OWT GOOD ON, MAM?
Stuart Millard continues his monthly review of MMA on UK TV... or the internet...

The summer is here, huzzah! As the sun blazes down from a powder blue sky, the breathless, sweat drenched air becomes filled with the stink of the common people’s poorly cooked barbecues, and overweight women saunter through the streets exposing more saggy, stretchmarked flesh than should be legal, the Commonwealth has become gripped by a fanatical wave of sports based patriotism.

I may be squinting, because I’m wearing my sunglasses around my neck like a bowtie instead of on my eyes, just like Tito Ortiz, but it’s clear to any Englishman with any sense that Mike Bisping fever is sweeping the nation, with our lad battering his way into ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ semifinal by brutally kneeing in the head a man who had just lost his home and everything he held dear to Hurricane Katrina. God save the Queen!

Anybody fortunate though to call England their home only need crane their head out of the window or take a walk through the streets to see the myriad of St George flags attached to chimneys, cars, or the ceilings of massage parlours. Lets also not forget the veritable army of shirtless, drunken men parading towards their local boozer patriotically bearing their pro-Bisping standard over a badly tattooed shoulder, like a wife beating Roman Centurion with a t-shirt tan. Not following any other sports, I can only assume that’s what’s behind all this. I seem to recall something similar four summers ago, and in 1966, but maybe those had to do with Ian Freeman and Billy Robinson, respectively. What else could it be?

With this in mind, it felt only right that I should devote this column to checking out some of Mike Bisping’s pre-‘Ultimate Fighter’ bouts. You may note a complete lack of reference to Bisping’s nickname in this column. While I’ve been happy to cast all sorts of slanderous aspersions on alarmingly hard MMA'ers in previous issues, I’m all too aware that an errant nudge of the delete key while referring to Bisping as ‘The Count’ (the only time I shall be saying that) could very well lead to a misunderstanding that sees me bottled in an alleyway and having my thumbs smashed with a brick. I’m sure he did it on purpose. It’s like being forced to recite that ‘pheasant plucker’ rhyme in front of a crowd of old ladies and vicars, and us poor MMA journalists are perpetually a single ‘o’ away from a savage beating.

Firstly, I checked out footage of Mike’s second ever pro match, against some poor f----r called John Weir. I really felt like I was watching an illegal, underground gangland brawl, thanks to the frankly appalling and shaky quality of the footage, which was closer to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ than anything you’d see on ‘The Ultimate Fighter’. It was brief and scrappy, with a darts style commentator bellowing ‘boom’ and ‘oof’ into the PA system like a child playing with action figures in the dirt. Bisping punching someone in the face in a smoky hall, with beer quaffing men cheering him on is the most quintessentially British image one could witness in 2006, short of building a time machine, going back to the 1960s and jiggling Barbara Windsor’s lovely cockney breats with feather duster while she giggles and adjusts her suspenders. Less than a minute in, and our boy had won by stoppage.

Next was a fight from ‘Cage Warriors Strike Force 2’, with Bisping taking on the rather greedily vowelled Miika Mehmet, from Finland. Bisping was defending his Cage Warriors title here, and entered the cage to the strains of The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’, as the commentators laughed at the very idea Mehmet could have a chance of winning, as though they were about to watch Fedor versus Stephen Hawking, or Andrei Arlovski fighting a baby that had just been born 30 weeks prematurely, and without any limbs.

The fight started out pretty aggressively, with Mehmet taking Bisping down and pushing him up against the cage. But even in this position, Mike idly looked over at his corner and chatted away, in a manner more befitting someone lounging by a pool then a man with his eyes full of sweat and knuckles. But rightly so, as Mehmet’s blows were akin to playful nudges between friends when secretly laughing at the amusing walk or hat of a passing stranger who might turn violent if they’d overheard, and were no trouble to the concrete-skulled Brit.

Mehmet eventually fired off some wild, windmilling punches, but Bisping caught his arm and started cranking back on it. The Finn wriggled out of it almost immediately though, and went back to throwing occasional sloppy jabs at the mounted Bisping, who fought out and scrambled to his feet, nailing the big Finn in the face with a couple of punches that knocked him down onto the mat.

Mehmet struggled to his feet for a brief moment, before being batted back down with a mass of blows, and Bisping went in for the kill. Astoundingly and perhaps mesmerised by the visceral poetry before him, the referee just stood and watched as Bisping mashed his opponent’s face into a mass of atoms, flesh and splintered bone with an awesome series of punches that hit Mehmet like a meteor storm on a dying planet. Mehmet’s version of ‘intelligent defence’ seemed to consist of wincing, and weakly putting his palms up, like a kitten batting at a piece of coloured string. With the referee still letting the match continue, Mehmet’s corner decided they would rescue him from a life of walking around with nothing more than a faceless, mashed up lump of skull protruding from his neck, and threw in the towel.

