Bellator appeared to take a leaf out of pro-wrestling’s playbook last night as Stephan Bonnar and Tito Ortiz stepped into the cage during the season 11 premiere on Spike TV last night to announce that they would be fighting on November 15th.
It was a bizarre spectacle with Bonnar appearing in the cage flanked by a masked man before beginning to talk trash about Ortiz, calling him “a sack of crap” and questioning how the UFC hall-of-famer’s former ex-pornstar girlfriend had put up with him for so long.
The most cringeworthy moment though was when Bonnar unveiled the masked man standing next to him. Rather than the crowd in attendance going “wow!” at the big reveal, there was instead an audible silence as people instead appeared to be thinking, “who?”
The moment was made more awkward by the fact that Bonnar made no attempt to inform the crowd who the guy standing next to him actually was. For the record, it was a long-time former training partner of Ortiz’s, Justin McCully.
Nope, no one else cared either.
Ortiz next got on the mic and called them both “drug addicts” before taking umbridge at his family and friends being brought into this.
In wholly predictable fashion it was now time for the men to engage in a good old fashioned shoving match initiated by Ortiz who somehow managed to shove thin air as Bonnar and McCully sidestepped him and others intervened to hold them apart.
“The Bad Boy is back, baby,” Ortiz yelled into the mic as he then left the cage with Bonnar still taunting him.
Oh well, clearly Bellator are figuring that, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” and while the immediate response online appeared to be a mixture of head scratching, bemusement and pictures of The Fonz jumping the shark, it got people talking and everyone now knows about the upcoming Bonnar Vs Ortiz match-up.
Check out their in-cage antics for yourselves in the video below.
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