This article is going to be a bit of a rant, but I really feel the need to vent a little bit about all of the flack that Anderson Silva has been catching for his performance against Thales Leites at UFC 97.  I am almost in disbelief of all the ridiculous comments and criticisms that I’ve heard, especially those of some of the sportswriters and the UFC President Dana White.

I expect the idiotic remarks and booing from the casual MMA fan sitting at Hooters, wearing his brand new UFC t-shirt and matching UFC hat (on backwards), stuffing his face with wings and beer.  To him I just say, you really are as dumb as you look.   These bandwagoneers, who can probably only identify Chuck Liddell because of his mohawk, are a scary reminder of how dumb the average American is.  Although I know that the average IQ of an American is less than 100, I’m still amazed at how the masses blindly follow trends.  So all of these dumb-asses who watch the UFC because it’s the “in thing”, don’t surprise me when they yell obscenities at the TV during a fight or post unintelligent threads on websites in barely intelligible English.  I honestly can’t wait for MMA to become fully mainstream so that the retarded trend spotters will die off.

Then one step up from the casual MMA fan, you have the “Sherdoggers”, who hold high ranking belts in the forums.  To these tools I say, find something better to do with your time than sit in the basement of your mom’s house in your tighty whities drinking Mountain Dew, eating Doritos and posting you’re asinine threads.  You are a more direct reflection of the MMA community and a bigger embarrassment to me and the others who hold this sport in high regard.  Here are just a few of my favorite threads started by the mentally challenged, which will better help you understand the kind of idiot I am referring to.

Anderson Silva’s strange performance has to do with money issues?

What Dana should do with the emerging A. Silva crisis.

Is Anderson Kind of Mentally Challenged? (Serious)

Some of the posts within the threads seen above are even more hysterically terrifying.

Then we have the “new” MMA sportswriters, probably the most aggravating of all those talking shit about the champ.  I call them “new” because until about two years ago they were writing about golf or badminton …or possibly boxing.  It wasn’t until they stumbled upon their first UFC on Pay Per View at a friend’s house on Bridge Night that they got the bright idea to get in on the “ground floor” of an emerging journalistic market.  “Oh boy, this will give me job security and it will be exciting too!!”  Yeah, only if you understand the topic you’re writing about and can write something that people want to read – jerk!

I love the one question that some nimrod reporter asked Anderson Silva at the post fight press conference – “It seems like you’re afraid to attack your opponent…you’re almost having too much fun out there playing cat and mouse.”  Thank God that Anderson didn’t validate this moron’s nonsensical question with an answer.  Instead, the great Chuck Liddell stepped up and answered the question so eloquently, totally putting the reporter in his place.  If I may quote Chuck, “The guy’s attacking…every time he threw a punch, the guy threw a punch at the air and fell on his back…seriously, where’d you get that?  He was attacking him the whole time (waves his hand in disgust) …you guys man.”  And this is just one of many journalists who said or wrote laughable things.

Finally, I have to take a shot at the big boss man – Dana White.  With all due respect to the man who has almost single handedly made the UFC what it is today, I say to Dana White, has that tight black t-shirt cut off the circulation to your brain?  What fight were you watching?  Here are a few of Dana White’s comments from the press conference.

“I personally apologize for what happened tonight,” White said. “You guys know this is not what the UFC was built on. This is not the way fights usually go.”

“I’m personally unhappy with the whole fight,” White said. “I did not like the fight at all, period, on either side.”

“I’ve never not wanted to come to a press conference, and I didn’t want to come to this one,” White said. “I’m serious.

“I’m personally unhappy with the whole fight,” White said. “I did not like the fight at all, period, on either side.”

“I’m in the business of selling fights, and I think I’m pretty good at it. But I’m going to have a hard time letting people know that, ‘I promise, his next one is going to be good.’ I need to talk to him and figure out what’s going on and why this is happening.”

“In Chicago (after the Cote fight), it was like, ‘Listen, everybody has a bad night,’” White said. “You name all the greats that have ever played any game in the history of playing games, every guy has an off night.’ That night, how upset [Silva] was and all the flak he got, I honestly thought he was going to come back strong.”

“We run a fight company, and when guys don’t fight, we sit down (with them) and have a conversation on why they’re not fighting,” White said. “This is what I do. It’s like having any other business and the guy doesn’t come out and perform at work.”

Honestly, I have a hunch that Dana understands that Silva didn’t have a bad performance, but knows that the majority of the fans don’t see it that way, so he put his P-R hat on and did damage control the best he could.   I think what he really should have said was – I apologize on behalf of the UFC and “matchmaker extraordinaire” Joe Silva for arranging another terrible match for Anderson Silva.  In the future, we’ll try our best to match Anderson up with a fighter who is a true title contender and will show up to fight.

Here’s my interpretation of what happened in the main event at UFC 97.  Anderson Silva showed up to defend his belt.  He trained to fight his fight to retain his belt, and that is exactly what he did.  Thales Leites, the challenger, trained to fight his fight and take the belt from Anderson, and that is what he attempted to do.  However, he failed miserably at executing his game plan.  It’s not realistic to think that Thales really thought that Anderson was going to jump into his guard every time he fell to his back, so that he could attempt to use his world class Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to submit him.  Had Thales wanted the belt badly enough, he would have thrown caution to the wind and shot single after double, and clinched, and punched, and kicked, and even charged and tackled (a la Brock Lesnar vs Heath Herring) if that’s what it took to get Anderson to the ground.

The challenger is given the chance of a lifetime when he gets a title shot and it is his job and responsibility to do everything in his power to capitalize on that opportunity.  It is up to the challenger to take the belt from the champion.  And it is the responsibility of the champion to defend his belt.  Could you imagine Wanderlei Silva or Chuck Liddell spending three rounds backing up, half-shooting for takedowns, and swinging at the air only to fall to their back and wait for the champ to join them for a tussle?  I don’t think so.  And to say that Anderson wasn’t attacking is absurd!  Anderson threw some of the most vicious downward kicks to the knees of Leites I’ve ever seen.  He landed a spinning back kick to the body.  And he stalked Leites and peppered him with some of the most athletic, creative, and artistic strikes I’ve ever witnessed in the octagon.  The problem is that it’s hard to hit a target that backs up or falls down every time you strike.  Should the champ have charged a retreating Leites with reckless abandon and exposed himself to be knocked out for the sake of entertainment?  I might answer yes they were fighting in the WWE and not the UFC.  The bottom line is that Leites didn’t do his job, so it made Anderson’s job that much harder.

Anderson is the CHAMP!  All others are challengers.  The UFC needs to find someone who can challenge the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.  End of story!