July 20, 2008

  • After all these years of watching mixed martial art events through DVDs and Pay-Per-Views, I finally gave myself the opportunity to watch one live this past day (July 19, 2008). I suppose it's only fitting that my very first live MMA show is also the inaugural show of "Affliction: Banned." Affliction is an upstart MMA organization, that was able to get a lot of support from MMA fans and fighters alike. In fact, the fight card for this show is unbelievably good, with tons of high profile fighters in the majority of the fights. The event was at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. Being that this is an MMA event, there was a majority of guys to girls in attendance ofcourse. However there were a ton of hot looking women accompanying their man to the show too. There were also non-MMA celebrities in attendance as well, but the ones I actually saw were Jenna Jameson and Donald Trump.

    Ticket prices for this show were not exactly on the cheap side, so I got the lowest priced tickets, which was something like $65. The seats that me and my friend were assigned to were literally less than 10 rows away from touching the back wall to the ceiling. That's right, we had nose-bleed seats. We decided to cheat and seat at one of the rows closest to the front of our section, until the owners of those seats eventually show up to kick us out. Surprisingly enough for the farthest sections of the arena, we had a good view of the fight. We can't see the detail of the action when the fighters are in a clench or doing some ground game, but that's what the overhead video screens are there for. I'll say this, it feels weird watching the fight without hearing any commentaries. During the second fight, I overheard some people nearby us talking to one of the employees about getting tickets switched for much closer seats. I inquired about that, and sure enough we were able to switch our nose-bleed cheap seats, with seats that were closer to the ring. I think we got seats that would have cost us $200! Apparently they wanted to fill up some of the more expensive seats that weren't sold, so that it'll look better on camera. Lucky us.

    As for the Affliction show itself, it was really good. The first fight started at 4:30 and the last fight ended about five hours later. I still have a few concerns though. Affliction used a tradtional ring format, instead of a cage, which wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the fact that the ropes seemed incredibly loose. Some fighters were easily able to fall out of the ring in a clench because of those loose ropes. I also did not like the fact that after the fighter does his entrance walk, they do the vaseline on the face thing inside the ring itself, and not outside like most events do. That kind of kills the momentum of the ring entrance, when the fighters have to stop all of a sudden again, after they already went through the ropes. What I did like was that they had heavy metal band Megadeth perform a song, while they let the fighters of the main fights walk out one by one for their group appearance in the beginning. I thought that was really cool, and Megadeth even performed two more songs sometime during the rest of the night. I never saw Megadeth live before, so this was yet another treat.

    I'm not going to talk about the fights in detail here, because of spoiler reasons, and the fact that you can probably find better recaps in certain MMA dedicated web sites. I'll tell you this though, out of the ten total fights that occured, I only maybe did not like two of them. That's a very good percentage for an up and coming MMA organization. The big draw was ofcourse the Fedor Emelianenko versus Tim Sylvia fight, and wow was that explosive. Some favorite MMA fighters were back fighting in the ring after a long break from it, like Gary Goodridge, Vitor Belfort, Matt Lindland, Josh Barnett, etc.. All in all, it was a great MMA event, that pretty much convinced me and my friend that we should go to more LIVE MMA events in the near future.

    - click here to see the Photos I took (spoilers) -

    - Megadeth videos possibly showing up here soon if youtube allows it -