This weekend saw UFC Fight Night 58: Lyoto Machida vs. C.B. Dollaway as well as the annual Grapple at the Garden event. I’ll break down both events for this week’s edition of the Monday Morning Analyst (MMA).
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The UFC is heading back to New Jersey.
The organization declared Saturday night it’s going to hold a UFC on FOX event April 18 at Prudential Center in Newark. The town continues to be an annual stop for the UFC recently. No main event was declared yet.
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Wayne Boyd is more passionate about wrestling than almost anyone, and his latest goal is to succeed at something that everyone else that has tried and failed: the idea of running a promotion doing professional amateur wrestling.
Boyd’s new venture, The Global Wrestling Championships, debuts with a Saturday afternoon show with three main event matches, featuring six of the country’s top wrestlers. The event brings four-time NCAA champion Kyle Dake back to Cornell University. It will be a combination of prelim matches streaming for free at 2 p.m. Eastern time on GoFightLive.tv and the championship matches as a $6.95 Internet pay-per-view if ordered in advance, at 3 p.m. ET.
Boyd’s goals are ambitious. He wants to present real wrestling, with the country’s best wrestlers, in a professional sports league team format. He wants to present the shows like MMA, with interviews, storylines and grudge matches. The idea is for the teams to be from the ten to 20 best wrestling clubs in the country, doing dual meets. The goal is to generate enough revenue that 88 of the best wrestlers in the country would be able to earn $50,000 per year with the hope it will help sustain them so they won’t have to work a full-time job while preparing for international competitions. They also want the U.S. team to surpass Iran and Russia for the top spot in the world. It would also gives those so inclined the experience of competing in a sports league and learning to promote matches before moving into MMA.
It’s something that is the reverse of two decades ago, when people like Randy Couture, Dan Henderson, Matt Lindland, Mark Coleman and Tom Erikson originally started fighting in MMA as a way to earn money to support their Olympic wrestling dreams.
For Saturday’s event, the prize money will be $7,500 to the winner and $2,500 to the loser, for three championship bouts.
In marketing, Boyd wants to change terminology. He doesn’t like the term amateur wrestling. And he wants to use boxing and MMA terms for weight classes.
When Sam Hazewinkel, a member of the 2012 Olympic team, faces Tony Ramos, who won the NCAA title last year for Iowa, they’ll be battling for the GWC flyweight championship, complete with a title belt. The actual weight of the competitors isn’t even decided, but it will be something in the neighborhood of 126 or 127 pounds.
Dake, the only man in history to win NCAA titles in four different weight classes and the best U.S. college wrestler in recent years, will battle Andrew Howe, a former NCAA champion from Wisconsin, for the welterweight title, which will be at around 163 pounds. The two went into triple overtime last year when they were in a tournament for a spot on the U.S. team in the world championships.
The heavyweight championship will be decided with Tervel Diagnev, who placed fifth at the last Olympics, facing Tyrell Fortune, a former Division II national champion who lost to Diagnev in the finals of the tournament in 2013 to make the U.S. team for the world championships. Both men will be about 285 pounds, and Boyd wants to go back to the past the make the heavyweight division an unlimited weight class, bringing back the days of the behemoth 400-pound heavyweights.
Boyd, 68, won an NCAA title in 1969 while going undefeated in dual meets during his college career at Temple University. He’s finishing his 57th year in the sport, and still trains twice a week. He notes that in 1981, he became the only man to ever pin Victor the Wrestling Bear. After the age of 45, he won seven age group national championships, the most recent being in 2009. He’s also produced movies about wrestling, most notably the 1996 movie, “One More Shot.”
The idea of a professional league for amateur wrestlers isn’t new. A number have sprung up in the last 40 years, usually lasting very little time. The AGON promotion tried it in recent years.
The most visibility any of these projects got was nearly a decade ago, when Real Pro Wrestling had a run on national television. RPW was on both PAX TV (now Ion) and Fox Sports Net, but folded after one season, with minimal ratings and an inability to get sponsors. But that league featured some of the best wrestlers in the country at the time, who a decade later are now names in MMA, including 184-pound champion Muhammad Lawal (King Mo) of the Oklahoma Slam, teammate Daniel Cormier, who won the 211-pound championship, and 264-pound champion Patrick Cummins. Also in the promotion was current Bellator bantamweight champion Joe Warren.
“It’s a real challenge,” said Boyd, about the promotion. “I’m really hoping we can do what UFC accomplished. We’re looking to give wrestling a bigger audience, more entertainment value and get more media interest. That’s what we are looking for. For years, we’ve called ourselves amateur wrestling. If you call yourself amateur, how do you expect to get any attention?”
