The VaultOpinion: WEC Is Turning 15, So Let’s All Make Fun of It
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.
On this day 15 years ago -- June 30, 2001 in case you're a lollygagger and not reading the publication date – World Extreme Cagefighting had its first ever event at MMA's little American Indian casino that could, the Tachi Palace Hotel and Casino. It was named, in classic corny cagefighting fashion, “Princes of Pain”, which still must be considered an intellectual victory, as it wasn't “Genesis” in the most rote MMA fashion.
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Know who was supposed to headline? Future UFC champion Chuck Liddell, fresh off knocking out Kevin Randleman in the UFC in 78 seconds before bending over Guy Mezger unconscious on top of his own leg in Pride Fighting Championships just over three weeks later. Naturally, a Zuffa cease-and-desist nixed that, but somewhere, someone in California's Central Valley still has a stack of WEC 1 posters with Liddell's mohawk on them.
Liddell on the card or not, his former training partner Scott Adams
and his partner Reed Harris -- the all-time biggest “Iceman” fan --
had planted the seed for something beautiful. The promotion has
been gone for six years, but I still miss it all the time. On the
day the WEC would've turned 15, I feel obligated to share some of
my favorite memories and not necessarily the most important ones.
We all loved Chan Sung
Jung-Leonard
Garcia and cried together when “The Korean Zombie” was robbed.
We all thought Jose Aldo's
ascent was breathtaking.
After WEC 53 -- fitting that the brand went out with one of the best MMA shows ever, punctuated by one of the best MMA fights ever in Anthony Pettis-Benson Henderson 1, capped by the single greatest technique in MMA history, “The Showtime Kick” -- we at Sherdog.com eulogized and memorialized the WEC thoroughly and brilliantly, in my humble opinion. I'd encourage you all to go read it, especially since it has some deep and beautiful reflections of Sherdog.com founder Jeff Sherwood, possibly the only man other than Harris to be there for WEC 1 and WEC 53. It's tremendous.
As truly great as the company was over its nine-year existence, that alone isn't why I cherish it more than any other MMA promotion ever. With its historic imprint split between the Adams and Harris ownership and shows at Tachi, then its better-known Zuffa-owned incarnation, the WEC's legacy is essentially that of two promotions in one. Regardless of which half of its history you're considering, both were often strange, surprising and, as a direct result, fun as hell. These are the sordid stories I love the most, the sort of stuff that reminds us MMA is a freakshow.
The WEC lured Frank Shamrock out of retirement in late 2002 to headline WEC 4 at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, only for Shamrock to break his leg and leave the company headlining with Jeff Curran-Bao Quach. This led to Shamrock fighting journeyman “The Pain Inducer” Bryan Pardoe, at WEC 6 in Lemoore, California. Yes, MMA legend Frank Shamrock ended his near two-and-a-half-year layoff to fight Shannon Ritch's top training partner for a ton of money at the Tachi Palace. This is MMA high comedy, people.
Then again, that same night, a 19-year-old Nick Diaz got his breakout victory, easily tapping Lion's Den prospect Joe Hurley in less than two minutes.
Every October from 2002 to 2005 under the Adams and Harris regime, the WEC did a Halloween show. The ring announcer would dress up like Gene Simmons from Kiss or a satanic preacher. Meanwhile, for nearly every early WEC event, a young Josh Rosenthal would dress up like a terrified neophyte referee in a track suit. Years before he would mature into the kind of “fighter's ref” who could allow Brock Lesnar-Shane Carwin and Dan Henderson-Mauricio Rua 1 to unfold as they did -- and years before he spent time in federal prison -- Rosenthal would show up in his pullover V-neck athletic poncho thing and play petrified bystander.
Even after Rosenthal became an infinitely more competent official, he still got to be a center of refereeing controversy during the Zuffa-era WEC, famously stopping the Paulo Filho-Chael Sonnen bout when “The American Gangster” exhibited his career-long tradition of screaming out while in submissions. In turn, this gave us a Filho-Sonnen rematch, which wound up being one of the most bizarre bouts in MMA history, as Filho abandoned his career as a high-level fighter in a mere 15 minutes, talking to ghosts and voices in his head while grappling with mental illness and addiction in front of us in the cage.
Filho drama aside, perhaps his most ignominious moment in Rosenthal's early refereeing career was at WEC 9 in January 2004, when he let Doug Marshall, then a furry heavyweight, stop Lavar Johnson with repeated knees to the groin after Johnson was bashing in Marshall's head for minutes on end. On the other hand, Rosenthal's refereeing that night allowed the positively insane brawl between John Polakowski and early WEC mascot Olaf Alfonso to flourish, even after Alfonso appeared to be knocked dead mere seconds into the fight.
HDNet executives were on hand that night in Lemoore, California, and made the call to immediately pick up WEC content to be broadcasted in future. More so than anything else -- more than Chris Leben knocking a gallon of slobber out of Mike Swick's face, more than Alex Stiebling's blood-soaked comeback against Joe Riggs -- the Olaf-Polakowski car crash is what convinced Mark Cuban's minions that cagefighting needed a place on his fledgling network. Two years later, WEC 18 would be live on HDNet.
Yes, the WEC was the promotion that first got Mark Cuban and AXS TV, then HDNet, hot and bothered about MMA. You like all the MMA you get to watch almost every Friday night on AXS? You appreciate the niche AXS has carved out as a consistently robust cross-section of MMA, kickboxing and pro wrestling? Thank Adams, Harris, Rosenthal, Polakowski and whatever hellish combination of forces that created Alfonso, one of the greatest cult figures in this sport's history.
