Former WWE star Dave Bautista won his MMA debut yesterday

By Joshua Molina

Bautista is now an undefeated mixed martial arts fighter.

The 43-year-old former WWE champion won his first fight by TKO in the first round Saturday night in Rhode Island.

Bautista may be the only MMA fighter in history to have a Pay Per View card booked entirely around his MMA debut. The fight was available on Direct TV and not even Brock Lesnar got that kind of treatment after he debuted in 2007.

What Lesnar did get after his MMA debut, however, was a fat contract with the UFC.

It’s not likely that Bautista is going to get a UFC contract after his first fight, if ever.

There were many questions surrounding Batista’s debut. Some of them were answered.

Here are some takeways from the fight, which is widely available for free on the Internet.

10. Bautista didn’t crack under pressure. He was rocked a few times with hard punches, but stayed on his feet and got through it. You can’t really prepare for getting hit inside the cage for the first time. Bautista survived it. Against this opponent, he was OK.

9. Bautista’s opponent Vince Lucero is too fat to fight. Yes, he rocked Bautista early in the fight, but his flabby body and stomach hanging over his waist line is not the kind of image MMA wants to present to the mainstream. Yes, he took the fight on five days’ notice, but still, MMA fighters should have better bodies that your average guy on the street.

8. Bautista has no standup defense. At least he didn’t show it in the fight. He led with his head and his hands low. Lucero made him pay. A better fight would have KO’d Bautista in less than 30 seconds.

7. Bautista is slow. He isn’t fast enough to connect with his punches. Even if he’s packing a powerful punch in his fists he isn’t fast enough to throw combinations to hit his opponent. Lucero, at 300 pounds, moved like a slug in the ring, yet he was faster than the muscular, 265-pound Batista.

6. Bautista trained very hard for the fight. It’s clear that he takes the sport very seriously. Bautista was all business. It was clear that he trained when, after he was getting pounded in the stand-up, that he switched to southpaw and shot for a double-leg takedown. That’s someone who made a necessary adjustment to gain the advantage.

5. Bautista knows how to take a fighter down. Lucero was totally surprised when Bautista went under and took the larger man to the ground. The moved looked like one of his old pro wrestling moves when he would tackle an opponent. He showed that he has a layers to his game and it ultimately made a difference in the fight.

4. Bautista needs to work on his submission offense. He had the blubbery Lucero first on his back, then his stomach and tried to apply several submission holds, including a crucifix. Seeing the chiseled Bautista lay on top of the walrus-like Lucero was one of the more disturbing non-blood-letting images seen in recent MMA history.

3. Bautista has major guts. A lot of people crap on pro wrestlers because they aren’t “real fighters,” but Bautista has proved again that some pro wrestlers like to also fight for real. Had MMA been popular a decade ago, maybe some of these WWE wrestlers probably be fighting in the UFC or other MMA leagues. At 43, Bautista stepped into the cage. That’s pretty impressive.

2. Bautista got lucky. A fighter slighly more skilled than Bautista would have knocked him out. It’s a learning experience and Bautista should go back to the gym and keep training. They should pick his next opponent wisely. Bautista vs. Herschel Walker – now that would be a great fight.

1. WWE has no idea how lucky it is. Bautista will be an even bigger draw when he eventuallys goes back to the pro wrestling. He knocked out his first opponent and can return to the squared circled as a legitimate bad-ass, MMA fighter. It doesn’t matter that Bautista’s opponent was fat and out of shape. It was a real fight. If the WWE were smart, they would book Bautista vs. Brock Lesnar, in a six-sided cage, in a real MMA fight on Pay Per View. Both of those guys would probably make $3 million off that one fight if the WWE promoted it. The UFC cannot compete with the WWE’s money or promotional abilities. That fight would easily outdraw anything that the UFC has ever done on Pay Per View.

UFC's Matt Mitrione (pictured) is the latest fighter to be scorned by the promotion's President Dana White for not accepting a fight with minimal notice.

By Joshua Molina

Daniel Cormier and Dave Bautista don’t have a lot in common.

Cormier is a 5 foot 11 inch world class, Olympic-level wrestler and a rising star in mixed martial arts. He’s the Strikeforce Grand Prix champion and an all-around likable guy.

