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Talk Radio: Should the UFC have booked the rematch between Kimbo Slice & Seth Petruzelli?
By Zach Arnold | June 10, 2010
From Pro MMA’s 100th radio show earlier in the week. It’s an awful question to ask and I’ll give you a quick answer to it — NO.
Don’t get me wrong — if Gary Shaw was still in MMA, he would have already booked that rematch long ago. But the UFC has no need for a gimmick match like that and they don’t need to book a match with all the controversy that was involved regarding the stand-up scandal and what Seth Petruzelli said on the radio regarding what he was supposedly approached with doing before the fight.
Heck, I don’t understand why the UFC brought back The Smoothie King to begin with.
Even more surprising than the idea of Kimbo Slice vs. Seth Petruzelli II is the idea that Kimbo was somehow sabotaged by the UFC. (Yes, that argument is brought up in the audio transcript here.)
LARRY PEPE: “I mentioned Gary Shaw popping up again. He is now saying that he thinks the UFC made a huge mistake, that once again his words ‘Dana’s ego has gotten in the way. I think Kimbo can be a draw wherever he goes. I think they matched him up wrong. I would have put him against just stand-up fighters and would have built a PPV with James Toney.’ My guess is that Dana’s got to be happy to hear that Gary Shaw disagrees with him about anything in MMA because we know Gary’s track record and Dana’s track record. The one thing I will say is that, given that Seth Petruzelli was brought back, I’m a little surprised that given the amount of money that Kimbo generated in every appearance that he did, every card he was on, the television show, the cable series, the fight with Roy (Nelson), everything was crazy numbers. I would think that it’s a marketable fight to have that rematch under the UFC banner and cash in with Kimbo one more time.”
JESSE HOLLAND: “You know what, and I’m not a conspiracy guy by any means, but you know what bothers me about this Kimbo Slice story is that you know the more you think about it the way Kimbo was brought into the UFC and the way he was matched up, it was almost like the UFC spent the money they spent on Kimbo to try and humiliate him and send him out of the UFC with his tail between his legs because… how do you bring a guy in, and we saw what happened to Kimbo against James Thompson on the ground and we saw what happened against Petruzelli, how do you bring him into a season, now looking in retrospect, that has a guy like Roy Nelson who has a ground game like that and oops, just out of the bat, he just so happens to be matched up with Roy? And then you bring him out into the finale and you put him up with a guy who that you thought was going to come out and swing guns-blazing with a guy who hits as hard as Houston Alexander. Of course, that didn’t work out. So you put him with a guy who hits just as hard with Matt Mitirione. It seems like there wasn’t any plan to get any good use out of Kimbo because if there was, and they’re not dumb at the UFC, they certainly know what they’re doing I mean look what they’ve done with the UFC… but it raises the question that Gary’s making is you know if you have a guy like Kimbo who has the marketability that he has and who can bring in the kind of numbers that he has, why not get the most out of it for as long as you can? And you really could have brought Kimbo along and gotten probably two years out of him with the right matchmaking and to your point, if you’re going to bring back Seth Petruzelli, I mean is that not the rematch that you know I think a lot of fans would want to see. I’d certainly want to see it, the second time around. It just feels like you know you can’t say they dropped the ball because I feel like everything the UFC does is done with intention. Was it done with bad intentions in Kimbo’s case.”
LARRY PEPE: “Yeah, I’m going to take the other side. I’m going to disagree with you and Gary on this one. *laughs* It can’t feel good to get lumped in with Gary and I’m using the word lumped for a reason, but putting that aside… I got to tell you, I thought they did everything they could to match him up in fights that he could do well in. Yeah, I thought Houston Alexander was going to beat him, but Houston Alexander has less of a ground game than Kimbo. He was actually beating Houston on the ground, which was, you got to go a long way to find someone who has less of a ground game than Kimbo at this point in his MMA career, whatever you want to call it. So, I thought that was the match-up where they had a guy that, yes, was a better striker I thought, I thought he was going to engage but he certainly didn’t have to worry about the ground game with Houston. Then they put him in with Matt Mitrione who you know tapped out to (James) McSweeney the second his arm got near his neck, had no ground game on the show. Granted, I picked Mitrione, I thought he was the more athletic, the heavier hitter.”
JESSE HOLLAND: “Picked him? YOU TOOK OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE AND PUT IT ON MITRIONE!”
LARRY PEPE: “You’re right, I’m driving a new car thanks to Mitirone. No, I’m just kidding, but the reality is like… Jesse, who are you going to match him up with? He’s just not that talented and at the UFC level, they did where it shows a good thing that it’s a good thing that Gary did get out of MMA, they did put him in with strikers and he just couldn’t hang because he’s just not that great of an MMA fighter.”
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 4 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
UFC shouldn’t do a Kimbo/Seth rematch…….but Strikeforce could! And you know they would do it.
I just saw that Seth Petruzelli is returning to UFC at UFC 116. Oh well, he wil probably get released again and Strikeforce or whoever else can then do the epic Kimbo/Seth rematch.
Why did the UFC bring back Petruzelli? For one simple reason, to get his lunch handed to him by Ricardo Romero.
I found this odd as well, welcome back Seth now here’s a big strong wrestler who can take you down and pound you out.
Bad match-up for him, if he goes 0-2 in the UFC and gets cut maybe he loses some value for the Kimbo Killer rematch