Dana Whiten ajatuksia tapahtuman jälkeen:
After Saturday’s performance, the toughest job in sports may belong to the person who has to devise a marketing campaign for Anderson Silva's next fight.
Silva won a unanimous decision over Thales Leites in the main event of UFC 97 on Saturday night at the Bell Centre, but it was such a mystifying and dreadful performance that it left UFC president Dana White angry and embarrassed.
“I can honestly tell you that I’ve never put on an event that I was embarrassed to be at until tonight,” White said. “I want to publicly apologize to all the fans.”
It’s the second consecutive time that Silva has been in such a fight. At UFC 90 in October, White was so mystified by Silva’s lack of aggression that he said he thought he was in “bizarro world” watching it.
Silva had an unlikely ally Saturday in Chuck Liddell, whose career likely ended earlier in the night when he was knocked out by Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. Liddell clearly placed more of the blame for the lack of action on Leites’ unwillingness to engage even a little.
“He was attacking the whole time,” Liddell said of Silva. “It’s a frustrating fight for a striker when every time you go to hit a guy, he falls on his back.”
White planned to have a long conversation with Silva and manager Ed Soares following the postfight news conference. During the fight, White got up from his cageside seat and walked over to Soares and gave him an earful.
Just as he was in Chicago, though, Silva was singularly unaffected. He had the air of a man who had just performed his job exceptionally, rather than one who had more than 20,000 people in the building and millions more watching on television at home feeling he’d cheated them out of their money.
“Everything I trained to do, I did,” Silva said.
It’s one of his stock answers these days, as he repeated it incessantly prior to the fight in response to numerous queries about his performance against Cote.
“I apologize. I personally apologize for what happened tonight,” White said. “You guys know, this isn’t what the UFC was built on and this isn’t the way the fights usually go."
“We’ve got to do something,” White said, shaking his head. “Watching that was hard. That was tough to take. It was embarrassing, honestly. It was really and truly embarrassing.”
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http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news;_y...9Eo14?slug=ki-silva041909&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
Mielenkiintoista nähdä mitä Dana keksii pakottaakseen otteluista viihdyttäviä. Hyviä vaihtoehtoja on monia (esim. keltainen kortti, Octagonin™ pienentäminen, muunlaiset sääntöuudistukset), mutta todennäköisesti Dana toimii omalla tavallaan eli kiristämällä ja uhkailemalla ottelijoita.