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MMATorch Interview: Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney on Pat Curran's injury, the featherweight division, UK TV, and more

Aug 21, 2012 - 8:45:04 PM MMATorch Interview: Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney on Pat Curran's injury, the featherweight division, UK TV, and more DISCUSS ALL THIS IN OUR NEW MMATORCH FORUM ...OH, ONE MORE THING - PLEASE BOOKMARK US & VISIT DAILY!



By: Rich Hansen, MMATorch Columnist, and Jamie Penick MMATorch Editor-in-Chief



Bellator Fighting Championships closes out their second summer series this Friday night with a four-fight main card on MTV2 from Harrah's Tunica Hotel and Casino in Tunica, Miss. The event was supposed to feature a Featherweight Championship bout between Pat Curran and Patricio "Pitbull" Freire, but Curran suffered a broken orbital bone last week that forced him out of the event. Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney spoke with MMATorch's Rich Hansen shortly after that news broke last week to discuss Curran's injury, the status of the featherweight division in the wake of that news, and much more:



RICH HANSEN: Let me start by asking you about the Hector Lombard fight against Tim Boetsch. Last time we talked you told me you couldn't see him being beaten at all and he lost in his UFC debut. How shocked were you by that?



BJORN REBNEY: You know, I've seen that in other athletes before. I was very surprised, and I think that Hector had just the worst night I've seen Hector have literally since I started watching him fight in Japan years ago. He just had an off night; he just absolutely had an off night. I don't think you'll see it out of him again. You see it at the highest level in tennis some of the time, you see it in football some of the time, you see it in basketball; guys have bad nights, and Hector had a bad night. I think he's an unbelievably talented middleweight, I think he can beat anybody in the world, I just think he had a bad night. I was as surprised as anyone, but there's no doubt in my mind that he'll come back and that he'll be devastating Hector Lombard and erase that performance from our memory, but it was an off night.



HANSEN: When is Pat Curran due to return, or is it too early to know?



REBNEY: Still too early to know. I'm in the process right now of waiting to get the full extent of the medical breakdown, of how serious the break or the fracture in the orbital bone is. Once we know that we'll be able to make a kind of diagnoses on it. Most orbital bone fractures that I've seen - because it happens in our sport some of the time - are a three month rehab situation. It's a little bit of a tricky rehab, it's not like an arm you can put in a cast. But my hope would be sooner rather than later. Maybe we'll get good news and it's just a very small fracture, but we're waiting to get the final information. I'm just heartbroken for Pat. His training's been going awesome. He had the devastating knockout win over Marlon [Sandro], then he had the devastating knockout win over [Joe] Warren. He's really been climbing the ranks into the top four or five in a lot of people's list at 145 lbs. This was going to be a big fight for him. Patricio [Pitbull] has been ranked in the top six or seven now for about year and a half. It's the kind of fight that could put Pat on everybody's list as the #2 in the world behind Jose [Aldo]. I was looking forward to it happening for him, and it's just, these things happen. It's mixed martial arts, and sometimes guys get injured.



HANSEN: I've already got him #2 on my list, for whatever that's worth.



REBNEY: I agree with you. I think if everyone in the world at 145 lbs. started throwing punches, Jose and Pat would be the last two guys standing. I'm in agreement with you, I think Pat is a wicked talent. And in addition to being a wicked talent, he's also a very, very, very cool guy. He's a good human being, a pleasure to be around; he's a great spokesperson for our brand, and the sport as a whole. He's a good dude, and you hate to see bad things happen to good people, but he'll bounce, he'll be fine. He'll get back from it.



HANSEN: Josh Koscheck suffered a broken orbital bone in his fight against Georges St-Pierre in December of 2010, didn't return to fight until nine and a half months after that. Theoretically, if Curran's injury winds up following the same time frame that means he's going to be out until after the completion of not just season seven, but season eight. With Pitbull, and Daniel Straus, and the season seven featherweight tournament set to happen starting in October, what does that do to this Championship? I'm going to shotgun a few questions: is Pitbull going to be fighting on Bellator 73? If so, who is he going to be fighting? And is there any chance that you might cancel the season seven featherweight tournament just because of the backlog that's going to build up?