The amateur wrestling community has constantly been trying to figure out a way for its top stars to be able to earn a sustainable living while full-time training for national and international competitions. And it’s come full circle, because Boyd is in discussion about putting on a second show in conjunction with the annual amateur wrestling spectacular held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, on Dec. 21. He talked about getting Lawal and Warren to wrestle on the show, and wants to get in touch with Tito Ortiz.
Ultimately, he’s talking about major arenas and pay-per-view, and hoping to be a circuit where guys can make some money, make a name, and then some would then transition into the UFC or another MMA promotion.
They are experimenting with rules. On the first show, each match is a series of a best-of-five series of three-minute rounds, calling them rounds and not periods. The rounds will be scored both separately and together. If there is a pin, the match is over. If not, the first person to win three rounds takes it. However, if the loser wins his rounds stronger, enough to where after four or five rounds, he has more cumulative points than the winner, they go into a three round overtime to decide the championship. If that fails, they stand up and have a sudden death, first person to score round. If neither man scores after three minutes, there will be three judges who decide the champion.
“We’re pushing scoring more points, wrestling longer and wrestling harder,” said Boyd. “Our guys, if they go to the world championships, when they wrestle the Russians and Iranians, they’ll have trained for 15-18 minute matches, so they’ll have a little edge in conditioning. We want the U.S. to dominate wrestling and dominate Russia and Iran.”
“I need to see what happens after ten minutes,” he said. “We need to see how it looks when they’re exhausted. I may find the magic number is 12 minutes, not 15, maybe nine, but I want the matches to be longer. Whose ever heard of an entertainment event that lasts six minutes?
He’s talking to NBA owners, with a goal to get exposure by putting on wrestling matches at halftime of games.
“People call me crazy, but without vision, you’ll just do the same things over and over,” he said. “We’ve never been able to pay our athletes. We’re looking at being a bridge to UFC. If I can sit down with Dana White, we can map something out.”
He looks back at the early 1900s, when Frank Gotch was one of the biggest sports heroes of the time, and battled George Hackenschmidt before 29,000 fans at Comiskey Park in Chicago, or when Joe Stecher battled Earl Caddock in Madison Square Garden in legitimate matches for the world championships.
“I’d like to do a match in Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, a big match where the lure is that the winner would get $1 million,” said Boyd. “If people knew two guys were fighting for that much money, they would get interested.”
He thinks that will lead to more participation in the sport.
“The characteristics of being great in any sport are common in wrestling,” he said. “Any ten year-old boy, or ten year-old girl should experience wrestling for at least one season. It’ll make him a better baseball player or a better football player. It builds character. It’s the world’s oldest sport, the original sport of the ancient Olympics, and it’s a natural teacher of life experiences.”
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With yearly events in Japan and an increasing presence in Macau, Pacific Rim growth is becoming a priority for the UFC.
Next year, add South Korea to the list.
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Sean Christopher Haire, a gimmick MMA fighter better known by his pro wrestling name of Sean O’Haire, was found dead Tuesday morning by his father at the family’s home in Spartanburg, S.C.
TMZ reported that Haire was found in his bedroom with a red rope tied around his neck and connected to the bedpost, next to his bed. It reported the death as a suicide, although neither the Spartanburg police nor the Spartanburg County Medical Examiner’s office would confirm any details, past saying it did not appear foul play was involved, and that the investigative process on the death has only just begun. Haire was 43.
Known professionally as Sean O’Haire, he held a unique distinction in that he not only fought for both the Pride Fighting Championships in its dying days, but also for K-1 in Japan as a kickboxer, with very minimal training, and was better known as a pro wrestler for both World Championship Wrestling, where he was the 2000 Rookie of the Year, and for World Wrestling Entertainment, where he was briefly part of a tag team with the legendary Roddy Piper.
As a pro wrestler, he had something of a reputation as a tough guy. Billed as 6-foot-6 and 270 pounds, although he was actually a few inches shorter than that, but heavily muscled, Haire won a number of Tough Man fights in the 90s, prior to getting into the world of theatrics. He was well known at that time as a bad apple in Spartanburg and Hilton Head Island, S.C., who got into a lot of trouble, usually street fights in and outside of bars, before his wrestling days.
Once, when talking to Hilton Head Island authorities after one of his escapades, an officer said that everyone knew Sean Haire, and his getting into fights where police were called, was hardly an irregular occurrence.
His MMA and kickboxing career came after being released by WWE in April of 2004, which ended a relatively short career as a major league wrestling star. The irony is that with a little bit of luck and timing, his wrestling career could have been very different.
When WCW was going down the tubes in 2000, management decided to take a new approach. Trying to cut costs because of a company that was projecting record losses, the decision was made to focus on new talent as opposed to many of the huge names that ushered in the company’s boom period from 1996 to early 1999, after which the company had a free-fall in popularity.