Speaking of bad refereeing, Alfonso would be victim to its most egregious instance in WEC history, one of the most infamous MMA late stoppages ever, when at WEC 19, referee Jon Schorle walked away to grab his mouthguard moments after “Razor” Rob McCullough punched it across the cage. McCullough proceeded to dribble Alfonso's head viciously off the mat with Schorle halfway to the neighboring city of Hanford.
In 2006, when WEC play-by-play man Ryan Bennett died in a car accident, Harris and Adams turned WEC 22 into an exhibition memorial show for Bennett's family and raised nearly $70,000. Noted 6-foot-9 weirdo Wes Sims opened his fight with Joel Suprenant by throwing a flying dropkick, only because Bennett had always remarked that he would love to see Sims throw one in the cage someday. Lots of other MMA promotions do memorial shows, but few have the chance to honor folks as great as Bennett and none of them feature a Sims dropkick.
Filho-Sonnen drama aside, it may seem like there's more wacky and/or embarrassing moments from the pre-Zuffa UFC, when you'd get a Tachi drum-and-dance introduction followed by a chubby Gilbert Melendez in hibiscus print shorts, then a complete trainwreck heavyweight fight between two local tough guys. However, after the UFC purchased the WEC in December 2006, I'm not sure things got less weird; they were just weird in a different way.
The generally accepted myth that's parroted now is that the WEC was a quaint-but-successful regional promotion that Zuffa purchased and turned into an incubator for 135- to 155-pound talent. The fact is that the WEC had been utilizing talent in these weight ranges for years and Zuffa's move toward that branding concept was incremental. After all, WEC welterweight ace Carlos Condit was the most heavily pushed promotional face other than Urijah Faber after Zuffa's purchase. The more concerted focus on the weight range that would come to define the promotion's legacy was actually set in motion by one of the more peculiar MMA power plays of all-time.
The more conscientious focus on 135 to 155 came when longtime Zuffa employee Sean Shelby was given the WEC matchmaking reins in December 2008. However, his big break came at the expense of WEC co-founder Scott Adams, who was relieved of his duties and pushed out of the picture after WEC 36, the night Mike Thomas Brown dethroned Faber for featherweight supremacy and Filho saw the ghosts.
In its Versus TV deal, the WEC would put four fights in a two-hour time block. Fans should have gotten to see “Cowboy” Donald Cerrone's breakthrough performance against former WEC lightweight champion McCullough, the first round of which was a shoo-in for “Round of the Year” in 2008. Instead, because Adams had negotiated a contract with then-unbeaten three-time NCAA wrestling champ Jake Rosholt that stipulated Rosholt must appear on TV, fans saw the former Oklahoma State Cowboy's sloppy mess of a fight with Nissen Osterneck. This gaffe and the Cerrone-McCullough slight was all the leverage necessary for Zuffa to get Adams out the door and put the overdue Shelby on the matchmaking map.
The WEC in large part will be remembered for authoring literally some of the greatest fights in the MMA canon under Zuffa stewardship, like Henderson's first clashes with Cerrone and Pettis. It will be defined by the emergence of those aforementioned lightweights and other historically significant fighters: Faber, Aldo, Miguel Torres, Dominick Cruz, Joseph Benavidez and Demetrious Johnson. However, the greatness present in the last three years of the promotion is amusingly offset by much of its production.
It was the Affliction era, so I won't harp on the fact that the WEC on Versus promo packages and event intros both featured organic, growing tribal tattoo and cage patterns over the screen. Still, there's a reason Frank Mir's loving obsession with Torres as a color commentator is a well-worn MMA joke, and frankly, it adds an ironic charm to going through Torres' bouts on UFC Fight Pass. In suitably bizarre fashion, Mir lost his WEC commentary gig when UFC President Dana White freaked out over Mir's saying he wanted Brock Lensar “to be the first person that dies due to Octagon-related injuries.”
In Mir's stead, we got Stephan Bonnar in an array of plaid shirts, the man who gave us one of the best calls in MMA history, losing his mind over the Showtime Kick and screaming “Did you see that?! He ran up the wall like a ninja!” While Bonnar would never be my first choice for an MMA color commentator, his shock captured any watcher's reaction in the most direct and MMA-ish way possible. I love it.
Of course, if you dig into the vault and watch any WEC classics and you want to see the formative fights of literally some of the greatest MMA fighters ever, you must contend with Todd Harris, whose shockingly inept stylings continue to haunt us today via the World Series of Fighting. You want to watch a Cerrone fight where he has a triangle choke applied for 30 seconds and Harris suggests the referee might stand it up? You can do that. Want to watch Shane Roller hit a textbook rear-naked choke on Danny Castillo while Harris calls it a “guillotine” repeatedly? You can do that also.
Brilliant exhibitions of technique with awful commentary is a historic MMA tradition, sewn in the code from the early UFC days when no one knew what they were watching, an era when the late, even the great Jeff Blatnick -- an Olympic gold medal-winning Greco-Roman wrestler, an influential supporter of MMA in its dark ages, eventually a UFC commissioner, then one of the best MMA color commentators and judges -- thought Severn was beating up Royce Gracie while being submitted in a triangle choke. The WEC had outstanding classic MMA, voiced by a man who was confused by the concept of “changing levels.” It is poetry.
The WEC legacy contains multitudes, plenty of them freakish. They're part of the charm. Yes, of course, let's have a 15-year toast to the promotion that gave us the bantamweights and featherweights and a crop of all-time great lightweights, to boot. By all means, celebrate a jewel of a regional promotion in the middle of nowhere in central California being artfully reshaped as the arena for some of the best fights and fighters in MMA history.
However, clink a glass or pour one out for the WEC, where Sonnen first got to hone his comedy chops, where Garcia robbed his peers with impunity, where Poppies Martinez was once the biggest ticket seller, where the fates of fighters and the company itself were in the hands of a not-ready-for-primetime Rosenthal.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some Olaf fights to watch.
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