The Bottom Line: Bellator Bets Big on the Past

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For much of Bellator MMA’s existence, it was a forward-looking organization. The focus was on creating new stars through a tournament format and building around the fighters who proved themselves the best. As its latest “tent pole” event approaches -- Bellator 149 is built around 52-year-old Ken Shamrock vs. 49-year-old Royce Gracie and 42-year-old Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson vs. 38-year-old youngster Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris -- on Friday in Houston, it’s clear those days are gone. Who is the best in the present has never meant less to Bellator, and the future might as well not exist. For 2016 Bellator, it’s all about squeezing every last drop of juice remaining in the fighters from the past and the distant past.

Shamrock and Gracie can pretend that this fight has significance to their legacies, but it just isn’t so. It will say as much about their prime fighting years as would Larry Bird challenging Magic Johnson to a one-on-one game at next year’s NBA All-Star Weekend. Shamrock is 3-10 since 2001, while the last time we saw Gracie in a fight nine years ago, he failed his drug test in spectacular fashion. Shamrock and Gracie deserve tremendous respect for their contributions to the sport, but the first time they fought, Bill Clinton had not yet completed his first year as president. Neither of them should be fighting at this stage of their lives, and neither has anything to prove.

At least Shamrock and Gracie were once great fighters. The same can’t be said for the competitors in the co-main event. “Kimbo Slice” has always been an attraction more than a high-level fighter, while “Dada 5000” may be the worst fighter in this high profile of a fight in the history of American MMA. There at least are stakes in that the two have a legitimate personal issue and want a win to prove where they stand relative to the other. However, the real game is ultimately just giving “Kimbo Slice” a soft opponent to milk his fame a little bit longer.

Often with these sorts of fights, there is the psychology that the promotion uses the aging stars to bring in a larger audience and then exposes that audience to the rising stars of the present and future. Bellator didn’t even do that for this card. Emanuel Newton-Linton Vassell and Emmanuel Sanchez-Daniel Pineda are perfectly fine fights but none of the fighters are elite, nor do they possess star qualities. Melvin Guillard is a name but peaked years back and is 3-7 with one no-contest in recent years. Bellator is just filling time before the names from the past are ready to come out.

It would be one thing if this was just one card, but this is the broad current direction of Bellator. Over the past six months, most Bellator events have been built around stars from the past whose career peaks have come and gone, from Cheick Kongo and Josh Thomson to Guillard and Melvin Manhoef. Some of those fighters have more left in the tank than others -- Thomson in particular has generally looked good even in defeats -- but they all will be remembered much more for what they have already accomplished in MMA than what they will accomplish going forward.

Manhoef, knocked out cold so many times over the years, brings up another issue with this strategy. Building around aging fighters is qualitatively different than building around aging basketball or baseball players. Basketball and baseball players don’t get punched and kicked in the face when they’re too slow to successfully defend themselves. We’ve learned a lot more in recent years about the negative effects of head trauma, and trotting out a series of declined athletes to take beatings is not just a dubious business strategy but an ethically questionable one.

In addition to the many fighters who probably shouldn’t be fighting already on the roster, Bellator President Scott Coker keeps signing more. Josh Koscheck has five losses in a row, including two brutal knockouts, and he’s being heavily focused on in order to rematch a 2010 fight with Paul Daley because it featured a sucker punch after the bell. Recent signee Chris Leben has four losses in a row, looked like he was moving underwater much of that time and has substance-abuse issues. Coker has expressed his interest in Wanderlei Silva, who has seemed psychologically out of control in recent years and is another fighter with a long history of taking brutal knockouts.

The goal here is absolutely not to demean these fighters. They have given so much to the sport, and their courage and fighting spirit is often why they have taken as much head trauma as they have. If they want to keep fighting, there’s ultimately only so much that can be done to dissuade them. However, the promoters that do what they can to try to encourage them to look out for their long-term health deserve so much more credit than promoters who look to exploit them for whatever money they have left in them in the twilight of their careers.

Some people attempt to defend the current Bellator direction by pointing out that its biggest ratings successes were a result of building around the likes of Tito Ortiz-Stephan Bonnar and Ferguson-Shamrock. The argument goes that this proved what the public wants and that Bellator is just serving the public desire and doing what’s best for business. This argument is delivered as if it’s some sort of revelation that freak shows draw ratings.

Of course freak-show fights draw bigger ratings in the short term. The problem: Over the long haul, they destroy the foundation of a fighting promotion. K-1 was on fire as a kickboxing outfit in the early 1990s, built around the premier kickboxers in the world. Then Bob Sapp came along and drew much higher ratings than the best kickboxers. K-1 responded by bringing in more and more freak shows and destroyed the foundation of its business until K-1 died.

The problem of building around freak shows is that the practice marginalizes and weakens the elite fighters of the present. Fans are educated by the promotion and are conditioned to think they don’t matter, and it becomes harder and harder to draw without the freak shows. We’ve already started to see this with Bellator, as ratings decline for high-quality battles between lesser names. It becomes a vicious cycle as the promotion feels more pressure to get away from building new talent, and that makes it harder for the new talent to be turned into stars.

All this is pretty much a moot point by now. Bellator is very firmly ensconced in its current plan. As MMA fans, we can only enjoy it for what it is, and there certainly are guilty pleasures to be had. Forget who the best fighters are, as that doesn’t matter in Bellator. Don’t worry about the futures that await these men. Just remember who they once were and let that carry you through.