Dear Bellator: Thanks for Making the Fights That the UFC Shouldn't

Saturday night at The Forum in Inglewood, California, at Bellator 170, a legend will make his walk one last time, while another will return to the ring for the first time in over three years.    

Tito Ortiz, he of the flaming shorts, bleached blonde hair and wild run as one of the UFC's first true superstars, will call it a career regardless of the outcome on Spike TV.

Chael Sonnen, he of the big opportunities generated by his even bigger mouth, will make his Bellator debut and fight outside the UFC for the first time since 2008.

In its own way, for better or worse, the lead-up to the bout has been memorable. Sonnen mocked Ortiz for having his car repossessed; Ortiz crushed a juice box on national television in a bizarre analogy representative of Sonnen's past dabbling in performance-enhancing drugs.

You know, the usual stuff.

The fight itself holds almost no competitive interest—it's a main event on a January night between two guys who are a combined 80 years old. They have 74 professional fights between them at this point. But the matchup is still captivating. Sonnen has framed it as a noble pursuit in the name of keeping a promise to his dying father, while Ortiz has used it as a chance to go out on his own terms after an iconic career.

It's a little bit of harmless fun, just worthwhile enough to pass muster without veering into the freak-show realm Bellator has been so keen to engage in the past.

It's also the type of fight you're not likely to see on a bigger stage like the UFC. For every CM Punk or Sage Northcutt redux, the UFC remains the top of the heap competitively. If an athlete is going to stay on that roster into his or her 40s, it's going to be on merit.

(Video contains profanity.)

Randy Couture was still elite to his last days. Ditto for Dan Henderson, even if he diminished from his prime. Anderson Silva is still a Top 10 middleweight. Most fighters in the heavyweight division seem to have entered their prime in the back half of their 30s.

Aging commodities have a place in the promotion, but they have to earn their keep.

Bellator is less concerned with that angle and more concerned with having a big name to put on the marquee, which is why it's throwing together two elder statesmen who washed out of the UFC and making an event out of it.

And that's OK. In fact, it might even be great.

When looking at the UFC, there's a certain market it cannot corner. There's an expectation that, even in the face of the increasing demands of fighters to receive the dreaded "money fight," the best will fight the best.

Bellator doesn't do that. It can give you Royce Gracie, a few Ken Shamrock fights and Kimbo Slice—a legend in his own way—before his untimely death. As a result, no one looks twice at Ortiz and Sonnen locking horns, and there's a case to be made that it straddles the line between ridiculous and compelling.

For a watch-if-you-want free television event, you could do a lot worse than that. The UFC often does in terms of providing interesting free material on Fox Sports 1.

So thank you, Bellator, for making the fights the UFC shouldn't. MMA is mostly niche in the sports world as it is, and there are niches even within that. One of them is the variety-oddity bout between Ortiz and Sonnen.

It's a fight the UFC would almost never make and one the sport probably didn't know that it wanted.

Luckily, Bellator has it covered.

Follow me on Twitter @matthewjryder.