The Long-Term Implications Of UFC 117: Chael Sonnen v. Anderson Silva

Every event in major MMA has implications for the future. UFC 117 has much potential to shape the future of the sport than any event of the last month. So let’s take a look at some of the major stories and what they could mean down the road.

Anderson Silva’s legacy and sport vs. spectacle: He is 11-0 since debuting with the UFC in June of 2006. With his most recent win over Demian Maia, Anderson broke the UFC record for consecutive title defenses (a record he would have broken earlier had Travis Lutter made weight at UFC 67). He has an 82% finish rate in the UFC, only going to decision twice. Silva decimated one of the best middleweights the sport has seen in Rich Franklin...twice. He has gone up to 205 pounds and knocked out James Irvin in just over a minute and embarrassed former light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin.

And yet Silva may be the most despised man in the promotion at this time. Following a bizarre performance at UFC 112 against Demian Maia in which he spent far more time taunting than he did atacking, and a similar performance two fights before against Thales Leites, many fans felt that Silva needed to be punished for wasting their pay-per-view dollars. UFC president Dana White was enraged following 112 as it made the company look awful in their first trip to Abu Dhabi after gaining a very substantial partner in the region. White went as far as to vow to put Silva on the undercard or even release him from his contract should he perform similarly in the future.

Against Chael Sonnen, Anderson will have a man who should be there for him to demolish should he feel like it. The MMA fan is generally a fickle creature, prone to emotion and almost always willing to take the most recent performance as an indication of a fighter’s overall talent and willingness to fight. Should Silva provide similar fireworks to every bout in his UFC career except the Maia and Leites fights we’ll likely see a return to the touting of Silva as a rare talent, the likes of which the sport has never seen. Should he choose to taunt and coast yet again it will be hard to see many people in the future focusing on him as the kind of amazing talent he truly is.

And what if he does turn in another dud? Would White and Co. actually choose to let him go from his current contract? If he wins a snoozer and the were to punish him in any way what does that say about MMA as a sport? Is it more about spectacle and entertainment than results? The pay-per-view model makes this a much harder question to answer than a sport like the NBA where no one really wanted to watch the Spurs at their most dominant but winning is all that mattered. As much as I want to see an exciting fight on Saturday there is some reason to want to see Silva go crazy again just to see what he repercussions would be.

Chael Sonnen and “selling a fight”: Let’s just make this perfectly clear right now. The Chael Sonnen everyone is seeing in interviews talking about how people would run Silva out of his town or calling Silva and his crew a “pygmy tribe of savages” is a character. Just like thousands of professional wrestlers through the years, Sonnen is saying whatever he can to try and make people want to see the fight so badly that they’re willing to plop down their hard earned money.

Sonnen’s antics appear to be doing the job. In fact, they’re working so well that almost all of the talk over he past week has been focused on Chael, not the dominant champion. We won’t know how well this outlandish style of promotion truly works until we see the PPV buy-rate numbers after the event but if the show does well it will cause some to wonder if this “pro-wrestling” style buildup is what we can expect in the future.

Sonnen’s antics have ran the gauntlet from borderline racist (the aforementioned savages comment) to funny (claiming to have won 99.7% of the vote in an election, while leaving out that he ran unopposed) to random (“Lance Armstrong gave himself cancer” followed by denying he said it) to flat-out lying (claiming he beat Paulo Filho twice).

In the same way as the first point we come to a sport vs. spectacle crossroads where one can only wonder if a successful buyrate means a forced build or if the UFC will continue to let fights be built around the true personalities of the fighters in the event and the fight itself while feeding off of natural bad blood on occasion. What makes Georges St. Pierre’s buy-rates so good aren’t his willingness to say anything and everything he can think of, it is the desire of the fans to see the best doing what they do. Is that the future? Or is the future in creating characters for the sake of manufacturing interest.

Roy Nelson vs. Junior dos Santos and the future of the heavyweight division: As I talked about earlier this week the UFC has slowly been piecing together a long term plan for the heavyweight division, for many years their weakest division, and the bout between Junior dos Santos and Roy Nelson is another part of the puzzle. The winner of the bout is supposedly in line to face the winner of the fight between champion Brock Lesnar and Cain Velasquez while the loser will reportedly fight Shane Carwin, who lost in his attempt to wrest the title away from Lesnar.

Should Junior pull off the win he will take another step toward proving that he really does belong in the conversation with Lesnar and Velasquez as a true elite heavyweight. If Nelson wins it will be the biggest achievement of a career in which the rotund star has failed to break through the wall of being “good” into the realm of being “great.” It’s a great story and one that plays directly into the future of the very top of the division.

Jon Fitch vs. Thiago Alves and the battle for No. 2 welterweight: With Georges St. Pierre establishing a death grip on the No. 1 spot for 170 pounders the battle between Fitch and Alves becomes a battle to determine who takes that spot as “next best” as well as determining who will move closer to a rematch with GSP.

Fitch is 12-1 in the UFC with his only loss coming at UFC 87 to St. Pierre. Meanwhile Alves has racked up a UFC record of 9-3 having lost his debut to Spencer Fisher, his first bout with Fitch in 2006 and his bid for the welterweight crown.

The title will be on hold for a bit longer as GSP and Josh Koscheck film a season of The Ultimate Fighter before meeting in the Octagon and Jake Shields will be making his UFC debut against Martin Kampmann, so the Fitch/Alves winner will likely have a while to wait before ever getting another shot at 170 pound gold, especially if Shields wins and is moved, as expected, into the No. 1 contender spot. But fans of the sport are unlikely to see anyone other than the winner of the rematch between Fitch and Alves as the true No. 2 in the division.

The end of Matt Hughes’ career? For a period of time Matt Hughes was the most dominant man in mixed martial arts. He is a true legend in the sport who defined long UFC title reigns during his prime. He is also 36 years old and while once he was one of the biggest men in the division, today he is generally of average size for a welterweight. Add to that the fact that he seems slower and far less able to get his body to do what his mind wants it to and you have the recipe for a man who may be at the end of his career.

There is no shame in a 44-7 career record with his only losses since 2004 being to B.J. Penn, Georges St. Pierre (x2) and Thiago Alves. But, he didn’t look all that impressive in stopping Renzo Gracie at UFC 112 and many fans would rather see Matt hang them up than tarnish his legacy by refusing to step away when the time is right. The always tough Ricardo Almeida will be standing across the ring from Matt on Saturday, and in many ways he represents the mostly one dimensional fighters that Hughes feasted on during his prime. Should he be unable to overcome Almeida look for MMA fans and media to immediately begin calling for Matt’s retirement.

(Photo: Esther Lin/MMA Fighting)