In one of the more interesting stories of the day, Bellator light heavyweight contender ‘King’ Mo Lawal recently spoke out about why fans seemed to get behind the recent Jon Jones/Daniel Cormier UFC press conference skirmish but chastised Bellator’s Tito Ortiz/Stephan Bonnar stand-off as a staged fiasco.
“You see Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier get into just a little tussle – no punches thrown, just wrestling a little bit – and everyone was like ‘oh yeah, that’s what the sport needs,'” said , who meets Tom DeBlass on Nov. 15 at Bellator 131. “And I’m like ‘wait a minute, so you’re okay with guys grabbing each other and are falling down, but you don’t care when guys are throwing hands and security coming in to break the s– up?’ It’s happened in Bellator and Strikeforce too.”
He continued and explained why the Bellator brawl between Ortiz and Bonnar was universally criticized, while the UFC’s unrehearsed donnybrook between Cormier and Jones got praised.
“It happened in Strikeforce with Jason Miller, and he got jumped. That s– was as real as it gets. Everyone’s like ‘that’s staged.’ I’m like ‘you can’t stage that. You don’t stage s- with the Diaz brothers. Really? You think the Diaz brothers jumping someone is staged?’ But if that happened in the UFC, everyone would have been like … ‘yeah, I can’t wait to see that fight! It’s going to be amazing.’ If everything with Tito and Bonnar happened in the UFC everyone would be ‘I can’t wait for Bonnar to rip Tito’s head off.'”
Lawal says the reason is Dana White.
“Every sport, the most popular people in the sport played the sport at one time. Look at [boxer Manny] Pacquiao. Could you imagine if Bob Arum was a bigger deal than Manny Pacquiao?” In MMA, the most popular person in the sport is Dana White. If Dana said ‘that was a great fight,’ but the fight sucked, people on Twitter will still be all ‘yeah, yeah, Dana, that was a great fight.’ They don’t think for themselves. In MMA, people didn’t grow up fighting. We grew up playing basketball, playing football, but they didn’t grow up training to fight in a cage. So they’ll be like “you know what, I need someone to listen to,’ so they’ll believe whoever is popular.”