Bautista is a 6 foot 6 inch former WWE champion, with huge muscles, a great fashion sense and from most accounts from his wrestling days, a bit of a snot backstage.

They are both wrestlers, of sorts, trying to make it big in MMA. Their situations illustrate much of what’s wrong with the state of mixed martial arts.

Both of these fighters need opponents for their upcoming fights on Oct. 6 for Bautista and Nov. 3 for Cormier. But neither one of these guys should be fighting in these cards, for entirely different reasons.

Increasingly, fighters are being treated like pieces of meat. The sport has been so hot and popular in recent years that promoters have looked to put on big fights quickly.

The undefeated Cormier has looked impressive in his 10 victories. He won the Strikeforce Grand Prix Championship and now is headed for the UFC – since the UFC gutted the Strikeforce division.

Cormier’s opponent for his Nov. 3 show was supposed to be former UFC champ Frank Mir. But Mir got injured leaving Cormier with no opponent.

Cormier and the UFC both want to a quick fight to complete the terms of his Showtime contract. Cormier must fight one more time on the network before the UFC can pull him over. So now that Mir is out, the UFC – since it fired or took the rest of the heavyweight fighters after it bought Strikeforce – is searching for an opponent for Cormier.

UFC fighter Matt Mitrione apparently rejected an offer to fight Cormier. UFC boss Dana White then blasted Mitrone for “not wanting opportunities,” saying that his decision made him sick.

White is always talking about how he has legitimized MMA and brought it to the masses, yet he still acts like fighters should take any fight, under any circumstances, regardless of whether they have had enough time to train for that fight.

White should know better than anyone that this isn’t backyard brawling. Look what happened to Jon Jones after he fought Vitor Belfort on about a month’s notice. He nearly got his arm broken and now fighters everywhere believe they know how to beat Jones.

Cormier shouldn’t be forced to fight anybody the UFC lines up either. If he’s lucky he will get a month’s notice. That’s not enough time to prepare. Cormier has an incentive to fight and move to the UFC where he can make more money, but if the UFC puts the wrong guy in front of him, on a month’s notice of training time, the Rise of Daniel Cormier could quickly turn into the Rise and Fall of Daniel Cormier.

Unfortunately, with Zuffa owning both the UFC and Strikeforce, the sport is spread too thin and there just aren’t enough fighters readily available to jump into camp to fight Cormier.

In a perfect world, the fight would get canceled, and Cormier would fight at the beginning of the year, so that UFC and Strikeforce could adequately find a fighter and promote the card. Finding a last-minute substitute helps no one, certainly not the fighters.

Why can’t Cormier just sit out the card and fight again in a couple of months against a skilled, qualified fighter?

It’s because Strikeforce would have to cancel the entire show without Cormier on it. But Zuffa only has itself to blame by gutting the heavyweight division and building cards with little depth behind them.

In the case of Bautista, the desperation is taken to the extreme. Bautista was scheduled to make his debut this Saturday.

As of now, the show is still scheduled, but Bautista doesn’t have an opponent.

This fight should be canceled. Bautista doesn’t belong inside the cage period, much less fighting someone on less than a week’s notice.

That kind of situation just hurts the reputation of the sport. These are supposed to be big-time legitimate athletes. The idea that you could pull some guy out of nowhere and fight him against Bautista is pretty insane.

Nobody even knows if Bautista, making his MMA debut, can fight. He’s 43, slow and injury prone. Maybe he will turn out to be spectacular inside the cage, but the odds are against him.

This fight should be canceled too. But Bautista isn’t getting any younger. The company putting on the show, Classic Sports & Entertainment, badly wants to make a pay day off of Bautista. The fight will be available for a fee on the internet and in a small number of homes on Pay Per View.

Bautista was a huge name in wrestling, but that popularity will never translate into MMA, unless he signed with the UFC, where at least then it could be seen as a spectacle. And that is probably never going to happen. Bautista is risking his health, his image and his future as a pro wrestler by stepping into the cage against a nobody – literally in this case – and for what and why?

For a pay day for someone. Forcing these fights to happen is good for promoters, but bad for the sport in the long run.