REBNEY: No. Josh's situation - it was horrible for him and I feel for him - hopefully it was an anomaly, and there won't be any kind of a duplication of that here with Pat. That would be awful if there was. We'd have to kind of reassess. At that point, god forbid if Pat's situation were one that was going to take seven or eight months or longer just because of the severity of the injury we'd have to really look at it and say, 'ok, Interim Championship fights are not something that we've entertained in the past, but we've got Straus waiting, we've got Pitbull waiting…



HANSEN: But it might be on the table?



REBNEY: Sure, you'd have to look at something like that. If Pat ran into a GSP kind of situation where he was out indefinitely, you'd have to look at it like and say, 'ok, we've got Pitbull waiting who absolutely deserves his shot, you've got Straus waiting who absolutely deserves his shot.' And then by the time we get to Christmas here this year, you're going to have another really talented 145 pounder waiting on his shot. So it would be too much of a backlog. And as we move to Spike, we're obviously going to have more tournaments, so you're going to have even more wickedly talented featherweights earning their shot as well. That's something we'd have to really think through, and talk about in-house, and try to figure out what the best answer to that conundrum would be. We'll figure it out and make it work. My hope against hope is that Pat's going to rehab quickly and it's not going to be a potentially extensive process to get him back in and training. Obviously you don't want to rush it, but my hope is its just not going to be that kind of length. We'll deal with it if it is.



HANSEN: Is Pitbull going to be fighting somebody a week from Friday?



REBNEY: No, Pitbull won't be fighting next Friday. We're going to sit back and see what's going to happen with Pat. If we get good news we'll reschedule there, if we don't we'll figure out what happens with Daniel and kind of make that whole situation work.



HANSEN: In an injury free world tournaments are a great idea, but injuries do happen. As you said earlier, when you move over to Spike there are going to be more tournaments per season. When you look at the possibility of Curran being out seven months [or more], does this ever give you even a moment where you sit down and reconsider adhering so strictly to a tournament format?



REBNEY: No, it doesn't. I think what you've got to do in a situation like this is look at it reasonably and objectively. There's a clear line that you could draw in the sand and say 'we'll never do an Interim World Title fight,' but then you run into a situation like the UFC did with GSP, and you have to reassess and say 'ok, in the interim, we've got one guy who's a legitimate top ten right now in Pitbull, we've got another guy in Straus who was a year ago top seven ranked in the world, and they're both waiting for a world title shot. So if Pat's going to be out for an extended period, perhaps we do need to do an Interim fight between those two guys, and then have a World Title fight when Pat returns.' You do have to bend on those things, because we're in a sport where injuries do occur. Thankfully they don't occur on as serious a level as the do in boxing and in football, but they do occur, and when they do sometimes you're going to have to adapt and mold your format to adjust to it. It's something we're going to look at, hopefully we don't have to, but there's no doubt as we get more tournaments and have more frequency, we're going to run into it. And we're just going to have to take steps to deal with it and the situations as they arise.



HANSEN: How long would Curran have to be on the shelf before an Interim Title idea would be in play?



REBNEY: I wouldn't go as far as saying an Interim Title fight would happen. What I would say is if Pat's time period is going to be one that extends beyond three to four months then we're going to have to start looking at how do you deal with that situation given the deserving nature of Pitbull and Straus and whoever it is that comes out of this next 145 lb. tournament that starts in about a month. So you'd have to just start figuring out how to orchestrate from there. But I'd say the three to four month period would be about the limit of what you could expect to have fighters of that caliber wait on.



HANSEN: Which divisions are there going to be tournaments for in season 7?



REBNEY: Heavyweight, welterweight, lightweight, and featherweight.



HANSEN: No middleweights, is that because you're waiting to do the fight between [Alexander] Shlemenko and [Maiquel] Falcao before you get another tournament?



REBNEY: Yeah, we'll do Shlemenko-Falcao on Spike probably one of the first two or three weeks of the Spike launch. Then simultaneously we'll do a 185 lb. tournament featuring all the biggest names we've got… back at 185 lbs.



HANSEN: Which Champions will be defending their titles in season seven?



REBNEY: Well, we'll probably do the 135 lb. Title defense because right now we've got Marcos [Galvao] fighting against Luis Nogueira… that should be a great fight. The winner of that will fight [Eduardo] Dantas, which brings up a very odd conundrum if Marcos wins that and he's got to fight Dantas, who is basically almost a little brother to him… That presents a storyline unto itself if those two guys [get matched up].