O’Haire, then 29, was a physically impressive big muscled up guy with surprising agility, and was brought to television and given a major push. The belief in late 2000 and early 2001 was that WCW would be sold to a consortium that was headed by Eric Bischoff, who ran the company for all of its big years and was also there as it collapsed. There was even a press conference announcing the sale of WCW to Fusient.
Bischoff, who was the man in charge during the Bill Goldberg phenomenon in 1998, had earmarked O’Haire for a similar type of superstar push once he got control. But things didn’t work out. A new person was put in control of programming the Turner networks, who hated pro wrestling. With WCW no longer on television, Bischoff’s partners saw no value in buying the company. Instead, it was sold to Vince McMahon’s WWE in a fire sale for a paltry $2.5 million.
O’Haire, taught a different style of wrestling at the WCW school, didn’t adapt quickly to the WWE ring style. Because of his size and physique, he got chances, but ultimately didn’t succeed with them, and was let go.
At that time, O’Haire hooked up with Rick Bassman, a wrestling and MMA promoter in Southern California, who had connections with Pride and K-1. In those days, both groups loved the idea of putting a former WWE wrestler in real fights.
So O’Haire got thrown to the wolves. On Dec. 31, 2004, he was part of K-1’s annual New Year’s Eve spectacular, before 35,000 fans at the Osaka Dome, in a kickboxing match billed as pro wrestling vs. K-1. O’Haire had never done a kickboxing match. His opponent, the Japanese fighter named Musashi, had weeks earlier, gone to the finals in the K-1 World Grand Prix tournament.
The fight went about how one would expect. O’Haire came out swinging wildly while Musashi evaded and waited for him to tire, and then took him out early in the second round.
It was the era of freak show fights on New Year’s Eve, on a show where UFC’s Yoshihiro Akiyama armbarred former highly ranked heavyweight boxer Francis Botha in 1:54, and the best wrestler out of the Olympics that year, Karam Gaber, got knocked out by Japanese MMA star and wrestler Kazuyuki Fujita.
O’Haire did two years in kickboxing, going 0-4, losing all four fights by knockout.
His MMA career was more interesting, because he went from pro wrestling right into it, and won his first two fights via first-round knockout, the second on a K-1 promoted show in Honolulu. His luck ran out as he was thrown to the wolves, this time in Seoul, South Korea, facing Min-soo Kim, a South Korean who won a silver medal in the Olympics in judo, who also later was Brock Lesnar’s first MMA opponent. O’Haire lost that one via guillotine.
Without a doubt, his most high profile fight for U.S. fans was on the Oct. 21, 2006, Pride 32 show from Las Vegas, where he faced gimmick boxer turned MMA fighter Butterbean.
The fight was originally scheduled as Butterbean vs. Mark Hunt, but Hunt had a visa issue. Pride was aware of the potential of a problem, so offered O’Haire $3,000 and all his expenses paid, to be on stand-by. O’Haire took this as an excuse to party in Las Vegas, never expecting to fight.
Bassman, on Facebook, writing about the death of O’Haire, said that when O’Haire ended up in the fight, he was then approached by Nobuyuki Sakakibara, the President of Pride, who told him that fans expected a stand-up war from Butterbean vs. Hunt, and figured that O’Haire would try and take the fight down. Bassman figured that was logical, given O’Haire would have little chance of winning otherwise.
Describing the meeting with Sakakibara and Yukino Kanda, who booked fighters and headed the U.S. operations for Pride, Bassman wrote, “It’s immediately apparent that I’m being asked to make sure Sean keeps it standing up. I mildly protest, saying that doing so will eliminate his only true hope.”
Pride, known for paying big money at the last minute to get what they wanted, asked if a $5,000 bonus would be enough. Bassman negotiated it up to $10,000, and went to O’Haire with the proposal.
At first, O’Haire was thrilled. His $3,000 weekend just became a $40,000 weekend. Then he thought about it more, and it wasn’t as great a proposal as he first thought.
“I’m gonna get killed, aren’t I?” he said to Bassman. “Could you just ask Bean not to break my face?”
Bassman, friends with Butterbean, said he went to the 300-plus pound boxer, who agreed with one stipulation, that he hates getting kicked in the face and will lose his cool if that happens.
O’Haire was then given the message, don’t try to kick Butterbean in the face.
So O’Haire went out celebrating his good fortune before the fight.
The match started. The first thing O’Haire did was kick Butterbean in the face. Twenty-nine seconds later, O’Haire was knocked out.
O’Haire’s MMA record is listed at 4-2, with his final fight in 2007, although he fought a couple of other times in an era were record keeping was far from complete. He suffered left eye damage, the result of a bar fight, and his MMA career ended shortly thereafter.
After fighting, he at one time owned a barber shop and worked as a hair dresser in Hilton Head Island. He continued to have brushes with the law. Most recently, he was working as a personal trainer in Spartanburg, S.C.
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