The UFC injury plague continued yesterday, forcing both Jose Aldo (pictured) and Rampage Jackson to withdraw from their respective UFC 153 bouts

By Joshua Molina

Injuries continue to rock the UFC.

Jose Aldo and Quentin “Rampage” Jackson are out of UFC 153 in Rio de Janeiro, the latest card to get wrecked by fighter injuries.

Injuries happen in every sport, but the bottom line is this: The UFC has too many pay per view cards, and not enough fighters to sustain the company’s rapid pace of shows. There isn’t enough depth on the roster to book cards with more than just one or two marquee matches.

As was the case with Dan Henderson and UFC 151, when a top fighter gets injured, the whole show crumbles.

The UFC also lives in a fantasy world in that it acts as though the best fighters in the world only work in the UFC. Considering that the UFC owns Strikeforce, it’s too bad that contracts prevent fighters from switching brands to fight one another.
Dana White mission to preserve the exclusivity of the UFC brand has hurt the sport overall.

By the way, White needs to stop acting like a teenage boy (dropping those tight T-shirts wouldn’t hurt either). His tweet after he heard that Rampage Jackson was injured and unable to fight was absurd. White tweeted, “Rampage is hurt and out of UFC 153 RIO. SUCKS!!!!!!”

Social media is great and all, but White needs show better and more poised leadership during times of crisis. If he expects Jon Jones or any of the fighters on his roster to act more professionally he needs to lead by example. White’s legacy will be measured by how he handles the UFC over the next 12 months, not how he managed the company when the product was super hot and fans would pay to see any two men step in the cage.

The MMA audience is getting smarter to how the management side of the UFC works, and the mainstream audience is dropping off.

. . . Speaking of social media, Big Dave Bautista is acting like he’s super-hyped for his MMA debut on Oct. 6. He tweeted “Can’t (expletive) wait for my #MMA debut.”

Bautista will face Rashid Evans on a Classic Entertainment and Sports Promotions Network show. Bautista, at 43 years old, will make his debut against Rashid Evans, who at 33 years old appears to also be making his MMA debut, although he’s had four amateur fights. Evans’ amateur record is either 1-2 and or 3-1, depending on where you look.
He can be seen here in a youtube clip knocking out his opponent in 10 seconds.

Here’s the truth about Bautista. He has a million-dollar body, but looks don’t tell the whole story. In pro wrestling he was slow, largely immobile and injury prone. He’s torn his tricep muscles at least four times, one of which happened after a fall while jogging.

Who knows what will happen when the 43-year-old Bautista makes an MMA debut. If he gets hit on the chin, he will probably get knocked out.

Rashid has gone three rounds in amateur fights at least two times, so we know he is in cage shape to go the distance. Bautista isn’t the best that pro wrestling has to offer in MMA, but at least he has the guts to try the sport, even at his advanced age.

Bautista’s former pro wrestling peer Jerry “The King” Lawler made national headlines on Monday after he passed out from a heart attack on a live edition of Monday Night Raw, which recently broadcast its 1,000 consecutive weekly episode.

Although pro wrestling is scripted, Lawler is known in wrestling circles as a legitimate tough guy. He must be, at 62, he wrestled Monday night prior to passing out. Lawler is most famous for slapping Andy Kaufman on the old David Letterman show in the 1980s.

Lawler has been the voice of the WWE for so long that he has called just about every Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn match, when the two both turned to professionally wrestling in the 1990s. Lawler’s condition is unclear, but he remains in a Canadian hospital and after he was revived by medical personnel.

Here’s Lawler calling a worked match between Ken Shamrock and The Rock and Lawler calling a triple threat match between Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock and Owen Hart.

Ronda Rousey (left) has made her opinion on the Jon Jones-UFC situation clear. Photo Credit: Esther Lin/Showtime

By Joshua Molina

Not too surprisingly, Ronda Rousey agrees with UFC president Dana White.

She also believes Jon Jones should have fought Chael Sonnen on eight days notice.

Rousey, who smashed Sarah Kaufman two weeks ago in 54 seconds, told ESPN this:

“I don’t know what Jon Jones’ reasoning is, but I’d have made a different decision,” Rousey told espn.com.