LAS VEGAS — Five years ago, the UFC went to Mexico City to pay belated homage to Mexican Independence Day with a fight card headlined by Chihuahua’s own Yair Rodriguez and Jeremy Stephens. It honestly couldn’t have gone worse if a million locusts descended on the Mexico City Arena.
A flyweight straight out of the pages of 19th century Russian literature named Askar Askarov fought Mexico’s own Brandon Moreno to a kissing cousin’s draw in the swing bout that night, right before Guadalajara’s Alexa Grasso took a drowsy drubbing at the hands of Carla Esparza. If all that weren’t buzzkill enough, Rodriguez — the prescribed hero of the night — poked Stephens in the eye just 15 seconds into the main event, rendering him unable to continue.
That’s when the beers and popcorn started flying in earnest. I can still remember the commentators ducking under the broadcast table to avoid being hit.
So Dana White’s words at his UFC 306 post-fight news conference were perhaps the truest spoken on the UFC’s first (and maybe last) ever event at Sphere in Las Vegas.
“You can put on $20 million dollars’ worth of production, but you can’t control the fights,” White said. “They’re going to be what they are, so I cannot let that drive me crazy.”
No, can’t do that, as evidenced by Valentina Shevchenko planting Grasso into the canvas for 25 minutes to win back her women’s flyweight title. Controlling chaos can only be achieved by those engaging in it, and the Kyrgyzstani fighter wasn’t about to get caught up in some romantic “love letter.”
Even still, what the UFC could control was pretty damn amazing.
To be at Sphere on Saturday night was to be thrown into an experience like no other — a living, breathing tribute to Mexico, that was meant to overload the senses. The atmosphere changed with short Mexican vignettes that told of the country’s fighting spirit on 160,000 square feet of fine-pitch LEDs, before landing on an environment for each fight on the main card like working your way through levels on a video game.
The great bout between Esteban Ribovics and Daniel Zellhuber played out in a Dia De Los Muertos themed town square, with thousands of orange and red flowers, flickering candles and skeletons playing instruments. When Ronaldo Rodriguez fought Ode Osbourne to open the pay-per-view portion of the event, it was with the cool Mayan ruins as a backdrop. And by the time the UFC’s great bantamweight star Sean O’Malley made the walk for his title defense with Merab Dvalishvili, we arrived at some point in the future.
There were jacks-shaped spacecrafts hovering overhead as fans in attendance sat in total awe, wondering exactly when O’Malley was going to let his hands go.
Turns out he only did that with about 90 seconds left in a 25-minute fight, far too late to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Being engulfed in digital serapes couldn’t help “Suga” Sean overcome a dogged wrestler like Dvalishvili, who fought exactly the fight he needed to fight to win the 135-pound title. As happens when a determined grinder nullifies a striker in a big spot, the majority of the 16,000 on hand weren’t thrilled. There was a feeling that an era had ended before it could truly get started.
Wasn’t the “Suga Show” the greatest show going? That “it” factor got gobbled up by Dvalishvili the way strands of tickets get eaten up in those machines at Chuck E. Cheese. Down the street at the T-Mobile Arena, boxing’s Canelo Álvarez was given an opponent who’d have to shock the world to beat him in Edgar Berlanga. Canelo prevailed as he always does on these Mexican Independence Day weekends, giving the people what they expect.
But the UFC isn’t like that. When the game is built on hype, the potential for disappointment competes very strongly with the potential for fireworks in every fight. It’s all a great emotional (and financial) gamble. There are no guarantees. You can have a scrap like Ribovics-Zellhuber — which Joe Rogan called “one of the best fights I’ve ever seen in my life” — embody the meaning of the night, only to have Shevchenko mute the party with one of the most dominant performances of her career.
White declared that UFC Noche would deliver in the biggest way possible. Actually, his exact words were, “Remember that I said this to you tonight: I’m going to put on the greatest live combat sports show anybody’s ever seen.”
Did he?
It was a thing to behold. When so many events begin to blend together, UFC 306 stood out as something completely and fantastically other, especially for those in attendance. Mexico got the epic shindig it was promised, even if the final tally for the Mexican fighters on the card was 3-6. In the end two belts changed hands, as a Georgian fighter won the main event, and a Kyrgyzstani/Peruvian fighter winning the co-main. No beer or popcorn was thrown because everything went according to plan, except maybe the outcomes.
In a strange way that’s the beauty of the sport. You can put on a $20 million production, but the fighters are never required to play along.