Due to a prior obligation, I unfortunately missed last Saturday’s UFC Live on Versus during its initial airing.

Dominick Cruz is a generation ahead of pretty much every other fighter at 135, but he faces a bias against good fighters who win by decision.

Judging by the results, it was exactly what I expected it to be: a woefully underlooked card that provided some of the more entertaining bouts in recent months.

I was disappointed, however, in the reaction I read online.

Part of the problem with MMA is that its fanbase has more overlap with professional wrestling than with boxing or any other legitimate sport. That’s not meant to browbeat professional wrestling fans as a whole, since I was one of them until the uglier aspects of the industry chased me away.

There comes a time, though, when one has to decide if they like sports or entertainment. While the terms aren’t mutually exclusive, it doesn’t follow that an athlete is required to entertain you, the fan, first and foremost.

This mindset is the same one that says Georges St-Pierre is a lesser fighter because he wins fights by decision. That bias and vitriol against strategy and technique is now being directed towards Dominick Cruz, who many fans have taken to calling “The Decisionater” (playing off his nickname “The Domin8r”). It doesn’t help either when fighters like Quinton Jackson talk about the glory days of Pride Fighting Championships in Japan and yearn for a return to days when fighters were more concerned with putting on a good show than actually winning the fight. If you took that attitude to a boxing fan, you’d be rightfully chastised.

Which leads me back to the problem at hand: a fanbase mired in a pro wrestling mindset.

This was certainly the case in Japan. While older fight fans wax poetic about the apex of the Japanese MMA scene, they ignore the fixed fights and fighters being offered bonuses if they happened to lose to native fighters via submission or knockout. The best fighters at Light Heavyweight and Heavyweight fought in Pride, but they rarely fought each other on a fair and level playing field. If they did meet, it was in a tournament spanning one or two evenings, which is indicative of toughness but not necessarily skill.

This sport is still evolving, and as a fan you have to either accept that or face the reality that what you’re looking for might not be here. Nobody with any reasonable level of intelligence or appreciation for the game and the sacrifices fighters make should call for anyone to sacrifice their championship or their career for the sake of a quick moment of elation for the chubby guy sitting at the bar.

If you can’t watch someone like Dominick Cruz put on the performances he’s had while the WEC and UFC Bantamweight Champion and appreciate his talent, then you’re not a fan of MMA. You’re a fan of flash knockouts, blood, and freak shows. And for that, you could save yourself a lot of time and money and just surf YouTube.

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Other notes/controversies from the event:

• Lightweight TJ Grant was given a submission win in the third round when referee Fernando Yamasaki (Mario Yamasaki’s younger brother) mistook Shane Roller‘s aggressive yell for a verbal submission. In watching the replay, I could see how someone could misinterpret the situation. On the other hand, I worry it sets a bad precedent when you have fighters thinking that any sort of grunt of verbal expression can be taken as a submission.
• Later in the evening, Mario Yamasaki was taken to task by some for what they perceived to be an early stoppage after Anthony Johnson nearly took Charlie Brenneman‘s head off with a head kick following a vicious offensive flurry that had Brenneman effectively out on his feet. In this case, Mario was right to stop the fight and he had no shortage of people defending it. I hate to dismiss so many by saying they’re ignorant, but the referee’s job isn’t to wait until a fighter is knocked unconscious. Mario Yamasaki determined – rightly – that Brenneman was in danger of being knocked unconscious. Which he was. Despite his reaction when knocked on his back, Brenneman was being beatne like a pinata and was clearly out on his feet before Johnson’s head kick. Anything after that would have been unnecessary damage, and like Dana White said in the post-fight presser, it’s always better to see a fight stopped early than a fight stopped well after it should have been.
• Pat Barry‘s loss to Stefan Struve proves what I’ve been thinking for a while: Barry is a very nice guy who is not very good at the whole MMA thing. He needs to do nothing for the next few months except drill his submission and takedown defense. A fighter would be able to get away with only one or two tools in his box three years ago, but not in 2011 and certainly not in a field where there’s more parity seemingly by the week.