HANSEN: I'm looking forward to the possibility, which is why I want Galvao, just to see teammates put that aside for one night, or for six weeks, even.



REBNEY: Not even teammates, these guys are just… the relationship between Marcos Galvao and Eduardo Dantas is just almost like teacher-student, older brother-younger brother. They are super tight. That's just an interesting dynamic where this sport presents some problems and conundrums that other sports don't. It's one thing playing against your brother when you're one of the Barber brothers playing football, it's a whole other thing going against a very, very close friend in a mixed martial arts cage. We'll see. It will make for very interesting writing, I'll tell you that.



HANSEN: Which other Champions will be fighting in season seven?



REBNEY: That's something I don't think we've announced yet. [Bellator matchmaker] Sam [Caplan] and I are still kind of bouncing some of the ideas back and forth about what we'll do in seven and what we'll ultimately hold and do on Spike. So we're kind of figuring out how to parcel that all out as we speak.



HANSEN: I know season seven starts last week of September, how long is the season running until?



REBNEY: It'll run 12 weeks, so we'll be done in the middle of December.



HANSEN: Lastly, do you have any updates on the medical situation for Blagoi Ivanov?



REBNEY: Yeah, I actually got a report from Bulgaria about two weeks ago. He has, throughout the entirety of his incident, he lost around 90-100 lbs. which is just staggering when you think about it. I mean, you're talking about a wickedly well-trained, world-class Sambo player who was a 250 lb., very solid individual. And to go down to 150 lbs. is just, it's shocking.



HANSEN: Yeah. Took my breath away.



REBNEY: Yeah, it's one thing for somebody to lose 40 lbs., but when you're talking about 100 lbs., he was so badly injured and in such dire straits that he lost a whole human being. What I would say is this: he's alive, he's communicative, he can speak, he can move, it appears as if he didn't suffer any kind of brain damage. All his faculties are there, which are just absolute gifts from god. Those are wickedly good things to say. Is he ever going to resume an athletic career? Remains to be seen.



HANSEN: And who cares if he does, I'm just asking from a human standpoint, you know?



REBNEY: My point exactly. If he does, then it becomes a story the likes of which people will write novels about and make a movie on. And if he doesn't, and he just survives and ends up having a family and having kids and moving on, that's awesome too. However he moves forward.



HANSEN: And even credit to you, I would be shocked if he ever fought again, but keeping tabs on him even though he has nothing to do with your company [at this point] is a classy move on your part, sir.



REBNEY: Well thanks. He was a good dude, and he brought it, performed at a high level, and he was nothing but a pleasure for us to work with. I was shocked as anybody when I got the news that he had come out of [his coma]. One week I was being told by doctors in Bulgaria that the chances of him actually ever coming out of the coma were very slim, and a week later I was online watching him do a short, abbreviated press conference announcing that he was going to try to get well and go home. Sometimes miracles happen, and this is sure one of those. Hopefully we've got a bunch of other stuff to talk about in the coming year where we go 'I can't believe he's doing this or that.'



HANSEN: Last question, is there any update on the UK television situation?



REBNEY: No, none. The group that handles our international television, Freemantle, there's not been much headway since the last time we spoke. I'm probably more anxious than anyone because I get more tweets and more messages from people in the UK about trying to get a TV deal than anywhere else. I would love to have it happen.



HANSEN: They're very passionate when they feel like they're being slighted (laughs)



