New Heavyweight hurdles

It’s 2005, I’m the only one in the world who watches the UFC, least that’s how it feels. The main event rolls round and in one corner stands Andrei ‘The Pitbull’ Arlovski; the man who’d taken a 5 fight win streak coming into the bout and seemed all but invincible.
In the other corner… Paul Buentello….

Who?
exactly.

The bell rings, a split second later Buentello lands on his face, the crowd has to watch several replays to figure out what happened. Easily the worst heavy weight title fight of all time.

What was the point of this nostalgia trip? To highlight the old problem the 205lbs+ division faced: lack of talent.

Buentello went on to prove himself a solid mid to top tier fighter and has ironically ended up back in the UFC fold, Arlovski is still trying to erase the ghosts of Fedor and Rogers.

But in 2005, Buentello got the gig just by having a fight license and a large set of bones; Frank Mir defended the belt against Wes Sims in what where to very competitive fights; Tim Sylvia won the title on only his second fight in the UFC.

Madness, truly the wild west of MMA, fat, ugly, misshapen giants with very little skill set being destroyed by the one or two decent athletes amongst them.

It’s 2009 now and things couldn’t be anymore different. There is no shortage of top talent and best of all: most of them haven’t fought each other yet. It’s never been more exciting in the big boy division and what could possibly go wrong?

Seemingly, most them won’t be fighting each other anytime soon. Lesnar is out for god knows how long (if he ever comes back). Big Nog is battling staph as we speak and pitting Carwin and Velsquez against each other in Jan is out because Carwin is recovering from surgery.

On top of this, throw Fedor not being in the UFC into the equation and it’s easy to get frustrated. there’s already talk of an interim title but whose fit to fight for it? The only luxury afforded by the delays is seeing the up and comers weed each other out.

Look forward to seeing the cream of:

• Buentello
• Duffee
• Rothwell
• Nelson
• Dos Anjos
• Mir
• Struve

rise to the top and for established talent:

• Herring
• Kongo
• Hardonk
• Gonzaga

to try their best to break through.

Meanwhile we’ll have to wait some time before we see the big four decide who’s the best, unfortunately, while good fights are great, without a leader and a goal it’s all very rudderless.