Pound for Pound: Revenge of the Freak Show

So, Randy Couture vs. James Toney turned out to be much ado about nothing.

Couture did exactly what most MMA experts thought he would do last weekend at UFC 118, tapping Toney will an arm triangle choke in the first round, after allowing the former boxing champion to fire off exactly zero punches on the feet.

In the wake of the fight, the UFC summarily washed its hands of Toney, MMA people all acted pretty smug and superior on their Twitters for a few hours and then the world went back to business as usual. Thus ended the company’s experiment with the self-described “freak show” fight; one it promoted as the “UFC vs. Boxing!” only because it sold better on a poster than “44-year-old vs. 47-year-old!”

The only trouble is, whatever rub Couture and the UFC got from beating down Toney vanished quickly this week as the ESPNs of the world got their hooks into a much juicier story: Shaquille O’Neal vs. Hong Man Choi.

That’s right, the 7-plus-foot NBA star showed up at UFC 118 in Boston and – as he is apt to do – started saying crazy things into whatever microphone was stuck in front of his face. Long a big (literally) MMA fan, Shaq expressed interest in stepping in a cage with fellow 7-footer Choi over the weekend. He also wouldn’t mind fighting Tito Ortiz, the newly anointed “Big Shamrock” proclaimed.

Insane? Absolutely. Will it ever happen? Of course not. But when I saw ESPN toss a Shaq vs. Hong Man Choi graphic up on my television screen the other day, it suddenly dawned on me: The freak show fight is back, kids, and as MMA continues to gain popularity, you’re probably going to see more and more stuff like this.

There was a time when MMA fans hoped they’d left spectacle behind in favor of sport. We thought we’d seen the last of dudes like Emmanuel Yarborough, Teila Tuli and Zuluzhino. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true.

The signs are everywhere.

At an upcoming event in Poland, former boxing sideshow Eric “Butterbean” Esch will bring his “talents” back to MMA when he takes on former multi-time “World’s Strongest Man” winner Mariusz Pudzianowski. That fight was perhaps too freakish even for the Moosin promotion, which put Pudzianowski in the cage with Tim Sylvia in Massachusetts a couple months back. Nonetheless, the “show” will go on in the former Eastern Bloc.

These kinds of fights are just relegated to the independent promotions, either. Take Strikeforce, for example, which recently segued seamlessly from scoffing at the idea of setting up Herschel Walker vs. Jose Canseco to salivating over an alleged pay-per-view bout pitting Bobby Lashley against fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista. No word if Lashley’s recent loss to actual MMA fighter Chad Griggs will sideline efforts to make that gem happen.

And as for James Toney? Fresh off his defeat by Couture, he said he wanted to fight in MMA again and it didn’t take long at all for the name Kimbo Slice to be bandied about as a possible opponent. The Sliceman commented this week he’s into the idea, saying “we all know” that Kimbo will fight anyone.

Unfortunately, that seems true of a lot of people these days.