I was going to refrain from ever commenting on the RioHeroes 9 event, but it seems to be re-emerging as a topic in mixed martial arts. What I find rather ridiculous is that the concept is what is being concentrated on rather than the boring drawn out fights, the horrible... let me rephrase that, horrendous production, and just bad styles and quality of fighting from the competitors. The concept is bare-knuckle fighting that has no time limits and no tapouts. Apparently nobody but myself watched it.

First, having an infinite time limit doesn't make the fighting brutal. It makes it unbelievably boring. Almost every single fighter gassed out to the point where they looked as if they were hugging each other on Valentine's Day for nearly half of the bouts. The zero time limit didn't allow any of the fighters to catch their breath and the basic strategy was to outlast the onslaught of their opponent to make the fight become unbearably boring. Secondly, bare knuckle fighting wasn't the problem at the RioHeroes 9 event. It's quite possible I missed some brutal head blasting knockout that obliterated some poor fighter's face. Let's get something straight before I argue my point that this is pointless to talk about because it's bare knuckled. During the RioHeroes 9 card, guys had cuts and injuries that were very consistent with UFC injuries and cuts I've seen in the past. It didn't seem like they were getting horribly beaten to death like most articles suggest. To be fair, the referee did stop some of the fights even though it's proclaimed to be a ruthless Vale Tudo promotion where only choking the guy out stops the fight or knocking him out. That brings me to my last point. As much as they advertise this no holds barred style of fighting, the referee still stopped many of the battles. Granted, he was taunting fighters to finish their opponents and hovering over guys yelling at them from time to time, but he did stop a few fights before they got horrifically bad. Fact is, it wasn't as bad as it got blown up to be.

I'm going to take a different approach however to why I think RioHeroes needs to be blasted off the face of the Earth. Yes, I agree that the possibility of someone being choked out in every fight brutally to end the fight is bad for the sport of MMA. What else is bad about RioHeroes? How about the fact it was filmed in a Brazilian basement that was the size of a one car garage or the person holding the camera for the fights was the clumsiest person alive and managed to fall down repeatedly missing periods of action that in some of the bouts was deemed to be important. There's nothing like a minute lapse in the camera work and then to come back to a fight where one guy is suddenly in a choke. Even better was the crowd, a bunch of people who looked like they were paid to be there and included some kids that looked as if they were in middle school. Moreover, I couldn't help but notice the two or three older women in the crowd. Were those mothers of the fighters? It was very odd.

Anyways, I guess that this is more of a comical rant that anything. We shouldn't be talking about RioHeroes for the mere fact it was absolutely one of the worst events I have ever seen as far as MMA goes. The commentators couldn't be heard, the referee gave inspirational speeches before bouts instead of just saying "Let's get it on!", the crowd was not into it, and it was quite possibly the biggest waste of Internet bandwidth ever since the implementation of streaming media. To me, the whole bare knuckles concept is second to the long boring drawn out battles that RioHeroes creates. It's like watching Andrei Arvloski vs. Fabricio Werdum for 15 minutes straight, just turn it off and forget about it. RioHeroes 10 looks to be the type of event that will create huge uproar from the event's preview stream that has a bunch of highlights showing big knockouts. Yeah, maybe that event will be a black mark on MMA. Please stop caring.

This is purely a rant.. although I did actually watch the event online when it happened, and it is now spearheads endless jokes pertaining to how horrible it was.