JL: It almost seems like in recent seasons, the tournament format has been, I don’t want to say de-emphasized, pushed to the back burner a little bit, with more types of super fights and that kind of thing. Do you prefer the tournament format, or the more traditional MMA card format?
SW: I actually love what we’re doing in Bellator now, which is we’ll have stand-alone fights. We’ve always had standalone fights, but we have bigger stand-alone fights, like when Rampage Jackson joined us. His first fight was against Joey Beltran, a UFC veteran, rather than throwing him into a tournament. That was a stand-alone fight.
We also have our tournaments. What’s so cool about our tournaments is that guys who would be somewhat of an unknown or slow to grow as a star in other promotions can be showcased. The best example of that is Pat Curran, who is our featherweight champion. He signed with Bellator at the start of season two, the same year Jimmy Smith and I started. He was 3-2 in his five fights. Bellator didn’t seed, but had they seeded that tournament, he would have been number eight.
He knocked out Mike Ricci, who went on to fight on The Ultimate Fighter and was billed as Georges St. Pierre’s prodigy and was going to be this phenomenal guy. I believe he was 5-0 at the time, and Curran knocks him out. And then he defeated Roger Huerta, who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was Bellator’s major signing for season two, and then he defeated Toby Imada and won that tournament. Then he dropped down to 145, took out Marlon Sandro, a phenomenal Brazilian fighter and had success in Japan, and became the 145 champion.
It would be difficult for someone like Pat Curran to make that mark in a non-tournament-based format. Because here’s a guy who’s soft-spoken, very smart, not flashy, doesn’t brag, 3-2 in his last five, and he needed that opportunity. So I love that we have tournaments, and the fact that we can do these non-tournament fights and showcase the fact that we’re doing Alvarez-Chandler 3 on our pay-per-view. We’ve loosened our regulations where just because a fighter loses they don’t have to go back in the tournament for an opportunity at a rematch.
So I think it gives the flexibility to give fans the fights that they want to see while not being so locked in and so rigid with our system. But that’s also the major core of Bellator that Bjorn Rebney had in mind, that you establish yourself as a top fighter through the tournaments and ultimately earn your title shots. People seem to forget that under Art Davie, the founder of the UFC, it was all tournament-based and then they started doing super fights. But they were all tournaments – that’s how it started. PRIDE always had their Grand Prix, which were phenomenal and so exciting. And I love that Bellator is kind of getting the best of both worlds right now.
JL: How about the seasons? Do you like kind of having the summer to kind of wind down with only a few shows, or do you want to work throughout the whole year?
SW: You’re talking to a guy who if they said “you’re working 50 weeks next year”, I would say “why not 52?” This is truly a dream job for me, and also, the fact that I was a Major League Soccer commentator for a long time, I’m used to, as a broadcaster, being in those weekly rhythms. I’ve never been a baseball commentator, so doing six games per week would feel really weird to me, but there’s nothing weird for me at all about doing a show every week.
I had those rhythms as an MLS commentator, so I love it. We do 25-26 shows per year, and I would be happy to double that amount. I have so much fun, it’s such a great job, Spike is the coolest place in the world to work as a commentator. Bjorn Rebney, our CEO, I consider him a friend. I love the fact that I’ve never seen our CEO wear a tie or tuck in his shirt, which is completely a man after my own heart because as you know from watching Bellator, I don’t wear a tie or and I don’t tuck in my shirt. It just isn’t me. But the more shows, the better.
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