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Scott Coker: Things could have been different if Fedor/Bigfoot Silva went to a third round
By Zach Arnold | February 16, 2011
Yesterday, the news broke that this past Saturday’s Strikeforce event from the Izod Center drew an average of 741,000 viewers on Showtime (with a peak viewership of 1.1 million viewers for Fedor vs. Bigfoot Silva). Suffice to say, Fedor’s loss to Werdum did not hurt his drawing power. In a funny way, Fedor is now a bigger star after that loss than Werdum is. However, will Fedor maintain his popularity after losing to Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva? More importantly, will Bigfoot become a bigger star after the win or will be end up not getting a big rub out of the win in terms of marketability?
On Tuesday, Mauro Ranallo had Scott Coker on his radio program to talk about Saturday’s event from New Jersey and what’s next for Fedor. Mauro did his best to play it straight and bring up the conversation or whether or not Fedor should be retired or make the move down to Light Heavyweight.
(If you listen to the interview, you’ll notice the singular answer Mr. Coker has for Fedor’s problems is that he needs a different kind of training camp.)
When it came time to address Fedor’s loss to Bigfoot Silva, the promoter took an interesting angle that I wasn’t really expecting out of him.
SCOTT COKER: “Things can happen and they did. It was an exciting night. I mean, it was an amazing entry into the New York area. The crowd was so passionate and any time Fedor fights you always have a feeling electricity in the audience and I felt it that night and, guys, he will be back. Here’s a guy that was ready to fight and it was the doctor that stopped the fight. Fedor didn’t say I want to quit or I’m done or I’m too tired or I’m hurt, it was the doctor. Fedor would have continued and I think it’s the third round that, you know, could have, would have, and should have because the last picture in my mind from that fight, Mauro, is both of those guys trying to get up at the end of the second round and honestly they were both (exhausted), Bigfoot Silva had left everything out there and just got tired of hitting Fedor and Fedor, you know, trying to survive that second round, you know, he left it all out there. And in the third round, you know, boy, it’s like what if.”
MAURO RANALLO: “Let’s bring us up to speed to what went down because you’re absolutely right but it’s also fair enough to say that we have never seen Fedor Emelianenko beaten down as badly as he was in that second round and, yes, he is known for his resiliency and those dramatic comebacks, including in another tournament as we mentioned on the broadcast as well the 2004 PRIDE Heavyweight GP when he was dropped on his head in the Monsterplex courtesy of Kevin Randleman and we’ve seen him take beatings before even against Brett Rogers and Andrei Arlovski recently, But, the point when the fight was stopped and I agree that, you know, he has the heart of a warrior, one of the most humble people I’ve ever met. But his eye was swollen shut and don’t you agree that the right decision was made to stop the fight at that time?”
SCOTT COKER: “Oh, absolutely, I mean, Mauro, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that wasn’t a good call, I’m saying that the referee made the call, the doctor made the call, and you know they stopped the fight and if I was looking at that eye up close I probably would have stopped the fight as well. I’m just saying that, you know, Fedor I believe was ready to fight, Antonio Silva was ready to fight. And I think that Fedor, you know, is always dangerous even when he’s hurt. So, in that third round it could have turned out to be something really special but, you know, it’s something that is going to go down in the history books as, you know, the ‘what if’ third round and moving on, guys, because I always said the tournament’s not about one guy. But, in saying that, we also, you know, plan to have Fedor back and plan to put on some amazing fights and this tournament’s going to continue and we will see how the best Heavyweight is come the end of the year.”
I am fascinated by the idea that Mr. Coker floated that ‘what if there was a third round’ theory. Just him saying that, alone, will turn out to be a Rorschach test for everyone reading this.
Mauro then asked Mr. Coker if Fedor’s loss hurt Strikeforce’s plans to run a PPV event.
MAURO RANALLO: “How does the loss by Fedor in the opening round impact your plans for a PPV event this year or are they still on the table?”
SCOTT COKER: “Oh, of course. I mean, you know, Fedor is not, um, you know, just because he’s out of the tournament doesn’t mean he’s not going to fight. I mean, one of the fights that I see down the line is Fedor fighting either Alistair (Overeem) or Fabricio Werdum. So, if Alistair advances, then Werdum vs. Fedor would be a great fight.”
Will the (proverbial) golden goose stay in tact?
Topics: Media, MMA, StrikeForce, Zach Arnold | 37 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Jesus, can he try any harder to no sell Bigfoot Silva???
