Despite Overwhelming Adversity, Scott Smith Delivers Once Again

I wonder if Shamrock still wants a rematch with Cung now?

Its true Cung will never be a top MMA fight, his ground game is garbage, he look lost trying to gnp smith in the first round. I never understand when a fighter does ground and pound so badly, now I’ve never fought in MMA but still all you have to do is hit lot and fast, if Cung hit Smith with some urgency he would have won, instead he hit, look confused, hit, etc. Same with Kimbo againt Huston, slow and bad.

MMA snobs are the worst! Nearly every comment I read about the show was people bitching that Smith and Le would both get smoked in the UFC.

Scott “The Comeback Kid” Smith, cheesy but it fits perfectly.

Great post Leland. I agree on all points.

I would find it funny that someone would be upset with Smith for “ruining” le’s chances at being a top contender. Le did that. You can’t be mad at a fighter b/c he won and did so against a guy with an (extremely) incomplete MMA game.

I also don’t find Le fun to watch at all. I guess I was one of those “UFC lovers” that said he would get killed in the UFC. But what I ACTUALLY said was he was not entertaining to watch when I couldn’t help but think he wouldn’t be able to pull all those pretty moves against top fighters. So watching him do a kick that everyone thinks is soo awesome and knowing it really isn’t, just doesn’t cut it for me; but mostly it was how ineffective he was on the ground.

This is the problem with what Strikeforce at what some of the other failed promotions have done though. They try to build shows on names and not on talent. They got hold of Henderson and Fedor and they better pray to god that Fedor doesn’t lose to any of the top cans they feed him or they will really be hurting. But when they have guys like Cung Le fighting as a top card, feeding him a mid-tier fighter he is expected to beat just so it “looks good” to the crowd; well you get what happened Sat night and what happened to Kimbo in Elite. I suppose it’s good to have some “names” to draw people in, but eventually they need to build their own names out of talent. Having guys like Cung Le, King Mo, Bobby Lashley headline cards is just recipe for either can feeding or random KOs and deflations. Leaving them with nothing.

Anybody got gif of that falling backhand guard pass Jacare put on Lindland?

Despite the fact that I have thoroughly enjoyed Scott Smith’s recent performances, recent articles on head trauma that have been posted on BE and other MMA news sites leave me worried for his future health and safety. Smith is becoming famous for his ability to endure an unbelievable amount of damage and still come back to win the upset. This style of fighting is not conducive to a long career and / or a healthy post-career life. Like other fighters who are known for their willingness to stand and bang (ie. Chris Lytle, Marcus Davis and Paul Taylor to name but a few) Smith consistently puts it all on the line for the sake of exciting performances inside the cage. Knowing how this brutal style is likely to be extremely detrimental to his mental health in the next few decades, I have begun to enjoy these “exciting” fights less and less. I should have prefaced this post by saying that I am a longtime MMA fan and hate to sound even remotely like the politicians who would do away with the sport altogether, but I it seems more and more apparent to me that fighting intelligently (ie. inflicting the most amount of damage while sustaining the least amount of damage) is not only the best way to win a bout, but the best way to ensure that one’s post-career life does not end up in shambles.

I was also thinking about the slugfest with Radach.

Fans will continue to complain that Smith isn’t a contender and he ruined the chances of Cung Le continuing as a headlining fighter,

If there are fans saying this sort of thing, they have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m sorry, but if Le can’t beat Smith, then that’s too bad for him, especially considering that Smith was handpicked for Le to show off and destroy on his first fight back since I don’t know. Like a lot of Le fights, it’s kind of fun seeing those flashy kicks, but as soon as Smith landed that left, I found myself saying, “Wut? Shit, yes! Yes!” And I gotta admit, that annoying MMA fan us hardcores love to hate kind of flared up in me and I wanted Smith to destroy Le, which he so satisfyingly did. It was just a really fun match to watch. You can say a lot of about Smith’s balls-out, never-give-up approach to fighting, whether that’s detrimental to his health in the long term, etc, but this is fighting. Of course it’s not good for him long-term. He’ll never hold a belt, but If I were a promoter, Smith would always have a spot on the roster. He’s a true fighter.

Some things I’ve been thinking about:

I’m not mad at Smith for smashing Cung, I’m not mad at Cung for taking easy fights, and I’m not mad at Cung for prioritizing movies over fighting. I’m mad at the MMA fans (and journalists) for believing the Cung Le hype and treating him like he’s the next big thing.

Part of what kills me is seeing people who ought to know better falling in love with his “spinning back everything” offense. There’s a reason you don’t see many other fighters pulling that shit: it doesn’t work against people who’ve prepared for it. Can you imagine Cung trying that in the UFC? As soon as he turned his back, he’d be eating canvas with a wrestler on top of him, or walking face-first into a punch.

As for Strikeforce, I’m also not mad at them for putting on entertaining fights that don’t mean much. There’s a need for that, and it’s fun. But I am mad at the MMA media for the way they treat this stuff. It seems like every site that puts out a list of ratings feels like they need to drop a few non-UFC fighters into their list to keep from seeming biased, so you get stuff like Robbie Lawler, Brett Rogers, and Jay Hieron showing up in the top 10 from time to time. Can nobody really think of 10 guys in the WHOLE WORLD that could beat Brett Rogers? I work with 10 guys that’d give him trouble, and I work for an IT contractor.

So Leland, I hear what you’re saying. But when you write this kind of stuff on a website where the boss claims with a straight face that Cung Le is showing us the future of MMA, it’s less credible. You can’t hype this stuff and then complain when people believe the hype.

Smith and Le not being super talented/ unable to contend in the UFC comes from the hyperbole/delusion from other posters that SF is the next to dethrone the UFC, or that they put on better cards than the UFC, or they almost have as many good fighters as the UFC… (if you haven’t read anything like this, you’re truly missing out)… BE doesn’t have much of that but even posters like Dank tread along those lines…

We’ve seen this all before, every time a promotion gains some traction and puts on some decent shows, other than UFC, they are hyped beyond all reason, and make it hard for such promotions to live up to these expectations.

Great writeup Leland, agreed on all points.

Why does every fight have to mean something? When people are fighting not to lose it usually results with incredibly boring fights (ie Couture/Vera) because they are so afraid to lose their spot in the pecking line. But when you put two guys that have no reasonable chance at a title shot that just want to go out there and fight and you get an exciting match like Smith/Le.

A lot of hardcore fans are beginning to forget why we started watching this stuff in the first place and that was to see exciting fights, not to see someone slowly but surely in an incredibly boring manner work their way of the ladder.

The guy was DOMINATING a fight he took about as seriously as a sparing session and got caught when he was trying to cruise to a decision. Ring Rust was a factor because he had several opportunities to end it and just didnt have that killer instinct. Id liken this a lot to the first Brock/Mir fight or Kimbo/Petruzelli where the better fighter got caught. However in any one of those rematches, the loser of the first fight would be favored in a rematch.

If they do this fight again, Le wins it 90% of the time.