in wrestling and fighting.

They claimed they know some guys that bought steroids from me, or something. I can see why Grove was doing it. He’s not the brightest bulb and he’s toward the end of his fight career – hell, he might have to retire after the beating I gave him. He thought he was going to build some audience for the fight. It just looks bad for Cooper because I dominated our fight. He looks like he’s just a whiner.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m clean, but like a lot of fighters, I had to travel to take a rigorous pre-fight test. There’s a bit of worry with these things, like getting a false positive, or maybe one of the supplements I use triggering a problem with the test. Who knows?

The test came back negative, which was a great weight off my shoulders, and I was p**sed. I couldn’t wait to get in the cage with that bag of rocks and was thrilled to sub him in the first. 

Before the Grove fight I felt a pop in my ankle while I was training but finished the session. But after my shower I noticed it was swollen. S**t. I treated it, iced it, but man, it was getting pretty painful. There were only a few days left, plenty of pounds to still get off, and I couldn’t use it. Let me tell you, it’s one hell of a tough cut to go down to 185lb. There was a long layoff before I got Grove, so I let my weight get pretty high. Big mistake. I’m not making any excuses. I missed weight. It was unprofessional, I deserved some sort of punishment. I lost some money. Fine.

But something about dealing with the drama of a couple of dopey fighters, the ankle and missing weight – it all came together to make me just angry enough to feel nothing but the powerful inclination to break this skinny little fighter into a thousand pieces. Which I did.

If it was up to me, this kind of s**t talking wouldn’t be part of MMA culture. I know we have to get people interested and it can be riveting when it’s done well. The problem is, there are a lot of fighters who just blather endlessly and say dumb stuff.

We’re fighters, not actors. And I like it that way. I think the acting thing is bad for the sport, so I won’t engage in it. When you see my fights coming up, you can follow me on Twitter (@BrandBullHalsey) and let me know if I don’t handle it well. 

I may talk a little s**t back, but I won’t be the one running my mouth nonsensically. I won’t curse, I won’t just hurl insipid insults. Anything I say, I try to say with class. I hope you’ll watch my fights more because of this, not in spite of it.

We don’t need to be like WWE and boxing. MMA is better. We can do better.

Champ stripped

Halsey was stripped of his belt and fined 20% of his purse when he weighed in at 188.1lb for Bellator 137. After beating Grove, he was given the chance to win it back against Rafael Carvalho at Bellator 144.