Bellator’s first ever bantamweight champion Zach Makovsky held the title for nearly 17 months, but in his first title defense at tonight’s Bellator 65, he lost the belt. Season five tournament winner Eduardo Dantas became the promotions second ever bantamweight champion with an impressive outing in front of a pro-Makovsky crowd at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It’s been just over a year since the last time Tiger Schulmann stand-out Lyman Good was seen in the Bellator Fighting Championship cage. Looking to get back onto the winning track, Good will step into the cage at tonight’s Bellator 65 as he takes on Lavon Maynard in a Season 7 Welterweight qualifying match.
With the UFC having taken an extended break, Bellator has been capitalizing on this lapse with their own brand of MMA programming. Bellator 65 will feature matches across several tournament brackets, and a title bout that should make for a great night of action. So, let’s take a short look at what we have in store this Friday.
The first time I heard the name Ben Askren was exactly two years ago, this month. He was scheduled to square off against Ryan Thomas in Bellator’s Welterweight tournament at Bellator 14. I’d heard of Thomas, the former UFC veteran, whose resume’ looked great on paper and who was poised to make a run in that tourney and challenge then Champion, Lyman Good. Add to that the fact that Askren only had three pro fights to his credit and we were looking at a sure-fire mismatch.
It’s odd how quickly the sport of MMA has changed, and how perceptions have shifted so dramatically. I got in on the ground floor of this crazy train, having seen an ad for UFC 1 in one of several karate publications I read as a young martial artist. I had entered the world of karate as a boy, partially to be more like my older brother, but primarily because I always wanted to kick people’s asses. Mike Tyson having begun to fade into “Bolivian” at the time, guys like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal were the new bad asses of our era, and if you wanted to lay an ass kicking on schoolyard thugs, you needed a black belt ASAP.
When you live on the edge there always comes a time when your luck runs out. So was the case last weekend at Bellator 55 when after 13 rolls of chance, the promotion finally hit snake eyes when the light heavyweight champion Christian M’Pumbu lost to Travis Wiuff in a non-title bout.
Bellator Welterweight Champion Ben Askren might be waiting some time to finally defend his Welterweight title, but he will still face a tough fight as he takes on MMA veteran Nick “The Goat” Thomspon at Bellator 40, which takes place at the First Council Casino in Newkirk, Oklahoma.
On a weekend with no UFC cards, Bellator 39 had the MMA community all too them self’s, allowing them to showcase their talent to the masses. With two tournament bouts and a lightweight title fight gracing the main televised card on MTV2 this was the perfect card to have the full fans attention.
