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Hitting the news this week, we’ve got a couple of comments for the commentary booths from both the UFC and Bellator/PFL. Plus we’re diving in on Khamzat Chimaev’s new trust issues, and Miesha Tate giving fans the hard sell on UFC 297.
The combat sports world is a constant circus of good news and bad. I’m just here trying to sort through it all to find those items that spark something a little more than ‘okay, that’s good to know.’ Join me for the latest Love/Hate to See It column…
LOVE TO SEE IT
Chris Curtis takes a shot at Dominick Cruz
Maybe time has dulled my memory, after all I’ve always felt that nostalgia is the most toxic of all emotions. It pulls us not to enjoy (or simply cope with) the world around us as it is, but to try and recapture some imagined past. Usually an era where we either weren’t even alive to experience it, or had no real sense of the multitude of problems surrounding us even then.
Did things really used to be better, or were we just younger and more foolish and free of woes?
What I’m trying to say is, that Dominick Cruz might be the worst regular UFC commentary booth member since Zuffa took ownership of the company back in 2001. Yes, even including Mike Goldberg.
Known for his long running Team Alpha Male feud during the height of his championship reign/injury epidemic, it turns out that the very feistiness that fueled his trash talk (and very likely his fighting career) is a personality trait that he can never turn off. When in the booth, calling that action, that often surfaces as a tendency for petty bickering, and an inability to let a singular observation go once it’s crept into his mind.
Lately, Cruz’s biggest fixation has been on the idea of ‘damage’ as a principal scoring criteria. Namely, in his mind, that the clearest (and perhaps only) signifier of damage in a fight are cuts. Every time a fighter gets cut, Cruz goes on a mini-rant about how they’ve now lost the fight because they’ve suffered the most damage. Never mind that it’s supposed to be an indicator of impact more than anything else.
Did a fighter get knocked down? Dazed? Wobbled? Were they slammed hard? Did the shots they took look heavier? Those are all measurements of damage too. Cuts and bruising are certainly a secondary or tertiary part of that scale, but to hear Cruz tell it, you’d think they made up the entire rubric.
It seems like fighters are getting tired of Cruz’s fixations as well. In a recent interview following his UFC 297 win, middleweight Chris Curtis took the ‘Dominator’ to task.
“I get s—t on by ‘DC’ and Dominick Cruz every time I fight,” Curtis said on The MMA Hour (transcript via MMA Fighting). “No matter what’s happening. DC was kinder than before, but Dominick Cruz is just like, ‘It looks like he’s sparring,’ and blah blah blah. Bro, [Barriault is] a solid man. He’s been knocked out once, I have been knocked out once. It’s not going to be easy to knock the other down, it’s just not.
“I hit him with some s—t that I’ve dropped people with, and he just kind of looked at it. I elbowed him a few times, I went to move in, he’s just staring at me like he’s back there. I hear Dominick Cruz say, ‘It’s just like a sparring match,’ and then, not to be a d—, but people are going to latch on to what the commentary says, and now I hear, ‘He didn’t even fight hard. It was a low-energy sparring match.’ Stand in front of me and let me hit you the same way.”
“Dominick Cruz, stand here Dominick Cruz, and let me hit you the way I was hitting him and see if it’s just sparring. No, we’re two large, solid men. I promise you guys, I was hitting him f hard, he was hitting me hard, I feel it since the fight. [Cruz] is like, ‘It looks like sparring.’ I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, the narrative is glorious.’ So I’m proud of myself, I’m very proud of myself.”
Here’s the thing. As he’s shown in several incidents over his UFC career, Chris Curtis can be a pretty sensitive guy. He seems to take criticism to heart, and doesn’t let go of it easily. To the point that we’ve even seen him get frustrated with opponents in the cage, when they don’t give him the fight he wants.
And, to be fair to Cruz, much like his teammate Sean Strickland, the ‘Action Man’ has a style that seems like it’s been born out of a ton of hard sparring. Where Strickland chooses a volume jab style, meant to score points and stay safe, Curtis chooses a back-foot, selective counter-striking style.
But I can’t help it, maybe I’m just petty too. Cruz’s work in the commentary booth is a continual drag. If the result of that is that he’s gonna catch a few strays, even when he might not be wrong, I’m here for it. Go off Curtis.
Big John McCarthy exits the booth
Probably one of the most surprising and strangest idiosyncrasies to pop up in the MMA world has been the commentary work of legendary MMA referee John McCarthy. A co-author (and sometimes outright creator) of many of the rules that define modern mixed martial arts, McCarthy has been a fixture in the North American MMA world essentially since day 1.
I’ve spoken to ‘Big’ John a couple times in my time working for Bloody Elbow. He’s a gregarious, generous speaker who will always give straight answers to questions, can fill in details whenever needed, and has a fantastic memory for the history of the sport.
He’s also just absolutely no fun as a play-by-play/color commentary figure in a broadcast booth. I don’t know why it is, I don’t know how it is, but the work just doesn’t seem to fit his style. His time with Bellator has come off as a mix of unfocused and low energy, seemingly often downplaying major swings in action, or simply missing key moments with off topic stories.
