Entertainment At a Premium At UFC 111

UFC 111 underlined George St Pierre's status as the most dominant champion in the sport emphatically and undermined the UFC's ambitions of becoming a mainstream sporting event dramatically.

GSP dominated Dan Hardy from start to finish. He was successful with 100 percent of his take down attempts meaning that Hardy spent the majority of the five rounds flat on his back with GSP on top of him. It was not a difficult fight to score but it was a difficult fight to enjoy.

Despite having 25 minutes in which to inflict damage on one another, neither man succeeded in doing so. GSP came close with a couple of submission attempts but both fighters emerged from the fight relatively unscathed which will have done little to sate the average viewer's lust for violence.

As the UFC puts on more and more pay-per-view shows, it is the average viewer that it needs to attract. Jo Rogan casually dismissed the large sections of the audience who were booing during a technical ground battle between Jon Fitch and Ben Saunders as being "meat heads." 

Rogan is missing the point: The vast majority of viewers are not interested in watching two fighters spend five minutes jostling for position on the mat. This situation is exacerbated in a large arena where it is very difficult to observe the subtle intricacies of ground fighting action from a distance.

The UFC has been brilliantly marketed as the final frontier for combat sports but it is somewhat ironic that the majority of its viewers seem to want to watch a kickboxing or Muay Thai match, whether they realize it or not.

Even more damaging to the UFC's reputation were a couple of extremely unsavoury incidents. The first occurred in the co-main event when Shane Carwin landed a series of savage uppercuts to buckle Frank Mir's knees. Carwin continued to reign down blows with Mir prone on the canvass and was allowed to do so by referee Dan Miragliotta long after Mir had clearly lost consciousness. Even the commentators were appalled.

Earlier on the card, middleweight Rousimar Palhares defeated Tomasz Drwal via heel-hook. The submission was applied perfectly and caused Drwal to tap instantly. For reasons best known to himself, Palhares chose to ignore Drwals increasingly urgent taps and crank the submission on even harder.

Even when the referee intervened, Palhares still did not immediately release the leg. Drwal was left screaming in agony and it is difficult to draw any interpretation of the incident other than that Palhares, despite already having won the fight, wished to inflict a serious injury on his opponent

It remains to be seen what damage was done to Drwal's knee but he had to be helped out of the cage and was in obvious pain. Fighters refusing to release submissions when their opponents tap is exactly the sort of ammunition that opponents of MMA, which is still not sanctioned in nearby New York, will use gleefully.

In the fight game, more than in any other sport, winning is not enough—fighters are required to put on a show. GSP's reluctance to engage Hardy on his feet might have frustrated his opponent but it will also have frustrated the fans. His strategy, carefully formulated by coach Greg Jackson, might have offered minimal risk but it also provided zero entertainment.

The UFC now has champions in the lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight divisions BJ Penn, GSP, and Anderson Silva respectively, who appear unbeatable. A fight between GSP and Silva is a distinct possibility and a mouth-watering prospect but a fight of this magnitude will only come around every few years. The UFC, which seems intent on putting on 20-plus pay-per-view cards a year, needs to ask itself "where does the entertainment lie?" because soon audiences will be asking themselves the same question.