Bisping celebrated with a handspring and some Bas ‘greatest man alive’ Ruttenesque jumping splits, before posing with a couple of generic promotions girls, a job that didn’t seem to exist a few years ago, but now seems to be a worryingly popular career path for fame hungry, disease ridden slags everywhere.

Then it came time to check out both fights between Bisping and Mike Epstein. Bout number one kicked off at a crazy pace, both men roaring out of their corners and unloading hard shots right from the bell. One of the commentators was so spectacularly cockney that he seemed to have drifted into the commentary booth by mistake, having wandered loose from a Dickensian workhouse.

Even as he found himself on the bottom, the awesome Bisping was in no trouble at all, and in constant movement, landing many more punches than the man on top.

At one point, Bisping rhythmically battered either side of Epstein’s head, like an overweight and socially inept Japanese teenager playing ‘Wonderful Ouch! Crazy Gibbon Bongo Mania!’ in a downtown Tokyo arcade. For the first time in this column, a fight made it out of the first round, although Epstein was sporting a lump on the side of his eye the size of a rabbit’s head.

At the start of round two, Bisping targeted the injury and rocked Epstein with a couple of wicked blows. From here, Bisping established dominance, and fist after brutal British fist slammed into his opponent’s jaw. Epstein staggered and wobbled as the blows kept raining down, his knees chaotically splaying into opposite directions, like those of a whore. Too groggy to even keep his hands up, Epstein took an incredible amount of punishment from Bisping, and must have a jaw fashioned from adamantium. Finally, after a ludicrous amount of punches and knees to the face, the referee stepped in, and Mikey Bisping was declared the victor.

Then it was on to the rematch, Bisping versus Epstein II, which would hopefully be an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ quality sequel, and not the ‘Usual Suspects II: Summercamp Soze’ of the fighting world.

Almost immediately, the pace was just as frenetic as the first contest, with Bisping catching Epstein with a stiff right, opening the fist-shaped floodgates. From here, the punches started coming hard, fast and heavy from both men. Three vicious jabs ending with a sick uppercut from Bisping dropped Epstein totally, to the point where I thought it was over, but Epstein was still in it, and still conscious, albeit with Bisping on top, battering him in the head.

With any normal man, I’d assume the fight to be over, but after the amount of punishment Epstein took in the last bout, I figured they could be there a while. With an incredibly shabby defence that seemed to be pulled from the play book of Homer Simpson, in the episode where he became a boxer, Epstein looked done, but out of nowhere, powered up and out, and suddenly the positions were reversed, with Bisping staring at the lights.

For the second time, Epstein took Bisping past the first round, and again, completely reminiscent of the first fight, round two opened with Epstein taking an insane amount of punches to the face. The rest of the round consisted of Bisping completely taking his opponent apart. The third round started with Epstein unleashing a barrage of hard leg kicks, which had Bisping visibly wince and start to limp, making the crowd lose their minds a little. The leg kicks continued, and clearly did their job, with Bisping now virtually hopping around the cage and generally looking like a malnourished child from a bygone era suffering with rickets, as Epstein hoofed his shin out from under him time and time again. Then, as out of the blue as a phone call at your wedding telling you that you have AIDS, a right hander from Bisping KTFO'd Epstein, and spectacularly so. The rematch was at least on par with the first fight, if not better.

Finishing off my Bisping-fest, was a contest from ‘Cage Warriors Strike Force 3’, with the title being defended against the man with the best use of rhyming in a nickname I’ve ever seen, Jakob ‘Striking Viking’ Lovstad. That is, if the name refers to his stand-up ability, otherwise Bisping might be branded a scab as he crosses the union picket-line on his way to the cage. Incredibly, the commentators make no references to raping or pillaging, although as he makes his entrance, the mumbly mic-man describes Lovstad as ‘unlucky’. Great way to build a competitive title fight, there.

The entire fight essentially consisted of Lovstad on his back with his knees in the air, while the standing Bisping stalked him, dropping punches to the mug and kicking him up the arse. Pretty quickly, Bisping got right on top of him and landed a flurry of unanswered clouts to the face, until the referee stepped in. Five fights, five scarily dominant performances.

One can only conclude from this column that Michael Bisping is the greatest living Englishman since Louis Theroux, or Victor from ‘Big Brother 5’, and if he isn’t crowned the Ultimate Fighter, not only will I be shocked beyond coherent speech, but I’ll be so appalled and ashamed to be British that I’ll happily move to France, like some sort of animal. So, if Mike doesn’t want the next ‘Owt Good On Mam?’ to be a hastily written account of some French farmers brawling in stinking ditches for the handfuls of Euros I toss at them in a vain attempt to raise some material for Total MMA, he’d better get his wild thing on, or I’ll end up looking like a right silly count.