After a week of anticipation for the debut of UFC on network television, I wasn’t particularly disappointed…but, damn, was it fast.
At first I thought that UFC on Fox 1 would be a two hour event, kind of like what they have had on Spike TV, only on Fox; then I did a little bit of research Friday during the day to find out that it was only going to be a one fight card for their debut. According to what I read, Dana White, the owner of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) said that the one card debut was Fox’s idea. I have to say, for a simple debut, it wasn’t bad. There was a lot of anticipation but I probably would have prefered to have seen at least one or two additional matches. I mean, it isn’t like we paid for it, but after waiting forty minutes before the fight started, it was only 9:42 before the event was actually over!
The main event match, which was the only card for the Fox viewers watching at home (the live crowd at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California had an entire event with multiple matches, was between the UFC Heavyweight Champion Cain Velasquez and the challenger was Junior Dos Santos who literally won in 64 seconds with a knock out blow followed by a grounded beating.
Now, if you were to have asked me before last night if I knew who these two were, I wouldn’t have been able to even tell the two of them apart! Aside from guys like Randy Couture or former 3-time WWE Champion Brock Lesnar, who is also a former UFC Heavyweight Champion (he lost his championship to Cain Velasquez–also, seeing UFC and WWE in the same posting might be confusing to some of the causal reader. UFC is a mix martial arts promotion, the fights are very much real and can be very brutal, while WWE is a Professional Wrestling promotion and the matches are per-determined for storyline purposes), I can now say I know two other guys. With UFC now on Fox, I am even more inclined to start watching more UFC fights. I might even consider getting the December UFC Pay-Per-View UFC 141 where Lesnar will fight Alistair Overeem; where the winner will get to fight Dos Santos for the UFC Heavyweight Championship at some point in the future.
So, earlier I said that I liked the event. They had a lot of really well great video packages and I’ve seen enough of UFC on Spike TV to know that some of these fights could last the full duration of the entirety of the rounds given to them (between 3-5 rounds depending on if it is for a championship or not). But, one thing that I found very distracting is that with this 7-year, 700 million dollar partnership between UFC and Fox, where UFC will broadcast four fights on Fox and another six on Fox’s sister cable network FX and also move the Ultimate Fighter from Spike to it’s new home on FX; the damn Fox Sports theme was playing throughout the entire debut event. It no longer felt like a unique UFC event, but it felt like a Fox run show. I kept expecting them to cut to a football game or something! Tell me I wasn’t the only one that felt that way?
In the end, although the fight was short, I will definitely be back to watch UFC on Fox when they start airing more in January. I just hope that they give us a little more then just one main event fight…
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