D. Mandel/Sherdog.com
Combat sports have always had the sadistic business sense to feed graying talent to younger, faster, better stars -- a torch-passing where the losing party gets third-degree burns in the process. It’s cruel, ugly and it never makes anyone feel too good.
It’s therefore encouraging to hear that Strikeforce wants Pat Miletich slotted against a slightly gimpy Frank Shamrock. (This opposed to either guy against a 20-year-old who craps concrete.) Miletich told FiveOuncesofPain.com that he’s agreed to the fight, proposed to take place before summer, but that Shamrock is sitting on his hands.
“Frank Shamrock and I have verbally agreed to fight each other, but from what I understand he’s being difficult in the negotiations,” Miletich said.
Like Saturday’s Coleman/Couture headliner, which had roots in the late 1990s, Shamrock/Miletich was flirted with before Shamrock took to cleaning up dog deposits with SEG’s lowball offers. It’s a few years too late, as most of the good fights usually are, but so what? There are at least a dozen fights in this genre to be made that feature charismatic athletes who could talk enough of a good game to interest people despite their title irrelevance -- Don Frye/Ken Shamrock from 2002 being the model example. Shamrock is 37, Miletich is 41, and plenty of fans are old enough to care.