REBNEY: I know! And it truly and honestly is not a slight. We've been negotiating with a series of British fighters and fighters from the U.K. We signed Paul 'Semtex' Daley who is one of my favorite fighters of the last decade. We want the U.K. to be integrated into the Bellator brand, it's just our agency hasn't been able to secure a deal yet. I'd bend over backwards to make it happen, but it just hasn't happened yet. Bellator Fighting Championships closes out their second summer series this Friday night with a four-fight main card on MTV2 from Harrah's Tunica Hotel and Casino in Tunica, Miss. The event was supposed to feature a Featherweight Championship bout between Pat Curran and Patricio "Pitbull" Freire, but Curran suffered a broken orbital bone last week that forced him out of the event. Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney spoke with MMATorch's Rich Hansen shortly after that news broke last week to discuss Curran's injury, the status of the featherweight division in the wake of that news, and much more:BJORN REBNEY: You know, I've seen that in other athletes before. I was very surprised, and I think that Hector had just the worst night I've seen Hector have literally since I started watching him fight in Japan years ago. He just had an off night; he just absolutely had an off night. I don't think you'll see it out of him again. You see it at the highest level in tennis some of the time, you see it in football some of the time, you see it in basketball; guys have bad nights, and Hector had a bad night. I think he's an unbelievably talented middleweight, I think he can beat anybody in the world, I just think he had a bad night. I was as surprised as anyone, but there's no doubt in my mind that he'll come back and that he'll be devastating Hector Lombard and erase that performance from our memory, but it was an off night.REBNEY: Still too early to know. I'm in the process right now of waiting to get the full extent of the medical breakdown, of how serious the break or the fracture in the orbital bone is. Once we know that we'll be able to make a kind of diagnoses on it. Most orbital bone fractures that I've seen - because it happens in our sport some of the time - are a three month rehab situation. It's a little bit of a tricky rehab, it's not like an arm you can put in a cast. But my hope would be sooner rather than later. Maybe we'll get good news and it's just a very small fracture, but we're waiting to get the final information. I'm just heartbroken for Pat. His training's been going awesome. He had the devastating knockout win over Marlon [Sandro], then he had the devastating knockout win over [Joe] Warren. He's really been climbing the ranks into the top four or five in a lot of people's list at 145 lbs. This was going to be a big fight for him. Patricio [Pitbull] has been ranked in the top six or seven now for about year and a half. It's the kind of fight that could put Pat on everybody's list as the #2 in the world behind Jose [Aldo]. I was looking forward to it happening for him, and it's just, these things happen. It's mixed martial arts, and sometimes guys get injured.REBNEY: I agree with you. I think if everyone in the world at 145 lbs. started throwing punches, Jose and Pat would be the last two guys standing. I'm in agreement with you, I think Pat is a wicked talent. And in addition to being a wicked talent, he's also a very, very, very cool guy. He's a good human being, a pleasure to be around; he's a great spokesperson for our brand, and the sport as a whole. He's a good dude, and you hate to see bad things happen to good people, but he'll bounce, he'll be fine. He'll get back from it.REBNEY: No. Josh's situation - it was horrible for him and I feel for him - hopefully it was an anomaly, and there won't be any kind of a duplication of that here with Pat. That would be awful if there was. We'd have to kind of reassess. At that point, god forbid if Pat's situation were one that was going to take seven or eight months or longer just because of the severity of the injury we'd have to really look at it and say, 'ok, Interim Championship fights are not something that we've entertained in the past, but we've got Straus waiting, we've got Pitbull waiting…REBNEY: Sure, you'd have to look at something like that. If Pat ran into a GSP kind of situation where he was out indefinitely, you'd have to look at it like and say, 'ok, we've got Pitbull waiting who absolutely deserves his shot, you've got Straus waiting who absolutely deserves his shot.' And then by the time we get to Christmas here this year, you're going to have another really talented 145 pounder waiting on his shot. So it would be too much of a backlog. And as we move to Spike, we're obviously going to have more tournaments, so you're going to have even more wickedly talented featherweights earning their shot as well. That's something we'd have to really think through, and talk about in-house, and try to figure out what the best answer to that conundrum would be. We'll figure it out and make it work. My hope against hope is that Pat's going to rehab quickly and it's not going to be a potentially extensive process to get him back in and training. Obviously you don't want to rush it, but my hope is its just not going to be that kind of length. We'll deal with it if it is.REBNEY: No, Pitbull won't be fighting next Friday. We're going to sit back and see what's going to happen with Pat. If we get good news we'll reschedule there, if we don't we'll figure out what happens with Daniel and kind of make that whole situation work.REBNEY: No, it doesn't. I think what you've got to do in a situation like this is look at it reasonably and objectively. There's a clear line that you could draw in the sand and say 'we'll never do an Interim World Title fight,' but then you run into a situation like the UFC did