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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Five years ago today, MMA clothing company Affliction made their first foray into the promotion business, bringing a heavyweight fight between Fedor Emelianenko and Tim Sylvia to pay-per-view. On that same night, the UFC decided to slap together an event on Spike TV, bringing then UFC Middleweight Champion Anderson Silva up to the light heavyweight division for the first time against James Irvin. The following article was a review and reaction piece to the UFC's show in comparison to the Affliction event, originally published on July 21, 2008.
On Saturday night, the first pay-per-view event under the Affliction banner was held from Anaheim, California. In dominating fashion, former PRIDE Champion Fedor Emelianenko defeated former UFC Heavyweight Champion Tim Sylvia with a rear naked choke in the first minute of the first round.
The UFC countered Affliction's show with their Ultimate Fight Night 14 special on Spike TV, featuring the "best pound-for-pound fighter in the world," Anderson Silva, decimating James Irvin in one minute in the first round.
The UFC gave their audience a good night of free fights. This obviously wasn't a marquee show, and was built around Silva and around disrupting the competition. The hype throughout, even during the matches, was aimed squarely at Silva, and rightfully so, but it seemed to take a bit away from the fights at times, because they seemed secondary to the hype to stick around to see Silva. Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg seemed relegated to pimping the main event, and that's it, for most of the show to try and keep viewers sticking around. Granted, this was probably the correct move for UFC in their minds because the real goal was to steal as many potential viewers from Affliction as possible.
The fights were all decent to good on this show, including a couple of really nice highlight reel knockouts in the final two fights. However, the decision in the Ken Burns vs. Anthony Johnson fightwas ridiculous and indefensible. You cannot call that a TKO when it was an illegal move that sent him down and caused the stoppage of the fight. Add to that the complete inconsistency in calls pointed out by our own Shawn Ennis with CB Dolloway's knee to Jesse Taylor's head on the ground, and it wasn't the best showing of officiating on this show.
On that note, it was good to see Jesse Taylor get his second chance with the UFC, and I think he'll have another chance to prove himself. While CB locked on that beautiful looking Peruvian Necktie for the submission, I couldn't help but think that the nasty knee to the head while Taylor was on the ground messed him up for the rest of the fight and put him at an unfair disadvantage.
Cain Velasquez looked really good in his fight against Jake O'Brien. That was an impressive showing of strength to take that position and hold it while dropping shots to the head the entire time; good stuff. Frankie Edgar looked really good in his three round decision victory as well.
Brandon Vera squeaked out a decision over Reese Andy, but as he said in his post fight interview, the weight cut affected him more than he believed it would. When we spoke last month he said he had been hanging around 215-220, and that it wouldn't be that big of an issue for him. Well, he found out how it actually affects him now, and we'll see how he responds to that the next time he needs to cut.
Rory Markham and Brodie Faber had one hell of an undercard one round fight to finish off this show. Brodie was peppering Markham and had him on the run, but he got too aggressive and just got dropped with a wonderful kick from Markham. That was just an absolute highlight reel knockout.
Finally, Anderson Silva is Anderson Silva. What else can you say? He looked great out there at 205, with some more meat on him than we normally see at 185, and the fight was just academic. Irvin got himself in a bad spot and got absolutely dropped. It should have been stopped with the first shot because he was done, he curled up immediately and it should have been ended.
All in all it was a good night of fights, and that probably did take away from Affliction's numbers in some capacity. At the same time, though, the Affliction show was a better night of fights, with my fight of the night for both shows being the return of the Pitbull, Andrei Arlovski. But where Affliction made gains in the ring, and showed off a damned impressive night of heavyweight action, they are sorely lacking in production value and announcing. The UFC's going to hold that edge on anyone, but the team of Jay Glazer, John McCarthy, and Frank Trigg just did not do it for me on Saturday night.
We'll wait to see what the buy rate was for the Affliction show, and we'll see if UFC's little offensive strike was a success. For those with the ability to record both shows, it was a great night, but invariably there were many who missed out on some good action on both shows by watching just one or the other.
[Anderson Silva art by Cory Gould (c) MMATorch.com]
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
STAFF COLUMNISTS: Shawn Ennis - Jason Amadi
Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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