This Saturday marks yet another UFC Fight Night. But you won't be seeing this one on Fox Sports 1, or on Fox. It is a UFC Fight Pass exclusive. What the heck is that, you ask? It is the UFC's new online subscription service. It gives customers behind the scenes looks at each event, and access to their library of fights. At least, some of them. Right now, there's not a ton of fights available. But the brass claim they're going to eventually upload every past UFC fight, plus all the fights from organizations they have purchased such as the Pride Fighting Championships and Strike Force.
If they do that, the $10 per month cost will be well worth it to an mma fan. Especially when you consider that future UFC cards will air most of their preliminary fights on Fight Pass, as well as entire cards like the one this weekend. The Pride library of fights alone is worth the subscription price, seeing as how you could watch some true legends like Rickson Gracie, Fedor Emelianenko, Wanderlei Silva, Rampage Jackson, Kazushi Sakuraba, Mirko Cro Cop, etc.--all in their primes! Thinking about those guys makes me think of the good ol' days, back at a time when the center of the mixed martial arts world wasn't located in Las Vegas, but in Tokyo.
People forget that the UFC wasn't always the greatest mma organization in the world. UFC was great. They were like a gourmet hamburger. But the Pride Fighting Championship was like a filet mignon smothered in butter. For years, the best fighters fought for Pride, whose Japanese owners had deep pockets and were willing to empty them for the fighters. Several competitors became millionaires fighting for Pride.
But rumors were rampant that Pride was mixed up with the yakuza, or Japanese mafia. When the word got out, things started going south for the company. Government officials started investigations, and fighters began to complain about not getting paid. Then Zuffa (owners of the UFC) stepped in to put a final nail in the coffin of the one organization that had always been considered a little bit better than the UFC. Zuffa bought Pride, claiming they weren't going to shut it down, that they would actually continue to have fights held under the Pride banner.
But they didn't. After the buyout, Pride never held another event. That was in 2007, and old school fans still haven't gotten over it.
Some of the best fighters from Pride came over to the UFC. Some of them still fight for them. Big names included: Dan Henderson, the Nogueira brothers, Wanderlei Silva, Shogun Rua, Heath Herring, and Takanori Gomi. Many other former Pride fighters eventually made their way over to the UFC. Names like Alistair Overeem, Denis Kang, Gegard Mousasi, Tatsuya Kawajiri, and, of course, Anderson Silva.
I refer to those years between 1997 and 2007 as "the good ol' days" not because today's fighting climate stinks. Today's climate is pretty darned good, actually, and I'll talk more about that in a moment. But those years that straddled the millennium were filled with amazing fights. They had Fedor vs Cro Cop, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs Bob Sapp, Wanderlei Silva vs Rampage Jackson, Fedor vs Randleman, Rampage Jackson vs Ricardo Arona, Royce Gracie vs Kazushi Sakuraba, Igor Vovchanchyn vs Enson Inoue, Wanderlei Silva vs Guy Mezger, Rickson Gracie vs Nobuhiko Takada--the list goes on and on.
It was an amazing time for fans because we were able to watch a sport in its infancy grow into adolescence. Modern mixed martial arts, for North Americans at least, began in 1993, when the first UFC aired. Yes, other countries had put on "no holds barred" fights for years before that. In Brazil, they called them vale tudo matches. But the sport didn't take off for us until it occurred in the United States. Overnight, our beliefs on what made an effective fighting art were turned upside down.
We learned that pure striking arts like karate and boxing were woefully inadequate once the fight went to the ground. And we also learned that almost every fight went to the ground eventually. Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as used by Royce Gracie, looked to be the perfect martial art. At least for a few years. Then we learned that wrestlers with submission defense could put a real beating on jiu-jitsu guys. Then we learned that kickboxers with takedown and submission defense could put a real beating on all of them.
Today we've learned that a mixed martial artist has got to know how to do everything well. They have to strike, wrestle, submit, and defend against all of it. Game plans and strategy matter more than ever. It's taken over 20 years for our sport to evolve to where it is today. 20 years may sound like a lot, but it doesn't when compared to other sports like soccer, basketball, baseball, and its close cousin, boxing.
Boxing has been around for hundreds of years. Some would argue that boxing is no longer evolving, but is regressing. For instance, I could point you to fights that occurred shortly before and after 1900 and you would see boxers fighting with a very different style than they do today. Then I could point you to fights that occurred in the 1940's and you would see, in my opinion, boxing technique at its absolutely most refined stage. One viewing of Sugar Ray Robinson should be more than enough to convince any objective viewer. Today's boxers have hundreds of years of evolution and fight tapes to draw from. Their technique is still refined, but their level of opposition has declined over the last 50 years. In the 40's, only 2 sports really mattered in North America: baseball and boxing. If you wanted to make a living as a professional athlete, you competed in one of those sports. Basketball and football were still in their infancy--like mma has been for most of its young life.
