Issue 067
November 2010
Confession: I’ve become a serious fan of Chael Sonnen. ‘Fan’ is not a term being used lightly, either. As a sports journalist it would be anathema, quite frankly, to classify yourself as a ‘fan’. Ordinarily, that is. Respect... that’s just about OK. Deference, no problem. But never a ‘fan’.
Yet Sonnen has become, from the perspective of this media seat, the Elvis of MMA. He can sing, dance, talk smack and then backs it up in droves in the Octagon. (He told me he can also play the guitar. I’m not sure if he gets the girl at the end, I’d made my excuses and left by then.) But Sonnen has been selling fights on his own on three occasions now. As witnessed against Nate Marquardt and Yushin Okami, before he toyed with Anderson Silva.
Sonnen has become my pound-for-pound most compelling fighter on the planet. The UFC YouTube channel put together several mini-videos depicting ‘The World’s Most Interesting Man’ based on Sonnen – 30-second vignettes.
They were tongue-in-cheek, but Sonnen did something against Silva that ought to have silenced those lining up to criticize him. Sonnen delivered what he had promised on the bottle.
There is one issue. In spite of his admirable challenge against Silva for the Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight title, there are those insisting that the Oregonian could not finish a plate of fries, let alone the most gifted MMA fighter on the planet. And I’m not going to argue with that. Was it 251 punches (according to FightMetric.com) landed on the bemused, yet barely marked, Brazilian?
Regardless of the rescue act (with 110 seconds and counting) from Silva in the five-round thriller, as Sonnen’s power ebbed away, it is the American’s continuing chatter that thrills. The boos will be ringing from the wings, but Sonnen versus Michael Bisping is a matchmaker’s dream. Imagine the smack talk from the master of the one-liners. The juxtaposition of characters would be a mind-bender. Bisping, highly sensitive, prone to be drawn by smack, against Sonnen, who can handle brickbats like no other.
If ‘pig Latin’ was the remark thrown at Ed Soares’ translations from Portuguese into English, and vice-versa, can you imagine the anti-colonial barrage? We’d get Paul Revere, 1788, Cornwallis… Sonnen versus Bisping would make a great event. It is a middleweight contest that must happen, closer than many predict and a good match. Imagine Sonnen’s bastardization of some of Sir Winston Churchill’s lines. Though: “If Michael Bisping ever addresses me in public again, I will bury him where he stands,” will live forever as a classic. Just like Elvis.
Refs back to school?
In recent weeks both UFC president Dana White and former UFC light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell have weighed in on the need in MMA for a judging school where officials literally sit in a classroom with experienced fighters and talk them through a replay of what they have seen during a fight, and how and why they judged as they did. White referenced Mitch Halpern in the discussion that I initiated with him in San Francisco during mid-summer. Halpern was a renowned referee who officiated 87 championship fights and many major Las Vegas fight nights. He was in the ring when Evander Holyfield knocked out Mike Tyson for the WBA heavyweight title in 1996. He was to referee the infamous ‘Bite Fight’ rematch but Tyson’s camp opposed the appointment and he was replaced by Mills Lane. Tragically, Halpern died aged 33 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that was reported to be the result of a domestic dispute.
White’s point, nonetheless, was that Halpern’s brilliance as a referee and official was down to dedication. “Mitch would go to gyms in Las Vegas after work or in his lunch break and get in the ring and referee sparring. In the end he knew all the little tricks that fighters used. No doubt that made him a much better official. For me, he was the best because he got right inside the sport. That’s what officials in MMA need to do. We need to get the Commissions to increase the standard of officiating right across the sport.”
Marc Ratner, however, issues a word of warning over officiating in MMA. Ratner, of course, was for over two decades the head of the Nevada State Athletic Commission – for even longer than that he has been a Liverpool soccer club fan – and he believes judging MMA will always be an inexact science.
“Boxing has a history going back 150 years and there are still decisions every year that both fans and those within the industry are unhappy with,” explained Ratner. “The problem we have in mixed martial arts is that the skill sets are much more complex to judge than in boxing, so we are unlikely ever to find a way of making clear-cut decisions in every contest.”
WEC for Eurozone
Surely it is time for wider-reaching television deals for World Extreme Cagefighting. In the US, the MMA audience loyal to Zuffa can choose between Spike and pay-per-view. In Europe, however, a deal for the WEC on subscription television is yet to be made. It is a question I am asked frequently by fans. My view is this: WEC on television in Europe will happen very soon, or there are plans underway, behind the scenes to merge the WEC with the UFC. I suspect the latter will come sooner rather than later, with eight weight divisions, from 125 to 265lb.
Gareth A Davies is boxing and MMA correspondent for The London Telegraph
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