The Octagon mat was stained with blood for this last weekend’s UFC 74. Obviously the prelims had been eventful but nothing was mentioned during the Live PPV telecast. Well, the cats out of the bag and apparently David Heath and Renato Sobral don’t like each other.
The huge smear that all TV viewers saw on the mat came from a huge gash on David Heath’s head, suffered by a legal, brutal elbow that was delivered by Renato in the second round.
David Heath tried some psychological warfare against Renato and failed. He wore a mugshot on his shirt of Renato to the weigh-ins and then they exchanged words forehead-to-forehead during their staredown.
The thing that David forgot was that Renato has a bit of a temper problem. Ok, the word “bit” is understating the issue. Renato has a huge temper problem and you don’t poke a Lion while he is sleeping and give your opponent ammunition to pump themselves up.
Renato came out in their fight with an ugly agenda and dominated the full fight, including opening up a huge gash on David’s head. When he got the Anaconda choke and David eventually tapped out, HE HELD IT! He looked straight at Steve Mazzagatti, the referee for the match, and held the choke despite the referee trying to pry his arms loose. What more, he admitted this in his post-fight interview.
You might have gotten away with that at UFC 2 where Royce Gracie looked right at a referee and broke a guys arm. That was then, this is now. MMA is now standardized, legalized, rules based, with athletic commissions and major news outlets now monitoring everything that happens. To willfully disobey the referee’s orders to release a choke and ignore a tap from your opponent is tantamount to spitting in the whole sports eye and endangering the hard won legitimacy that MMA has fought for all these years.
The NSAC is currently withholding half his $50,000 purse pending an investigation and hearing but the UFC needs to step up pro-actively and take action againt Renato before the athletic commission can get to the fighter themselves. What he did was not only disobedient but incredibly dangerous. Strokes and death can occur if the blood is cut off from the brain for very long. That is why the ref is there to protect the fighters and why the rules are in place that allow tapouts.
Renato needs a nice vacation and some mandated anger management courses if he wants to come back and fight in the UFC. He is an exciting fighter to watch but nobody is above the MMA rules and regulations. Nobody.