with GSP, and you have to reassess and say 'ok, in the interim, we've got one guy who's a legitimate top ten right now in Pitbull, we've got another guy in Straus who was a year ago top seven ranked in the world, and they're both waiting for a world title shot. So if Pat's going to be out for an extended period, perhaps we do need to do an Interim fight between those two guys, and then have a World Title fight when Pat returns.' You do have to bend on those things, because we're in a sport where injuries do occur. Thankfully they don't occur on as serious a level as the do in boxing and in football, but they do occur, and when they do sometimes you're going to have to adapt and mold your format to adjust to it. It's something we're going to look at, hopefully we don't have to, but there's no doubt as we get more tournaments and have more frequency, we're going to run into it. And we're just going to have to take steps to deal with it and the situations as they arise.REBNEY: I wouldn't go as far as saying an Interim Title fight would happen. What I would say is if Pat's time period is going to be one that extends beyond three to four months then we're going to have to start looking at how do you deal with that situation given the deserving nature of Pitbull and Straus and whoever it is that comes out of this next 145 lb. tournament that starts in about a month. So you'd have to just start figuring out how to orchestrate from there. But I'd say the three to four month period would be about the limit of what you could expect to have fighters of that caliber wait on.REBNEY: Heavyweight, welterweight, lightweight, and featherweight.REBNEY: Yeah, we'll do Shlemenko-Falcao on Spike probably one of the first two or three weeks of the Spike launch. Then simultaneously we'll do a 185 lb. tournament featuring all the biggest names we've got… back at 185 lbs.REBNEY: Well, we'll probably do the 135 lb. Title defense because right now we've got Marcos [Galvao] fighting against Luis Nogueira… that should be a great fight. The winner of that will fight [Eduardo] Dantas, which brings up a very odd conundrum if Marcos wins that and he's got to fight Dantas, who is basically almost a little brother to him… That presents a storyline unto itself if those two guys [get matched up].REBNEY: Not even teammates, these guys are just… the relationship between Marcos Galvao and Eduardo Dantas is just almost like teacher-student, older brother-younger brother. They are super tight. That's just an interesting dynamic where this sport presents some problems and conundrums that other sports don't. It's one thing playing against your brother when you're one of the Barber brothers playing football, it's a whole other thing going against a very, very close friend in a mixed martial arts cage. We'll see. It will make for very interesting writing, I'll tell you that.REBNEY: That's something I don't think we've announced yet. [Bellator matchmaker] Sam [Caplan] and I are still kind of bouncing some of the ideas back and forth about what we'll do in seven and what we'll ultimately hold and do on Spike. So we're kind of figuring out how to parcel that all out as we speak.REBNEY: It'll run 12 weeks, so we'll be done in the middle of December.REBNEY: Yeah, I actually got a report from Bulgaria about two weeks ago. He has, throughout the entirety of his incident, he lost around 90-100 lbs. which is just staggering when you think about it. I mean, you're talking about a wickedly well-trained, world-class Sambo player who was a 250 lb., very solid individual. And to go down to 150 lbs. is just, it's shocking.REBNEY: Yeah, it's one thing for somebody to lose 40 lbs., but when you're talking about 100 lbs., he was so badly injured and in such dire straits that he lost a whole human being. What I would say is this: he's alive, he's communicative, he can speak, he can move, it appears as if he didn't suffer any kind of brain damage. All his faculties are there, which are just absolute gifts from god. Those are wickedly good things to say. Is he ever going to resume an athletic career? Remains to be seen.REBNEY: My point exactly. If he does, then it becomes a story the likes of which people will write novels about and make a movie on. And if he doesn't, and he just survives and ends up having a family and having kids and moving on, that's awesome too. However he moves forward.REBNEY: Well thanks. He was a good dude, and he brought it, performed at a high level, and he was nothing but a pleasure for us to work with. I was shocked as anybody when I got the news that he had come out of [his coma]. One week I was being told by doctors in Bulgaria that the chances of him actually ever coming out of the coma were very slim, and a week later I was online watching him do a short, abbreviated press conference announcing that he was going to try to get well and go home. Sometimes miracles happen, and this is sure one of those. Hopefully we've got a bunch of other stuff to talk about in the coming year where we go 'I can't believe he's doing this or that.'REBNEY: No, none. The group that handles our international television, Freemantle, there's not been much headway since the last time we spoke. I'm probably more anxious than anyone because I get more tweets and more messages from people in the UK about trying to get a TV deal than anywhere else. I would love to have it happen.REBNEY: I know! And it truly and honestly is not a slight. We've been negotiating with a series of British fighters and fighters from the U.K. We signed Paul 'Semtex' Daley who is one of my favorite fighters of the last decade. We want the U.K. to be integrated into the Bellator brand, it's just our agency hasn't been able to secure a deal yet. I'd bend over backwards to make it happen, but it just hasn't happened yet.



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