Did you like MMA and kickboxing on one card?
Bellator: Dynamite was an experiment, to test whether MMA and kickboxing work well on the same card. In your opinion, did the mix workk?
Bellator: Dynamite was an experiment, to test whether MMA and kickboxing work well on the same card in North America. It also had a one-day, four-man tournament, and Tito Ortiz fighting for their light heavyweight world title. Ortiz earned the title shot by going 1-7-1 in the UFC, and then beating Stephan Bonnar by split decision, and tapping out the league’s middleweight champion. It had beloved ‘Crazy PRIDE Lady’ Lenne Hardt.
In short, it felt like JMMA.
Fan opinions were across the board. MMA Fighting’s Dave Doyle argued bluntly that combining MMA with GLORY Kickboxing did not work.
It served as a reminder that, at least over here in North America, there’s a reason combat sports rarely mix on the same event.
Some MMA fans are also boxing fans. Some boxing fans are also kickboxing fans. Some kickboxing fans are also amateur wrestling fans. Some amateur wrestling fans are also jiu-jitsu superfight fans.
But this isn’t the Japanese combat sports scene in 2002. In the United States in 2015, there simply isn’t enough of a crossover audience to sustain multi-combat-sport events on a major scale like the one Bellator and Glory kickboxing attempted in San Jose.
The main card at SAP Center got off to a solid start with the light heavyweight tournament semifinals. Then the kickboxing bouts came, and the show nearly dragged to a halt, as the crowd, by and large the old loyal, NorCal crowd which used to turn out in droves for Strikeforce, seemed disinterested, and the mood on Twitter turned against the show.
Part of that was due to the matchmaking, as two of the three fights didn’t feature Glory regulars. This was Glory’s big chance in front of a new audience. Whether it was Spike, Glory or Bellator who decided to feature something other than top-tier, full-time kickboxers, it simply wasn’t the right call.
That said, even assuming we got nothing but Glory’s best, if there was a market for more than one combat sport on the same event, wouldn’t someone else have started regularly promoting such shows by now? If there was real money to be made, the A-list promoters, the Top Ranks and Golden Boys and Zuffas, ruthless capitalists one and all, would have given this a try a long time ago. The bottom line is that kickboxing has been on the periphery of the U.S. sports scene since at least the 1970s and has simply never caught on.
If you took the interminable kickboxing middle out of the near-four-hour main show, what was left was a fairly intriguing MMA event.
Scott Coker’s had far more hits than misses over the years. Bellator Dynamite was worth giving a try. The mix of MMA and kickboxing on the same show didn’t work for the same reasons you don’t stage a rugby match in the middle of an NFL game. The audiences are simply different. Putting together big spectacular shows with a look and feel that is different from the UFC is a positive thing. But let’s hope that going forward, the cage and the ring stay in separate venues.
Bleacher Report’s Lead Combat Sports writer Jonathan Snowden offered a less certain reflection.
It was innovative for certain. Whether it worked is a question that can’t be answered right away. The kickboxing bouts, unfortunately, failed to deliver. But that’s a failure of execution, not of concept. The idea may not be broken—it just needs a bit of fine-tuning and a better class of fighter.
Of course, the entire show wasn’t perfection, even if the concept was. But what card is?
MMAjunkie’s Ben Fowlkes offered both criticism and praise, and at the least, declared himself entertained.
5. Whatever else we might say about the shortcomings and missed opportunities of Bellator Dynamite, were you not entertained?
I know I was, even when I was making fun of it. It was something different, something novel that also managed a nod or two to our collective past (shout out to Lenne Hardt reprising her crazy PRIDE lady role).
Bellator’s Scott Coker era has been all about ditching the every-Friday-night routine in favor of stuff that’s just enough of a spectacle to get us in our seats with a real sense of eagerness and anticipation. It worked on me here. It even made me excited about what he’ll come up with next.
What did you think?