“Silva was tired, if it went to round three it would have been different.” What promoter does this??? You have a fighter who just had an impressive and dominant win, you completely no sell him and claim he was tired and would have gotten beat in the third.
It’s so much easier to watch Strikeforce if you don’t pay attention to the idiot running it. At least at the end of the day there are some entertaining fights for free. It’s just amazing that they haven’t run themselves out of business.
I was too busy laughing to notice him burying Silva like that.
“it’s something that is going to go down in the history books as, you know, the ‘what if’ third round”.
Scott is in a state of denial. When Strikeforce got Fedor it was a symbol that they were now more of a “big league” promotion. They used him to get on CBS. They were going to use him to get on PPV.
Fedor was the golden goose that would propel their league into a big shot UFC-like promotion.
Now Strikeforce has been truly relegated to a small time promotion stuck on Showtime.
He’s also probably mourning the amount of money he spent on 3 Fedor fights which got him absolutely nowhere.
It got him higher ratings…. But not anywhere money wise.
Which is typical Fedor stuff. His asking price isn’t worth it.
“It got him higher ratings…. But not anywhere money wise.”
Huh?
Pre-Fedor, Strikeforce was a little regional promoter with a pay-for-play TV deal who lived off of gate receipts which rarely topped the million dollar mark.
Post-Fedor, Strikeforce is a national promoter with a lucrative TV deal that brought them $30MM in revenue last fiscal year.
Fedor had a HUGE impact on Strikeforce’s bottom line.
Pre-Fedor Strikeforce had already signed on with Showtime. You have your time line wrong. So Fedor has little to do with their current contract with Showtime.
And you do know that if Strikeforce was making a profit that they were proud of, the net income not the revenues would have been released.
Increased revenues mean nothing when their fighter payroll has gone through the roof during the same period of time.
@ Jason Harris
Should he have buried Fedor? Bigfoot is no draw and the last thing the company needs is another Brazilian with the personality of a turnip as the face – and a very ugly one at that – being pushed into the forefront.
If anything Coker is leaving the door open to “what if” – and there is nothing wrong with that. Remember this is a tournament and only the first round. It would be a lot different if Coker had taken this stance with a grand prix final.
As far as the fight itself, the stoppage was suspect. There was no opportunity for the corner to get the swelling down – and contrary to what Mauro said in the interview – Fedor’s eye was not completely closed; you could see a slit. The fight was called and Showtime missed any shot of the ref and the doctor having a discussion over Fedor’s eye; the fight was called quickly.
Silva was a lot more gassed than Fedor. Emelianenko was standing up and Silva was hanging onto the fence still trying to catch his wind.
I don’t know if Fedor would have won that third round, but he would have to have submitted or knocked out Silva, otherwise that fight would have been declared a draw. Then what?
Wow, a Fedor fan insulting another fighter for having “the personality of a turnip”. That’s pretty ironic.
Nice catch.
A huge thing people are missing is the opportunity this all sets up for Fedor’s redemption. It is now pretty likely that either Werdum, Overeem, or Bigfoot win this tournament, and if it’s Overeem or Bigfoot then both will likely come out of as feared men. If Fedor gets a fight with these guys after the grand-prix, and beats one or both as an underdog for the first time in forever, it would be a much bigger deal than if he had just won the tournament straight up.
How does this scenario work for Fedor’s redemption and SF’s legitimacy.
Werdum beats Overeem.
Silva beats Werdum.
Silva loses the finals.
… or heaven forbid, what if Fedor loses AGAIN in the interim?
The only “what if”
Is how quickly Silva would have crushed Fedor IF he hadn’t been buying into the myth for the first round.
Geez, Coker is a lousy promoter.
Not only does he hype his shows like the old Saturday morning wrestling shows, where they only promote one fighter. But even after the guy he didn’t promote wins Coker still plays favorites.
It’s a completely laughable lie, but why not say something like: “Bigfoot Silva showed why he is one of the most feared HW’s in the world. He did something the monsters in the UFC never could have done. He manhandled Fedor.”
Instead we get, Fedor probably woulda, coulda, shoulda won if he had more time.
I used to be a giant Fedor mark, until he signed with SF actually. But what made me stop rooting for him are his ridiculous fans. How many stupid myths like this have there been about Fedor? Like the one where he “steals people’s souls” to explain why his opponents look mediocre after fighting him.
You would think Coker would learn the dangers of promoting one fighter at a time (as opposed to bother fighters in a given fight) after Cung Le, Gina Carano and Fedor’s first loss.
exactly. coker should be saying stuff like, “you all saw how fearsome bigfoot silva can be. he’s as big as brock but as athletic as cain. he’s going to fight the winner of the best heavyweight striker in the world versus the best heavyweight grappler in the world.”
