Saturday night in Inglewood, California, a legend will make his walk one last time while another will return to make it for the first time in three years at Bellator 170.
Tito Ortiz, he of the flaming shorts, bleached blonde hair and wild run as one of the UFC’s first true superstars, will call it a career regardless of the outcome on Spike TV.
Chael Sonnen, he of the big opportunities generated by his even bigger mouth, will make his Bellator debut and fight outside the UFC for the first time since 2009.
In its own way, for better or worse, the leadup to the bout has been memorable. Sonnen mocked Ortiz for having his car repossessed, Ortiz crushed a juicebox on national television in a bizarre philosophical analogy representative of Sonnen’s past dabbling in PEDs.
You know, the usual stuff.
While the fight itself—a main event on a cold January night between two guys who’ll combine to be 83-years-old with 75 fights between them—holds almost no competitive interest, it’s still interesting. Sonnen has framed it as a noble pursuit in the name of keeping a promise to his dying father, while Ortiz has used it as a chance to go out on his own terms after an iconic career.
It’s all a little bit of harmless fun, just worthwhile enough to pass muster without veering into the freakshow realm that Bellator has been so keen to engage in the past.
It’s also the exact type of fight that you’re not likely to see on a bigger stage like the UFC. For every CM Punk or Sage Northcutt redux, the UFC remains the top of the heap competitively. If an athlete is going to stay on that roster into his or her forties, they’re going to do it on merit.
Randy Couture was still elite to his last days. Ditto for Dan Henderson, even if he was diminished from his prime. Anderson Silva is still a top-10 middleweight. Most of the heavyweight division seems to have entered their prime in the back half of their thirties.
Aging commodities have a place in the promotion, but they have to earn their keep.
Bellator is less concerned with that angle and more concerned with having a big name to put on the marquee, which is why they’re throwing together two elder statesmen who washed out of the UFC and making an event out of it.
And that’s totally okay. In fact, it might even be pretty great.
When looking at the UFC, there’s a certain market it simply cannot corner. There’s an expectation that, even in the face of the increasing demands of fighters to receive the dreaded “money fight,” the best will generally fight the best there.
Bellator doesn’t have that. They can give you Royce Gracie, a few Ken Shamrock fights and even Kimbo Slice—a legend in his own way—before his untimely death. No one looks twice at Ortiz and Sonnen locking horns as a result, and there’s a case to be made that it straddles the line between ridiculous and compelling even if it’s long past its expiration date.
For a watch-if-you-want free television event, you could do a lot worse than that. Realistically the UFC often does in terms of providing interesting free material on FOX Sports 1.
So thank you Bellator, for making the fights the UFC really shouldn’t. MMA is mostly niche in the sports world as it is, and there are niches even within that niche. One of them is the variety of oddity bout being provided by Ortiz and Sonnen, however one wishes to define it.
It’s a fight the UFC would almost never make and one the sport probably didn’t know that it wanted. Luckily, Bellator has it covered and we can all have a bit of fun as a result.
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