...OH, ONE MORE THING - PLEASE BOOKMARK US & VISIT DAILY!
By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
In an embarrassing farce of a segment that cut the legs out from under a great main event on Friday night, Bellator put Stephan Bonnar and Tito Ortiz in the cage together to announce their Nov. 15 fight, and then this happened:
For those who missed it and can't watch the video, it's Bonnar cutting a promo on Ortiz, then unmasking one of Ortiz's former friends - yes, unmasking - in cage to silence and the need from most watching for further clarification on who he was. That led to Ortiz grabbing the mic and trying to cut his own promo back, realizing it's not his strong suit, then trying, ineffectively, to shove Bonnar mid-sentence until they were pulled apart.
It's the type of thing you'd see in pro wrestling, except it's pulled off with much better execution more often than not.
If this is one of the directions for the new Bellator with Coker at the helm and Viacom pulling the strings, they've gone the wrong direction. Last night's segment may have been memorable, but it was for all the wrong reasons, and likely had more fans shaking their heads in disbelief than those actually anticipating that fight because of the incident. It was absolutely ridiculous start to finish, and it takes away from the legitimate, relevant fighters on their roster.
That's true for last night's headliners Pat Curran and Patricio "Pitbull" Freire, who had gotten the benefit of some great pieces of promotion leading into the fight, only to have fans sucked out of things with that Ortiz-Bonnar segment coming right before.
Bellator doesn't need the old guard to be a successful promotion, they need to establish fighters fans want to see now and for the future. Instead, what we're going to get here is one irrelevant fight between two formerly retired fighters on the back of one of the most ridiculous TV segments from an MMA event in years.
It may work short term to get eyes on some of the other fighters on their roster come Nov. 15, but long term, if fans wanted to see bizarre and poorly executed pro wrestling angles on Spike TV, there's another program available to them on Wednesday nights.
DON'T GO YET... WE SUGGEST THESE MMATORCH ARTICLES, TOO!
Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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