Funny how MMA fans actively call for promoters to lie to them.
My take: I have zero interest in promoters or what they say. I’ve been saying that Silva was underrated for a while, and I’m curious to see where he goes from here.
Even Coker keeps repeating that the referee stopped the fight, but wasn’t that a doctor’s stoppage?
The one thing that isn’t being brought up is that if it weren’t Fedor getting beaten on, I think that fight gets stopped about 3 min in when Silva has the full mount and is raining punches. The other attempts Fedor was intelligently defending. But at that point he was getting plastered without doing much.
I think reputation kept Fedor from being stopped at that point. But when it got between rounds the ref saw an opportunity to say enough and end the fight.
I for one am glad Fedor didn’t get killed out there in the third round. I felt really bad for Fedor seeing him like that. Anyone who watched the first two rounds couldn’t have realistically expected Fedor to do anything but get more injured, potentially seriously injured.
Yeah Silva looked tired at the end of the round (you try throwing punches and going for three sub attempts for 5 min straight). But Silva got his wind right back and looked ready to go by the time they told him the fight was over.
“I for one am glad Fedor didn’t get killed out there in the third round. I felt really bad for Fedor seeing him like that. Anyone who watched the first two rounds couldn’t have realistically expected Fedor to do anything but get more injured, potentially seriously injured.”
Fedor looked wobbly walking back to his corner, he looked like he barely knew where he was, and he didn’t even try to act like he could see out of his eye. Fedor has had some great comebacks in his career, but he was done after that round.
Jemaleddin;
Only the referee could stop the fight in the unified rules for MMA and boxing. The doctor can SUGGEST stopping the fight, but the doctor can’t ultimately make the call. It is still all on the referee. In New York for fights not under the unified rules, for boxing, the doctor CAN make the call to stop the fight, as can the doctor in some other states. But the unified rules? Only the referee. And professional MMA uses only the unified rules I believe.
What the Rorshach test seems to indicate is that everyone is either reading too much into it or looking for
shitto gripe about:“Fedor I believe was ready to fight, Antonio Silva was ready to fight”
“both of those guys trying to get up at the end of the second round and honestly they were both (exhausted), Bigfoot Silva had left everything out there and just got tired of hitting Fedor and Fedor, you know, trying to survive that second round, you know, he [Fedor] left it all out there.”
This is actually good promoter talk, from a guy who unfortunately has a hard time speaking. He’s trying to preserve some of Fedor’s mystique so if he does come back people will want to see a guy they thought was still putting up a fight to the end and not the guy that got pinned and pommeled.
Rock and a hard place. I’ll take a stab at it from a marketing/promoter standpoint. Coker signs Fedor. Fedor is unknown to the casual fan, doesn’t speak english, and has a blank look on his face ALL the time – BUT, he is considered the best heavyweight of all time, is beloved by hardcore fans, is covered by the MMA media, and has this unbeatable AURA around him(think Tyson in the 80s). In his first fight he has some trouble against Rogers, but in the end gets the highlight reel K.O. and draws a decent rating on CBS. So far so good.
Then comes the Werdum fight. Fedor loses to a submission 1 minute into the first round. The rating isn’t the greatest. Werdum doesn’t get promoted, all eyes still on Fedor. On the bright side you can sell the loss as a fluke or “he just got caught” type of deal. Heavyweight tourney is set up. Big hype, media and hardcores are a buzz with the favorite being Fedor to win it. Bigfoot? Ehhh – no prob, Fedor beats him most think.
Then another problem. Bigfoot beats his ass big time in the second round – making him look old/slow/outdated/etc. And again, Fedor gets the spotlight, not the guy who beat him. Plus side is a big improvement in the ratings (780k overall/1.1 peak) and Coker is selling the “what if/third round” deal.
So what does Coker do now? Will Fedor still draw even though his aura is dead? If he doesn’t draw, who do you push outside of Carano and Walker? If he can still draw, do you have a situation similar to Kimbo(can’t win/struggles against top level fighters, but gets some of the best ratings)? Will Coker push Overeem & Bigfoot over Fedor now, or wait to see if he still draws killing momentum for Overeem & Bigfoot? Hard place, meet rock.
Does this practice end up scaring away fighters who end their contracts and don’t have a championship clause. That is really what needs to be seen moving forward. What type of taste will this leave in the others fighters mouths.
