UFC 99 - CroCop Wins, Wanderlei Screwed

UFC 99 - The Comeback was very dissappointing. There were two decisions that I feel were complete and utter crap, one more so than the other.

The card opened with Marcus Davis vs Dan Hardy. This was IMO the fight of the night. What a great opening fight. It was back and forth with lots of brutal shots and just all around good fighting. Hardy got the nod, but I don't think there was much of a loser in this fight. Setting the stakes this high wasn't too good though, because it went downhill from here.

Next we had Spencer Fisher vs Caol Uno in one of the most boring fights I've seen all year. It wasn't boring due to lay and pray but they constantly negated each and every move the other did. This was actually one of the most active, but boring, fights I've seen in a while. Uno's plan seems to of been to just control Spencer the whole fight to take away his striking which is pretty much what he did. Near the end of the third he got a dominate position and rained down strikes. Now comes the horribly bad decision. Both my friend and I agreed Uno took the fight, yet he didn't get the win. OK, different opinions happen but Spencer did nothing (he couldn't). He landed a few shots here and there but got controlled the whole time. Furthermore, the judges gave him a 30-27 score! How the hell did he win the third round?.

You know, well of course you do, ALL MMA FANS know how bad the judging can be, but the UFC has some extremly piss poor judging. Commission provided or not, some of these people have no business scoring fights. Their crappy outtakes on things they do not know about can cost people well in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. [example: $250,000 to show, $250,000 to win].

Coming off that almost complete snoozer of a fight I was thrilled to see the Mike Swick vs Ben Saunders fight next. This is one that interested me from the start (I'm a Swick fan). The fight opened up and Saunders rushed in and got guard. Now, I think it's smart to take away Swicks striking on the feet but Ben did absolutely nothing for the entire time. We even got to hear Swick complain about Saunders when the cameraman swung by. Luckily, later in the fight Swick got off a flurry and won via TKO. Just like I hoped for! I don't know about you, but I'm so sick of shelling out $50 and getting some of these quality of fighters on the card. They belong on free TV. PPV slots should not be filled by people who do not want to fight or who cannot last 3 freaking rounds. I'm sorry, but it's a disgrace and extremly dampens down the product.

Anyways, thankfully we moved on to the Cro Cop fight. Since my friend and I both consider Mirko our favorite fighter we were hella exited to see him come out to "Wild Boys" and all that. Unfortunatly for me, Charter Cable didn't deem me worthy. As per usual (around 3-5 times a day) my screen went black and said the dreaded "You do not subscribe to this channel, blah blah" for about 5 minutes. Thank god the UFC has extremly annoyingly (ha!) long entrances! By time Charter decided not to be complete and utter shit it was only 40 seconds in to the fight. It's pretty damn bad when you have to possible pirate something simply to get the full experience you should of when you paid for it. Not that I'm going to do that, or condone it, I'm just being sarcastic. I probably failed.

OH, right, the fight. Well, Cro Cop was a lot bigger in this fight than normal and he was his normal tenative self. Just kind of shrugging off peolpe when they try to close the distance and such but he started throwing some punches. I was happy. When Mirko actually throws punches he really dominates. He was landed a few good blows and started stalking Turk. You know the moves I'm talking about. He smelled the blood of Turk. Now, here comes the end. Some say it's controversial, but I do not think so. Mirko starts a flurry, and the first show was indeed an accidental poke to the right eye of Turk, in which Turk instantly turned to his left as a reaction (in pain, I'm sure) and Cro Cop followed up with more combos and finished the fight. Mirko pulls out the win, albeit controversial to some.

Look people, eye pokes happen all the time (Chuck Liddell anyone?). Henderson vs Franklin had an eye poke by Dan, and he won. No one says anything really. I'm unsure if it's just normal buzz since it just happened or if it will stick around for some time. Time will tell. What's next for Mirko? Who knows, who knows. I was happy to see him and am glad he got a win.

Moving on, we had the Cheick Kongo vs Cain Velasquez fight. Totally amped from the Cro Cop fight I was looking forward to Cain beating the crap out of Kongo. I won't deny it, or hide it, I don't like Kongo at all. I never have. I also bet $20 on Cain so I hoping he'd win me something to help pay for the ppv since I'm cheap. Cain was only 5-0 going in to the fight and Kongo was easily his biggest challenge in his career. The fight opens up and Cain comes in aggressivly. Kongo lands two flush brutal shots that would easily KO a lesser man but immediatly Cain takes him down. It was awesome. From there Cain just seriously beat Kongo to crap for pretty much the rest of the round. Coming out in the second again Cain takes a hard shot that would of probably been a KO if his head wasn't made out of concrete. For the rest of the fight he pretty much just pounds on Kongo who does nothing. It was great to watch Kongo get pounded and Cain take the decision. This guy is going to be a force for sure. At only 26 and 6-0 he is only going to get a lot better.

Finally, we have the fight I wanted to see the most: Rich Franklin vs Wanderlei Silva. Throughout the first round Wandy played it smarter than I thought, not being too aggressive. They both landed some shots throughout but Rich took the round. In round two Wandy started landing some real good shots, wobbling Rich a bit and landing a lot of good shots. He won this round easily. In the third, it was more of the same. Back and forth, but again I saw Wandy winning the round. It was a close fight, but I think Wandereli won this fight. I think he got screwed, just like Uno did. I'm a fan of Ace, but I think he lost this fight. It sounded like the fans thought so too. Wandy really needed this win badly. It's so sad to see this fight go down the way it did but it was a great fight either way.

All in all, the card had good fights but the judging in these events anymore are often questionable, ecspecially overseas ...

Sadly, we got no undercard, again. I really don't understand how they can only fight 5 fights on 3 hours of tv.

P.S. Looks like I got 3 out of 4 of my UFC 99 Predictions right. Woo hoo