Following his third straight loss after going undefeated for a decade, Fedor Emelianenko has been released from his Strikeforce contract.
In a wildly entertaining fight in Illinois on Saturday night, Dan Henderson became the third man to shock the MMA world by defeating Fedor by TKO in the first round. Many on the internet were outraged that referee Herb Dean stepped in when he did, and because of their loyalty of Emelianenko, they refuse to see any other result.
However, if you look carefully at replays, Fedor fell to the ground with palms facing upward, if he did start reacting a few seconds later it was because Henderson’s other punches woke him back up.
There have been arguments that this was similar to the Barry v Kongo fight or Edgar v Maynard 2.
You have to consider though that even though it looked like Edgar and Kongo were down for, at no time did they go totally limp like Fedor.
After suffering his third shock defeat and being finished in each of those fights, the future now looks uncertain for the former pound-for-pound best fighter in the world.
Zuffa who despite claiming Strikeforce would continue to operate “business as usual”, have been trimming expenditure and Fedor’s inflated contract which also includes co-promotion with his company M-1 Global was cancelled.
However it has now surface that while Zuffa can choose not to promote a fight with Fedor, it is in fact cable company Showtime who have the actual contract with Emelianenko and M-1.
This leaves the door open for one more possible fight in the United States but it is hard to work out where Fedor should go from here.
Dana White has been gleefully telling people how wrong they were in naming Fedor the “Michael Jordan of MMA”.
It seems the sport has finally caught with and moved past The Last Emperor, but regardless of criticism it cannot be denied that he was one of if not the greatest heavyweight of his era, which sadly seems to be at an end.
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