The Heat and the Shine

Let us stand back and appreciate Carlos Condit.  For he is a great fighter.  He deserves a world title shot.  He is a psychopath. It takes at least a smidgen of mental illness to compete at the top levels of sport.  A wise man once said, "you have to be smart enough to do it, and dumb enough to think it matters".  That is Carlos Condit.  It matters to him.  You can see it in the skinny Mexican frame that's been built into a lithe sculpture of muscle and sinew.  You can see it in the scraggly beard and the lack of bunny-bait tattoos.  Carlos don't care. In part the fascination is because he's not the typical fighter/dunce.  This ain't some redass rassler or hard life thug.  He's almost a scion.  The son of a white Democratic Party operative and a Latino mother.  He fights because he wants to.  He loves the sport.  He loves competition.  He loves to whip your ass. Condit's destruction of Marvin Kampmann was in total.  And it wasn't just provi

The  Triple H interview  on Grantland is well worth a read.  Of course a long interview with a powerful WWE executive is going to be interesting.  Of course a publication like Grantland will make sure the interview stays a shoot, which makes it even more interesting. Most interesting (at least, to yours truly), is what Triple H reveals about himself through subtext.  Namely that he is a wrestler in full: wise, savvy and paranoid. Triple H is wise in that he gets what a lot of hardcore wrestling fans choose to ignore: the fact that WWE offers opportunity.  Bray Wyatt is the example he cites in the interview, but there are dozens of others.  WWE wants wrestlers to get over because over wrestlers draw money. There are exceptions to any rule, and that applies to WWE's promotion of wrestlers.  They screwed up Goldberg.  They probably could have handled Scott Steiner better.  It always felt like Shelton Benjamin could have been something more.  But by and large Vince has good tas

It's done, and just in the nick of time.  With about 72 hours to go until an embarrassment of Crystal Pepsian proportions, the deal got done for Fox Sports 1. On Saturday, that means fights.  But what does it mean today?  One thing it means is that Fox took a heck of a hit in opportunity cost. Fox Sports 1 has attractive programming scheduled beyond UFC.  On Saturday night, Fox imports Dan O'Toole and Jay Onrait, witty ex-anchors of TSN SportsCentre, for the nightly highlight show, "Fox Sports Live".  On Monday afternoon, Regis Philbin begins a studio show, "Crowd Goes Wild".  And one week from next Thursday, Fox Sports 1's marquee property (sorry, UFC), college football, kicks off. The problem is that they're all too late.  Today, O'Toole and Onrait don't mean squat. (sorry) And Regis means even less. (not sorry) College football means something, but that is two weeks away.  And the sum total of all of it is too close to nil in the ga