The Sports Informant

I recently watched the “Ultimate Fighter Finale” on SpikeTV, which featured Philipino Phillipe Nover versus Mexican Efrain Escudero in the lightweight final. Nover, the clear cut favorite coming out of the reality show’s taped season, lost a unanimous decision to Escudero, who came in with a great game plan and stole a victory.

It was a fantastic three-round fight, and got me thinking… Where else can you be this entertained by guys not even proven to be great pros yet?

The easy answer is the Sacramento River Cats, who continuously sellout their games at the Triple-A baseball level with minor leaguers trying to make it to the big leagues.

But in any sport of fighting, sometimes it’s these amateurs turning pro that really put on the real show. They’re not catering to sold out stadiums and expensive pay-per-view audiences, just working hard to make a name for themselves by standing mano-y-mano with a guy across the ring looking to do the same. They’ve sacrificed any sort of careers outside of fighting and live off of crumbs to fulfill a dream of one day wearing a belt as blood drips down their faces. That’s pretty admirable.

I’m not a fan of reality shows. In fact, I believe most are more fiction than the fiction shows. But in the Ultimate Fighter, once fighters step in the Octogan, there’s no more acting. If you can’t fight, you will get your butt kicked on national television, bottom line.

So I try to tune in to the show to find out who the next great fighter might be. One day, like Light Heavyweight Champion Forrest Griffin, who got his start on the show, they could be champions, and I want to be able to have followed their run from the very beginning. It makes them human, and whenever I can relate to a guy chiseled out of rock who beats up people for a living, it’s a pretty cool thing.

Last week Escudero made his dream come true, and thanks to a real reality show, I was able to catch a glimpse of what that was like.

Which reminds me…

Philipinos and Mexicans have a nice little rivalry going. Manny Pacquiao, nicknamed the “Mexecutioner,” has been getting the best of all of the Mexican and Mexican-American boxers, and rightly so. Right now, there’s no one better than Pacquiao, and so he should continue to destroy all in his way, Mexican or not, until someone like Floyd Mayweather Jr. comes out of “retirement.” Beating our once “Golden Boy” Oscar de la Hoya, obviously in his decline, was a good notch in his belt.

If there’s one thing Mexican athletes are usually good at, it’s fighting. Being half-Mexican myself, I take pride in the success of athletes with similar heritage, but lately, we’ve been getting the crap beat out of us. It was nice to see Escudero win one back for us.

Oh, and you wanna talk about diversity? If there’s one sport full of it, it’s Mixed Martial Arts. Right now the UFC has a former WWE wrestler and Caucasian as it’s Heavyweight champ (Brock Lesnar), a Brazilian as its Interim Heavyweight champ (Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira), a goofy white guy as it’s Light Heavyweight champ (Griffin),a Brazilian as its Middleweight champion (Anderson Silva), a Canadian as its Welterweight champion (Georges St. Pierre) and a Hawaiian as its Lightweight champion, with several African American and other Latin American fighters in the mix for several of those titles. Welcome to the melting pot of professional sports, folks. This is the future.