Babalu can’t melt The Iceman

Chuck Liddell is riding high right now. Going into his fight against Renato ‘Babalu’ Sobral he’d notched up five straight wins since his last defeat (back in 2003), so its kind of a no-brainer you’d expect him to have a lot of confidence. “I love fighting,” said Chuck in his pre-fight interview. Babalu’s answer was slightly less upbeat. “I just want to kill him,” said the Brazilian.

They had met once before, back on UFC 40 as part of the undercard to Tito Ortiz’s first of many encounters with Ken Shamrock. Liddell was on form that night, and hungry too. Cast your minds back, and you will remember that this was back when Tito was champ, before Randy Couture had resurfaced as a light heavyweight, and when Chuck was still desperately waiting for his shot at the title. Liddell was clinical in his work that night, hunting Babalu from one side of the cage to the other before putting the Brazilian’s lights out with a brutal kick to the face. The kick did more than make it onto a thousand highlight reels - it almost retired Babalu, such was the pain of the defeat.

Babalu picked himself up, brushed himself off, got himself a new fight team to train with (the respected Gracie Barra Combat Team in Rio) and went about building his career back up. He went on to win ten, yes ten, straight fights in three years. What is most remarkable is that three of those fights took place in one night! He submitted Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua and decision Trevor Prangley and Jeremy Horn in a fantastic display of guts in an IFC eight-man tournament. He came to the UK and picked up two nifty wins before returning to the Octagon of the UFC. Working his way up the ranks, he found himself number one challenger to Liddell’s championship

By now Liddell was firmly in charge of the light heavyweight decision. He had wiped the smile from Ortiz’s face, retired Randy Couture, TKO’d the previously unstopped Jeremy Horn, and destroyed an overmatched Vernon White. Liddell has a reason to be confident – not only did have the psychological advantage of having already defeated Babalu, but he had the knowledge that the UFC were struggling to find him competitors. This was apparent even in their match making – it is no coincidence that they looked to set up a match between Chuck and Wanderlei Silva before he had even fought Babalu. It seemed nobody gave Babalu much of a chance, aside from the various Babalu nut-huggers and Chuck haters.

To describe the fight is no tall order, as it boils down to no more than this. Babalu, for all his pre-fight talk of avenging the loss that almost retired him (let alone almost decapitated him), seemed to forget everything he knew about fighting and made an error Chuck could only have expected in his wildest dreams. In a shade over 90 seconds, Chuck had left Babalu flat on his back and beaten senseless, quite literally – Sobral hilariously tried to single-leg referee Big John McCarthy after it the fight had been waved off, such was the state he was in!

Some pundits now rate Chuck Liddell as the top light heavyweight in the world, and this is partly due to his recent run, partly due to the fact he has yet to meet the other great 205lbers out there. He hasn’t been avoiding them, but finding him decent matches is going to be a real problem for the UFC. They seem to want to have nothing to do with Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson, the man who handed Chuck his most recent loss. The UFC opted to pass Jackson up when he was a free agent, and Jackson is now fighting under contract with the WFA. Chuck has said he thinks Rampage is ducking him by ‘hiding’ in the rival organisation, but we have to ask how much of it is down to the UFC wanting to protect their investment in The Iceman. The UFC are going to have to import some serious outside talent (maybe now Silva lost in the PRIDE Grand Prix in Japan the UFC will look to poach him, but this is doubtful – many in the UFC, including Liddell, though that his appearance at the UFC was nothing more than PRIDE looking to get some pre-USA debut publicity).

First of all we will have to endure another UFC rematch – this time the rumours are that Chuck will fight Tito again, very possibly on December 30^th. What this does for either mans career is unclear, as Chuck has already stated this match would, for him, be no more than “just for fun”.

A rematch made in…?

The UFC has been accused of being lazy at times, in that it has promoted a string of rematches in what could be deemed a low-risk strategy. Randy vs. Chuck, Sylvia vs. Arlovski, Tito vs. Shamrock, even the main event of this card… The list is a little too long for some tastes, including mine.

