The Doggy Bag: The Unintended Consequences Edition
Bellator and Dudu’s Booboo
So, Eduardo Dantas got destroyed by Tyson Nam. Two questions for you then. One, this gets Tyson Nam into the UFC, right? Two, this is the end of Bellator champs having non-title fights, right? I feel bad for him and other Bellator champions, but you need to protect your product. That knockout was vicious, but it was also pretty embarrassing. -- Rich from Ithaca
Mike Whitman, news editor: Last I heard, Nam’s management was waiting on a fax from UFC mini-weight matchmaker Sean Shelby. Keep in mind, there is a reason that unconfirmed information is not in the news box.
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What was the upside? While this certainly is not the first time Bellator has let its fighters compete outside its circle, those instances have made more sense when a service was garnered in return, as in the Rob McCullough-Shinya Aoki Dream swap last year. For example, it was wholly expected that former middleweight champion Hector Lombard would continue to win while waiting for new challengers in Bellator, but what if he had gotten upset in one of his appearances Down Under? That would have been bad news, especially when considering much of Bellator’s audience is made up of the hardcore fan population who believed that Lombard was a world-beater at the time.
While I admire the fighter-first mentality of allowing a champion to stay active and collect a paycheck instead of making him sit idly and wait for an eight-man tournament to finish, I cannot say it makes sense to me from a business perspective. If you do not think Joe Rogan is going to mention that Nam starched Bellator’s golden boy every time the Sports Lab rep makes that Octagon walk, you are nuts.
We should not put all the blame on Bellator, however. Against Nam, Dantas looked like a 16-year-old whose dad just surprised him with a brand new Porsche and a radar detector. I do not want to assume too much or speak out of place, but based on my prior experience watching “Dudu” duke it out, it looked like he gave Nam very little respect in that fight. All of Dantas’ attacks -- from that flying whatever-that-was at the opening bell to the wild sequence that ended the fight -- looked like they carried with them the expectation that they would overwhelm Nam simply because it was Dantas who had thrown them.
Sorry, but when you bull-rush a man who is not hurt, bad things can happen. Nam tried to counter Dantas’ knee attempts with right hooks over the top several times in that first round, and it was not shocking that one of them finally found the sweet spot after Dantas left himself wide open.
To me, that was not the same dude who beat Wilson Reis, Ed West, Alexis Vila and Zach Makovsky in Bellator. That Dantas kept his chin tucked and his defense tight. That Dantas used his reach beautifully and made his opponents pay for hanging out in the in-between spaces. That Dantas looked razor-sharp and focused every single instant that he was in that cage. Unfortunately, that Dantas did not make the trip back to Brazil.
The upside is that we do not have to go all gloom-and-doom about this. Dantas is only 23 years old and still has plenty of time to mature into what I expect will be one of the very best fighters in the game. Who knows? This loss could end up being the best thing that ever happened to him. Continue Reading » “How Taste My Pee-Pee?” Part Five?
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