Downplaying a huge victory and constantly over hyping a guy who you have a “special” relationship with his management team isn’t going to make other fighters feel comfortable that they are getting a fair shake.
When the UFC promotes a fight, they have equal interest in both fighters winning because they equally promote them.
SF held a tournament that was co-promoted by 1 fighters management team. Besides that being a huge conflict of interest…. Now these post fight interviews show how much of a conflict it has turned into.
That’s not fair to any of the other fighters in the tournament.
And one more comment on my own comments….
This is why co-promotion fails so badly in this sport. You can’t have a promoter playing favorites like this and expecting people to take it seriously. It’s a big joke the way Coker is bending over for Fedor and M-1 because they are co-promoting with him.
People can say all they want about the business aspects of it…. But at the very least a FAIR and level playing field must be in place. And Coker is not providing that environment when he is trying to get Fedor back into the tournament and also place doubt in a victory that really deserves none.
replying to Safari_Punch
There is some truth to that. There is a reason Fitch and Okami are not being rushed into title shots, why Vitor Belfort got a shot after a 15-month layoff and why Junior Dos Santos has not had to wait in line behind Cain and Carwin even though he had the arguably more impressive resume.
As much as the UFC and MMA are a sport making money is still the chief concern.
There is no quesion that Brock Lesnar did not deserve the title shot, but I would disagree about JDS being ahead of Carwin. Carwin vs. Mir was set up to make the nest title challenger and virtually the #3 HW in the world.
The UFC might hype up certain fighters a little bit more than others, but it is not the same as what SF is doing. Especially after the fight if the guy they wanted to win more doesn’t win , The UFC is immediately complimenting, promoting, and hyping up the competitor that got the upset.
There is certainly room for improvement in the UFC system. Okami’s long wait is a perfect example of that.
But there is still a huge gap between what the UFC does wrong here and what Coker is doing. To say Fedor should go back in the tournament would never happen in the UFC if they ran a GP.
And the only reason it is happening is because M-1 is the co-promoter.
The UFC does not have an equal interest in fighters. They have match ups they are trying to set up and the fans like who they like.
Yeah because when Cain beat their cash cow in Lesnar, all you heard White talk about was the loser.
The UFC promotes fights properly so they benefit from whoever wins a fight.
You are confusing fan favorites, which the UFC has…. With what Strikeforce does which is only promote one fighter in a fight. Or sometimes even worse. Purposely get a guy on short notice so they can be at a disadvantage with the guy they want to win. SF is filled with these types of examples.
Dont know who sounds more desperate or stupid – Coker sounding off like a 14yo Fedor mark; or Fedor’s coaches Michkov and Voronov trying to outdo each other making up more fantastic excuses about Fedor lost or the M1 cretins, Vadim and Evgeni trying to put a positive spin on the Russian mob forcing Fedor to continue fighting
Cause every fighter the UFC wants to lose gets a f’n RALLY
I’m just bored hearing about this. I know its a popular subject that people want to read about, but man, isn’t there someone fighting somewhere this weekend?
Donaire-Montiel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can’t wait for that fight. Anyone catch Real Sports this week? Donaire is working with Victor Conte.
I’m sure things would be different if they let Fedor fight into the third round. Instead of him being about 2 to 3 months, he would be out 6 to 8 like Koscheck was and would have been beaten into a bloody pulp. I know Coker is desperate but he’s now reaching even lower levels than I could ever imagine. This guy is about to have a meltdown and you’d think he would be happy with the high ratings instead he looks more miserable because of all he, his company and Showtime have put into Fedor.
Oh gosh, is Coker genuinely this big of a shmuck or is he trying to emulate Dana with some sort of arsehole shtick?!
“…I mean, one of the fights that I see down the line is Fedor fighting either Alistair (Overeem) or Fabricio Werdum. So, if Alistair advances, then Werdum vs. Fedor would be a great fight.””‘
^^
And here he is clumsily gushing his hopes onto the elusive Alistair again.
I mean come on dude!
Whats he gonna do if/when Alistair looses?
Call off the whole thing?
Although inbetween being a nitwit he also bumbles onto a few good ideas, like the general idea of Fed vs. the loser of Alistair/Werdum.
(Well its a “good” idea compared to his proposed alternative at least.)
Gets Fed back in soon against some legitimate but fair comp.
But we’ll see if a good idea can break the combined spell of being a ding dong and his psychically induced servitude to M1’s secret mind technologies.
I suspect M1 would prefer to have Fed just inserted into the final.