It has to be said, as well, that it feels like he’s had enough of a runway at this point that if he were going to improve a lot in the roll, he already would have. I’m not surprised Bellator kept him on in the position as long as they did. Like I said before, my experience of the guy is that he’s wonderfully easy to work with. But over time it felt like a marked downgrade of the product from its glory days with Jimmy Smith and Sean Wheelock calling the action.
Which brings me to this piece of good news from a recent interview McCarthy did with MMA Junkie.
“I am going to be staying with the PFL because I had a contract with Bellator, and it still has a year on it, so the PFL picked that up,” McCarthy explained. “Will my role be the same? I don’t think it’s going to be the same.
“I think it’s going to be more towards rules and regulations, scoring the fights and doing those things – making sure everyone understands what’s being done, if it’s being done in the correct way and what options do the officials have.”
McCarthy is definitely an asset that PFL would do well to keep. But if they can find a role for him that’s not one where he’s constantly on the mic, calling the fights? That seems like it’s the best idea for everyone involved.
HATE TO SEE IT
Khamzat Chimaev learns not to trust the UFC
It’s one of the most enduring factors of the UFC’s business model. Ever since the promotion took its first steps away from the tournament model in the mid-90s, there are no guarantees in the Octagon. Yesterday’s promise is today’s maybe and tomorrow’s change of plans.
It’s a fact that has driven a whole generation of rival companies. From Bellator and PFL, to PRIDE and now RIZIN, other organizations look to lay down a path to contendership, a way to be Pepsi to the UFC’s Coke. It’s also a lament that fighters find themselves singing time and time again, ‘What do I have to do to get a title shot around here?’
At some point it really does feel like this lesson should get learned. There is no fight booking promise the UFC would make that they would feel honor bound to keep. Nonetheless, Khamzat Chimaev is still very disappointed to find out that he’s not in consideration for the middleweight title.
“I heard Dana White said that, ‘I don’t think Khamzat is next for the title,’ that’s the bulls—t, man,” Chimaev told ESPN in a recent interview (transcript via MMA Fighting), after Dana White told media he didn’t think the Chechen-born fighter would be healthy enough to compete at UFC 300.
“If you promised me something, you have to answer for your words, and I’m the guy who always answers for my words. I don’t care if it’s some president, or a king, if you give me [your] word, you have to answer for that.”
“I will be surprised if that happens—if somebody fights [for the title] next, and not me. We’ll see, I didn’t talk with Dana, and I don’t know what he’s thinking. He knows better than me.
“In my mind, it should be me,” Chimaev added. “I asked Hunter [Campbell] to let me fight at UFC 300, so we’ll see what they say.”
I honestly can’t believe I’m about to say this, but realistically, the UFC is right not to guarantee these kinds of bookings. Combat sports always has been and always will be just as much about the grandeur and sizzle as it is about finding out who’s the ‘baddest man on the planet’. These aren’t team events and they aren’t golf or tennis where impact is low enough and repetitions are high enough that you can more or less guarantee a certain number of stars will shine at every event.
Even at its best, fighting is wild and chaotic and filled with the possibility of upset and injury. Maybe three months ago Chimaev looked like a great title fight option. But now a possible Adesanya vs. du Plessis fight looks like a better one.
Hate to see another fighter learning this lesson the hard way, but anyone who wants to compete in the Octagon is going to find themselves rolling with the punches—whether they want to or not.
Miesha Tate makes case for ‘dynamic’ UFC 297 co-main event
I know women get a hard time of things from MMA fans. Far too many of their fights are dismissed out of hand as a ‘bathroom break’ and comments are filled with the listless braindead droning of men who don’t think women should be competing, no matter how competent or entertaining they are. I don’t want to add to that noise. So just to start off, I’ll go ahead and say that I don’t really think Raquel Pennington vs. Mayra Bueno Silva was any worse than Alexandre Pantoja vs. Brandon Royval.
That said, I also seem to be one of the only people out there who thinks that the most recent UFC flyweight title fight was more dud than dynamic. In both cases, the first time challenger looked dramatically unprepared for their first real taste of the big stage. In both cases one of the title competitors seemed to gas out horribly early, and in both cases the winning champ looked hardly a half-step better than their competition.
That said, let’s not try to sell the co-main event of UFC 297 as some kind of resounding piece of entertainment.
Truly no sport has trouble with numbers like MMA. Mayra Bueno Silva is 32. Miesha Tate is 37. Raquel Pennington is 35. Nobody here is ‘young.’ I’m sure ‘Sheetara’ will be back to the top of the mountain soon, but she’s been in this business for 9 years. Relative to her division, she’s a top tier athlete in her prime, and she absolutely was not prepared.
This isn’t me trying to talk up Strickland vs. du Plessis either, as a main event. It was a totally reasonable, solid title fight. Nothing electrifying. But at least both fighters looked prepared. Du Plessis is younger and has never fought five rounds either, he was still ready for the task at hand. There have been plenty of great fights from women in the Octagon, fights we can all laud as entertaining. This wasn’t one of them.