Bodog Beat

UFC veterans Mark Kerr and Oleg Taktarov fought at Yamma Pit Fighting. (MMAweekly.com Photo)

Sometimes the worst fighters actually deliver the best fights. I once saw two old ladies throw down at a bake sale, and to this day, it’s still the most entertaining thing I've ever seen in my life. With that logic in mind, I was expecting Yamma Pit Fighting to be so bad, it would actually do a complete 360-degree spin around the wheel of awfulness and end up being wildly entertaining. After all, the card looked like a trainwreck waiting to happen. Of course, that’s exactly what promoter Bob Meyrowitz had in mind. Like a throwback to the early UFC events, Yamma was meant to be a spectacle, not a sport.

The Broadcast Team

Meyrowitz was the guy who sold the UFC for $2 million dollars back in 2001 and then watched the new owners transform it into a multimillion dollar success story. I can only imagine the overwhelming sense of loss and unbearable shame that he feels about that.

For his new event, he broke out the rolodex and called up all his old crew, including play-by-play man Bruce Beck, color commentator (and Olympic gold medalist) Jeff Blatnick and John Perretti, who was briefly the UFC matchmaker after his own event, Extreme Fighting, went down in a blazing ball of failure in the mid-'90s. The overall effect was a bizarre trip to the past for hardcore MMA fans, and it was all glazed with something ugly thanks to the repellent work of announcer Scott Ferrall, who seemed simultaneously out of breath, drunk and constipated for most of the event.

The Yamma

Instead of having fighters throw down in a boxing ring or an octagon, promoters designed a "revolutionary fighting surface" called the "Yamma." Imagine crossing the UFC octagon with an enormous salad bowl and you've got the right idea. Anyone who's brawled on an icy parking lot knows that the outcome of a fight is directly affected by the environment in which it occurs, so sending a crew of chubby dudes and senior citizens to throw hands in a giant salad bowl reeked of insanity, which is exactly why it caught my attention.

Read more about Yamma Pit Fighiting at Bodog Nation.