I thought Bellator 123 came out great. The card was great to start with on paper, but a lot of times you could put together a good card and expect great fights and it doesn't always turn out that way. MMA is kind of unpredictable, but in this case, it turned out great. Everybody fought hard. There were three finishes on the main card and an amazing main event. All around, it was great and there was a huge crowd. It was awesome. You feel an immediate impact with Scott Coker being at the helm. I mean, there was an immediate impact as soon as it was announced that Coker was taking over. You saw it almost overnight, a shift in attitude from people towards Bellator.
I mean, Bellator was like...it was treated like a cancerous tumor that everybody was just hoping would die down or something would happen to it. No matter what they were doing, they would always have a negative spin on it. There was never anything positive written about it. It was a lot of negativity, a lot of resentment from the camps and media; just everybody. I used to tell people that I didn't understand how a company that is a part of one of the largest media empires of the world is so hated. People would rather go fight in small organizations than to go fight in Bellator, so when Scott took over, that was almost fixed overnight. The response from the camps from different trainers and fighters and media was instantaneous. And if you look at the card, you could feel Coker's presence all around; from changing that depressing dark canvas color to changing the canvas format, which allowed Mo, for one, not to slip all over the place and actually be able to punch people.
But the look is just brighter and happier, and then when you're at the event, you can feel it. The people involved in the back are happier. It's just a happy place to come to work. It's basically what Strikeforce used to be. Strikeforce used to be one big party. Everybody was working very hard, but everybody was happy and there was a great environment in the back for the fighters and staff and production. So that, you can feel right away, but as far as major impact, I think it will take a year or two until it really starts to buzz and you can feel his footprint on it. Right now, you can feel the changes and they are very obvious, but it's not quite where it needs to be.
I don't know why people say the Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar thing took attention away from Curran and Pitbull's fight. I don't know how there exchange would overshadow the main event when Curran and Pitbull fought after Tito and Stephan's exchange. If anything, people were talking about it and hopefully tuning in more. So maybe it added to the ratings. The people that's talking about it is the media. The media is saying it overshadowed Pitbull's accomplishment. To me, this is the biggest oxymoron ever. Think about this, a reporter spends an hour, thirty minutes to forty minutes or however long it took him to write an article, on how what Tito and Bonnar did overshadowed Pitbull's fight with Pat Curran, which was a great fight. And then you say, okay, well the same reporter, because he already knows this, must have written an awesome article on Pitbull vs. Curran, right? But he didn't. So why the fuck would you spend all of this time writing about something overshadowing that you believed should have had more attention, yet you don't go out there and give it any attention? It's like the dumbest thing ever and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that very few of these guys are actually reporters.
There are a lot of idiots with a laptop and access to a website or somebody's website and they sit down and write an opinion. I'm not criticizing people that were critical of what happened; it's up to your interpretation. Some people felt it was a good thing. Some people felt it was a bad thing. I think there is a little too much of this in MMA. "Oh, this is bad for the sport." No, removing fucking judges in the middle of an MMA event is bad for the sport. Tweeting fans to shut the fuck up and don't buy the PPV if you don't like it is bad for the sport. Two people doing some theatrics in the cage is not bad for the sport. The sport will be just fine tomorrow morning when we wake up, especially when it's followed by an amazing fight. You had two 145-pounders who just beat the crap out of each other. But this whole overshadowing thing is done by reporters. They are writing articles about what happened as opposed to writing about what they felt was being overshadowed. If you felt it was being overshadowed, why don't you give that three lines in your article and then say, "But really, what we should concentrate on is," and then describe the fight. They are contradicting themselves. I don't think it overshadowed anything.
The Tito and Bonnar thing wasn't planned. They were supposed to go in there and announce the fight. Bonnar took over the microphone and he brought McCully in with him and nobody even knew he was there. There was a guy sitting ringside with a mask on. People looked at him like what the fuck is going on. But it's like when Mo and Rampage did that, there was no masked man, but it was similar antics. People thought that was staged and that wasn't staged either. But nonetheless, they went on for two months hating each other and talking shit about each other and talked themselves into a 100,000 PPV views for a debuting organization, which is pretty fucking awesome. People can sit around and say what the hell they want, but remember that YouTube video where the hillbilly girls was fighting and one hit the other one with a fucking shovel and everybody was like, "That's disgusting. Way too much violence. Let me watch this video." I mean, the video ended up with like 8 million views. It's very taboo to talk and yap and write these stupid articles about this overshadowed this and how it's crazy and that we don't have room for pro wrestling. What are you talking about?
Nobody sits around and praises the UFC for what they have done, and they have done a tremendous amount of work; congratulations to them. They took the playbook from WWE. Vince McMahon does this and they do this. They took McMahon's playbook. When Brock Lesnar was the reigning champion, where the hell did he come from and what was he doing. He did a WWE-like post-fight interview when he said he was going to bang his wife and drink a different beer than Bud Light. People wanted to see it. This is entertainment and for those that enjoyed it, they enjoyed it, and for those who didn't enjoy it, they are still talking about it. As of this morning, the 4 videos that are out from that incident on YouTube have half a million views. You wanna talk about marketing? That's free marketing. You think those two gonna stop talking shit about each other? Nope! So for all of these articles out there saying it overshadowed the announcement of Michael Chandler and Will Brooks, well, why aren't you writing about it? If you are aware of the fact that it overshadowed it, don't concentrate your time on the fight that you think is overshadowing the Brooks/Chandler rematch.
A lot of these MMA so-called experts or reporters don't understand to get the casual fan to follow this and learn who Michael Chandler and Will Brooks is, you have to do this kind of stuff. A few years ago, you had Dana White saying Kimbo Slice would never fight in the UFC because he was too much of a spectacle. Kimbo Slice gave them one of the highest ratings they ever had in his finale. And Brock Lesnar is, to this date, the highest grossing PPV person on their roster. It's a proven formula that's been around forever. It attracts the casual fans. When Japan was doing 20 million views and 25 million ratings, believe it or not, it wasn't Wanderlei Silva against Rampage doing those numbers. It was Yoshida fighting some giant from fuck knows where. Akebono fighting Bob Sapp, to this day, is the highest rated fight in Japanese fighting history with 55 million views. Just about every damn person with a TV in Japan was watching that fight. That was a spectacle, but guess what! Those 55 million people hopefully hung around to see some really good, quality fights. And they may have saw someone on that card that they became a fan of and started to follow their career. So I think stupid people write about that shit, stupid people talk about that shit, and all of them tune in anyway.