"King Mo" Lawal was victorious in his Bellator debut last night

By Joshua Molina

Notes from Bellator last night on Spike TV.

King Mo Lawal needs to keep his left hand up.

It didn’t matter much last night against Przemyslaw Mysiala, but it will against a more skilled opponent.

Mo is training with Floyd Mayweather Sr., and it shows. He’s dangling that left hand like a spaghetti  strand falling from the side of a plate.

He better keep it up or he’s gonna get dropped eventually.

And despite his trip to Amsterdam to work on his kickboxing, Mo didn’t throw a lot of kicks.

Still he looked comfortable and confident out there.

Referee Jason Herzog had a bad night. It’s not a good thing when a fighter has to walk away and tell you to stop a fight when you should have done it in the first place.

It was clear that Michail Tsarev couldn’t stand on his left leg after a vicious kick from opponent Douglas Lima.

Tsarev hobbled around unable to stand. He eventually fell to his back in a desperate attempt to bait his opponent to the ground.

Herzog stood him up and Lima dismantled him before he felt so bad that he pointed at Tsarev, looked at the ref, nudging Herzog to stop the fight.

Herzog later would top his apathetic performance in the Ben Askren vs. Karl Amoussou fight.

Maybe Herzog got caught up in Bellator’s cross-promotion with TNA wrestling because Herzog let Amoussou take a beating like it was a 1980s Ric Flair vs. Dusty Rhodes fight.

Askren pounded Amoussou on the ground en route to defending his welterweight championship.

Blood gushed from Amoussou’s face as he tried to fight back from his back. Askren smashed him with dozens of shots to the head, eventually closing his eye shut.

Herzog should have stopped the fight in round 3, but he let it go until the doctor stopped it in between rounds.

At a time when MMA promoters are saying the sport is safer than boxing, this fight flew in the face of that.

If it were boxing, Amoussou would not have been allowed to take that kind of punishment.

A beating like that shortens careers, and might do much worse in the long run.