Is Bellator going in the wrong direction?

“Pull your pants down. I’ll show my nuts right now. Let me see your nuts. You’ve got baby nuts, Dada. I bet you my nuts are bigger than yours. Come on.”

Those were the never-to-be-forgotten words uttered by Kimbo Slice yesterday as he prepared for his fight with fellow street fighting specialist Dada 5000 on this weekend’s Bellator 149 card which takes place in Houston, Texas.

Now, ordinarily, someone who is familiar with the history of mixed martial arts wouldn’t be shocked by this. And I’m not. Remember, this is the sport of broken doors, tastes of big pee-pee and killing people to a living death.

In all of those cases, though, and many more besides, the sideshow was just that – a sideshow. But in the Bellator of 2016 the sideshow seems to have become the whole show.

In headlining positions of the biggest cards of the year you have street fighters and men so past their prime that fellow fighters in MMA weren’t even born the first time they fought.

Bellator parades Ken Shamrock, Royce Gracie, Dada 5000 and Kimbo Slice with pride while Will Brooks, probably the best fighter under contract with the promotion, is left rotting in the sidelines of the big events to later be showcased on lesser cards with lower viewers.

And we all know why. Bellator is a television product. It lives and dies by viewer numbers. Quite literally. If viewer numbers fall too low on a consistent basis, parent company Viacom will have no choice but to shut up shop.

So the choice was made to go in the direction of sideshow. The direction of known names. The direction of survival.

Bellator are doing anything they can to produce a product that will peak interest right now whether we like it or not. Tough.

A near-pensioner with name value or a guy with millions of hits on YouTube or a star of a documentary is worth more to Bellator than people with actual mixed martial arts skill.

And although that’s OK for them, it doesn’t mean it has to be OK for the viewing public.

For a lot of people, MMA, due to its very nature, is a sport laden with contradictions but heavily predicated on it being an athletic competition based on skill and fairness with the health and safety off all competitors as important as humanly possibly when undertaking such activities.

This weekend’s Bellator card fails miserably to adhere, or ever get close, to that.

For one, how did an athletic commission even clear someone like Ken Shamrock to fight? Even back in the mid-2000’s he was a shadow of the athlete he once was. Now he is an old man who needs to be saved from himself. And Royce Gracie, despite less of a rigourous competitive career, isn’t exactly a spring chicken himself.

And that’s before we even get to Kimbo vs. Dada 5000. The latter who was appropriately described as looking like a drunk/dead version of yours truly by Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter yesterday after video of him hitting a heavybag made him a viral laughing stock online.

What we basically have here is two guys who had some sort of quasi-beef coming out of a documentary which focuses on a street-fighting ‘promotion’ run by Dada 5000. In it, Dada accuses Kimbo of stealing his persona and using it to make himself a star while all the time being lesser of a fighter. Something the Bellator circus will prove to be true or not on Friday night. How kind of them.

When Scott Coker took over Bellator coming up on two years ago it was felt hope was finally here for a promotion which Bjorn Rebney was seemingly allowing to die away by the very minute.

That hope, though, has also quickly died and left us with a product like Bellator 149. The saddest part of which is that Kimbo Slice, a man who got famous because of a backyard brawl on YouTube, is the most legitimate MMA fighter as it currently stands in the top-4 participants of what will probably be the biggest card of the world’s second biggest promotion this year.

Actually, no. The saddest thing is that I’ll probably be watching it on a grainy stream at 5am on Saturday morning.