As usual, Randy Couture found a way to just win. It wasn't pretty, but it sure was effective. Did anyone else feel like they were watching a replay of Tim Sylvia vs. Brandon Vera? It was basically the same deal. Sylvia kept Vera pressed against the fence for the vast majority of the fight. Vera managed a takedown, even passed to side control, but couldn't manage to do much with it. The outcome would be different, of course, given that Vera managed a knockdown against Couture and never really damaged Sylvia, but the gameplan and execution were basically the same. The funny thing is that conventional wisdom after the Sylvia fight said that Vera was just too small to deal with the big heavyweights. Now that he's dropped to 205, he succumbed to the exact same tactic. Seems like the issue is not so much size but strategy.

I'll leave it to others to debate the quality of the fights themselves (though I thought the two that went to decision were dreadful), but I felt it had to be said that last night's Strikeforce broadcast had so many awful, maddening, amateurish problems that the entire experience was marrred. I thought the commentary was as poor as it ever was with EliteXC (even without Bill Goldberg), but my main problems are two:

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Listen, I'm not about to blow a gasket because Dana White used disparaging terms about women and gays. I get the feeling that these are terms that he uses quite frequently when the cameras aren't rolling. While the words are hateful in origin and hurtful in context, it's beyond my scope to level much ire against Dana's vocabulary. He's probably talked like that his entire life and it's not something we can change.

What baffles me, what infurates me, is his hubris. There are plenty of cases where public figures make politically-incorrect statements because they didn't know a microphone was on or they thought they were speaking off the record. But this was Dana White's own production. He has complete control over what appears in his video blogs, was well aware that the language he used was sure to offend, and yet he still chose to broadcast his little rant without any edits. That video can't ever be recalled, so he must have known that his words could be thrown back in his face at some point in the future. And still, knowing all that, he didn't just rubber stamp the broadcast, he insisted on it. That's not "ballsy," it's megalomania, and it makes me very nervous.

Reading a lot of the comments from regular fans on MMA blogs, there seems to be a common sentiment in the wake of Evan Tanner’s death: it hurts more than people expected and they’re not exactly sure why. Most never met the man at all, yet they feel for his loss like a member of their own family. Let me put in my two cents:

The fan-athlete relationship between Evan Tanner and the MMA community was not like the relationship with other fighters. Evan was our child and we were his protectors.

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