But if there was one rematch that simply had to happen it was this one. Forrest Griffin’s hard-fought win over Stephan Bonnar in the first ever final of the UFC’s reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) had even the most cynical of observers crying out for a second scrap.

Forrest Griffin has achieved a fair bit since winning series one of TUF. Beating a couple of B-class light heavies in the form of Bill Mahood and Elvis Sinosic, he was thrust in against Tito Ortiz and held his own but lost by decision. Bonnar had beaten a pair of former TUF-participants, namely Sam Hoger and Keith Jardine, as well as the tough James Irvin, but incredulously dropped a decision to Rashad Evans, the heavyweight winner of TUF 2.

With both men coming off losses you’d expect a decent effort from both, especially considering they had met before and would be under a lot of pressure to perform to the degree they did last time. Unfortunately, however good this fight would turn out to be, unless it obliterated the last one in terms of brutality and excitement, it would leave fans unhappy.

That’s exactly what happened. We got fifteen minutes of a fairly entertaining yet ultimately non-thrilling kickboxing match. Considering the pressure to perform these two were under, I’d say the fight turned out OK. Hyped to death, you got the feeling that no matter what this fight just wasn’t going to be what it was cracked up to be. Bonnar broke his right thumb fairly early in the match and this hampered his aggression as well as his ability to score decent shots. Griffin found it hard to get out of second gear, comfortably winning all three rounds but never putting Bonnar in trouble.

Anyone entertaining idea’s of a repeat of their last fight was only ever going to be disappointed with this fight though. Yes, the last fight was like something out of a Rocky film, with both guys standing toe-to-toe and trading blows with gusto, but these are intelligent men. They were fighting for something tangible back then – it wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t even just about the contract with the UFC (which they both got anyway). They were fighting to win a competition that had taken up more than three months of their lives.

What were they fighting for this time? Our amusement, it seemed. No doubt they would have been all too aware of this, and neither man was going to lay it on the line like last time for just this. Add to that the fact they were friends, had spent time training and travelling together and were well acquainted with each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and its kind of obvious we weren’t going to get a replay of their last fight. Something that good doesn’t come along everyday, and its impossible to force it.

What was most disconcerting about the entire episode were the fierce jeers from the audience that Griffin faced during his post fight interview with Joe Rogan. “Come on guys, I suffer from low self-esteem,” Griffin half-joked, obviously put out by the disrespect from the Las Vegas crowd. He really didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, and one wonders what he would have had to do to placate the mob, thirsty for blood and unashamed in their behaviour. Let’s be frank – this booing culture among UFC ‘fans’ has got to stop.

Round Up

The UFC is heading down a similar route to the boxing mega-shows of recent years. Increasingly reliant on selling their events on the basis of one big fight and a supporting match-up of some interest, the undercard is often peppered with unknown, untested, yet cheap, fighters.

This is a clever move on the UFC’s part – it keeps costs down and enables them to focus their budget on the people that matter (stars such as Chuck, who reportedly earned $250,000 for his minute and a half of work). The problem is it leaves the pay-per-view audience at home twiddling their thumbs through no-name fights while waiting for the main event, and the crowd in the arena more time to get drunk so that they are better equipped to hurl abuse at fighters such as Forrest Griffin.

The supporting fights did contain a few fights of interest though. Hermes Franca, back on form after a rough 2005 (he lost all of his fights that year) took his winning streak to a straight six fights and gave himself something of a birthday present. The Brazilian lightweight turned 32 the same night he tapped out Jamie Varner with an unorthodox reverse armbar in the third round.

French Muay Thai fighter Cheick Kongo took apart the part-timer Christian Wellisch in true Thai style, finally delivering the killing blow 2.51 into the first round. He did well to avoid the grappling game of American Kickboxing Academy fighter Wellisch, and delivered a vicious knee to lay him out. Kongo, his ground game notable due to its complete absence, will soon find himself pushed by the UFC if he continues to get wins like this.

Nasty Nick Diaz picked up submission of the night by tapping out Josh Neer with a picture-perfect kimura, while Eric Schafer put Canadian Rob MacDonald to sleep by way of an ultra-tight arm triangle choke.