Saturday, September 15, 2007

Saturday night MMA grab-bag

Tonight I watched "Rites of Passage", an MMA documentary, TapOut episode whatever, the one with "Sunshine" Fiordirosa (on my DVR, I'd seen it already), and followed the EliteXC "Uprising" card on sherdog's play-by-play, since you apparently can't buy Showtime for one night. Customer service my ass!
Rites of Passage (Amazon link) was pretty cool. It was basically set up as three vignettes; "The Inoue Brothers", the 2000 World Vale Tudo championships, and "The Monster and the Wolf" featuring Kevin Randleman and Eugene Jackson at the UFC Ultimate Japan event from 1999. There was supposed to be more interesting stuff, but apparently Netflix doesn't care if you have a two-disc set when you add it to your queue. The piece about Enson and Egan Inoue was cool enough, and did a nice job of highlighting the differences between the two brothers. The second set was my favorite, showing the whole of the 2000 WVC in Recife, Brazil. There was some amazingly cool seeming non-sequitur moments. I'd recommend seeing this DVD if you get a chance. I liked "Smashing Machine" better, but this was good.
The TapOut episode was good too, even though it seemed more of a showcase for the crew themselves instead of the fighter. Jeff "Big Frog" Curran had a lot of issues with the way the crew took Fiordirosa to his fight. The characterisation of Fiordirosa as an amateur fighter was interesting, as a simple Sherdog search shows Fiordirosa having an 11-1 record, with his only loss to IFL standout Waggney Fabiano. He's got wins against names like Chase Beebe and Tristan Yunker, both fighters of note. Beebe is the 135lb champ in the WEC, for chrissake. I'm having trouble understanding why Fiordirosa is saying he's got "four amateur fights" in this episode. I'm sure there's a ton of this on Sherdog's forums, but still.
In the EliteXC play-by-play they show Robbie Lawler TKO'ing Ninja Rua in the third round, and Nick Diaz winning a spllit decision over local fighter Mike Aina, which was booed by the crowd apparently. I didn't see the fight, so I don't know if it's a bad decision. Sherdog's play-by-play announcer had it for Aina. I wonder if judges tend to give more weight to fighters who do their work at the end of a round as opposed to the beginning and middle?
Additionally, Jake Shields beat Renato Verissimo pretty handily. I'd expected more of a battle between the two. Jake Shields continues to impress, don't be surprised if he comes up on some "Best of..." lists soon. Kala Kolohe Hose wins the golden screw. He had a bout lined up with Lawler for the ICON Sport belt, and the EliteXC purchase of ICON shoved his ass down to the undercard. He still TKO'd his opponent in 20 seconds. That's a good way to say "Fuck you" to the fight promoter and still have a shot at the belt. Go Hose.
All in all it looks like a kickass card for EliteXC, I wish I could have paid fucking Showtime $40 for it. Dicks.

3 comments:

MMA Critique said...

I watched it. The televised card was good, no boring fights. The production of the show was good, looked like it was a boxing ppv. No annoying Xyience commercials or movie trailers like UFC. As soon as one fight ended they gave the next fight.

garth2 said...

damn. sam caplan at 5oz liked it too. have you seen anything from people who were at the show live?

MMA Critique said...

Good call on the Sam Caplan article, good stuff. Nope havemt talked to anyone that was there live. I think there was a link to see the fight over the somewhere on the internet on the sherdog forums. Maybe try that sometime. I'm lucky, girlfriend and her roommate got showtime.

 
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