Consequently, there were boxing gyms on every corner. To become a world champion, one had to face true monsters--guys who had tested themselves against the best from a huge talent pool. Today, there isn't a pool, so much as a puddle. The best athletes of today rarely choose to take punches for a living. Guys like Lebron James may have boxed back in the 1940's. Today, he's winning NBA championships. There's more money in it, and it hurts less.
As the money gets better in mixed martial arts, we should see more and more people willing to participate. But with that being said, most people who become fighters have a genuine need to fight. Guys like Chuck Liddell would have fought for free back when he was just getting into it, and, indeed, many of his early paychecks were laughable. But he didn't care. He was fighting, and there's something about the give and take of hand to hand combat that is exhilarating. Intoxicating. Some fighters never get enough of it.
Guys like him are willing to take the pain of daily training. They have unimaginable pain tolerances. The long runs, the punches to the nose, the hyper-extended ligaments, the big guys grinding you into the floor. And the constant injuries. They say every fighter goes into the cage with an injury. Every fighter.
I don't know about you, but when I have something as minor as an ingrown toenail, I can barely make myself walk. These guys fight with far worse injuries. And you can't tell by looking at them. To us, they look fine! They bounce on their toes, throw kicks with real power, shoot deep for double legs--all the things we would expect from an uninjured fighter. But then we find out afterwards that they were suffering from a blown-out knee or a separated shoulder. It's astounding.
This weekend, Dong Hyun Kim and John Hathaway will step into the cage with nagging injuries. They won't talk about them. That's considered bad manners. No, they'll step into the cage already hurting and then they will do their best to bring more hurt to one another. It should be noted that the point isn't to hurt their opponent. The point is to win. But they happen to compete in a sport where winning requires hurting another person. Even so, few fighters are cruel individuals. Most would prefer to win quickly, without hurting their opponent much at all. But they're willing to hurt them if they must. And, so often, they must.
Despite Kim's last fight, where he knocked out Brazilian heart throb, Eric Silva, with one punch, he is not a knockout artist. Most of his wins have come by suffocating opponents with wrestling. Few men have been able to deal with it. Demian Maia did. As did Carlos Condit. But those guys are top of the food chain fighters. Besides those losses, the "Stun Gun" has beaten some legitimate fighters
John Hathaway's results have been similar. He rarely knocks anyone out. He rarely submits anyone. But, except for his loss to "Super Mullet" Mike Pyle, he always wins. He can be forgiven that loss to Pyle, who is an excellent veteran we watched this past weekend beat a different up and comer. In fact, he darn near killed him.
The Pyle fight aside, Hathaway's best wins have been against Diego Sanchez and Rick Story. Those are good wins, by the way. When he handled Sanchez, I was excited about the young man's potential. He looked great in that fight. When he faced Pyle, I expected him to be too much for the old veteran. Pyle proved me wrong, of course, winning a unanimous decision over Hathaway. Since then, Hathaway has had some injuries that have kept him from fighting as often as he would have liked. All the same, he is on a 3-fight win streak. But he hasn't fought since 2012.
Kim is the best fighter Hathaway will have ever faced. But Hathaway is not the best fighter Kim will have ever faced. Carlos Condit, Demian Maia, Paulo Thiago, Nate Diaz, Matt Brown--all of these guys have accomplished more in the cage than Hathaway has. And Kim has fought all of them.
Because of this, and because of the long layoff for Hathaway, I predict Dong Hyun Kim will grind out a unanimous decision. If you've got Fight Pass, you can watch it live. Saturday morning, for you East Coasters like me, since it's being held in China.
Dong Hyun Kim Unanimous Decision John Hathaway.
The rest of the card is filled with fighters who I'm not truly familiar with. I know Matt Mitrione and Hatsu Hioki, but I'm not real familiar with their opponents, so I won't make any predictions for their fights. I've heard that Mitrione's opponent, Shawn Jordan, is a banger, which probably plays into the hands of Mitrione, whose striking is darned good and whose reach is far longer than Jordan's. If I was forced to pick a winner, which I am not, I would go with Mitrione.
Hatsu Hioki was once considered the #2 featherweight in the world, but he has lost 3 straight. His opponent, Ivan Menjivar, has lost 3 of his last 4. Again, if I was forced to pick a winner, which I am not, I would go with Hioki. But we'll see.
Until next time.
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