Affliction Trilogy gets canceled
July 24, 2009 by Ryan Harkness
Filed under MMA-UFC
Two days ago we passed along info that Josh Barnett had been busted for juicing and his fight against Fedor Emelianenko had been canceled. Now I have more bad news for you: the entire Affliction Trilogy event is dead. And unlike the Kimo news from yesterday, this is for sure … word came out this morning that fighters were being contacted and Affliction president Tom Atencio released a statement an hour ago saying the following:
Affliction Trilogy Poster - Image: Affliction Entertainment
“Finding an opponent for the No. 1 ranked MMA heavy weight champion in such a short period of time was a huge endeavor and I’m thrilled at the amount of fighters willing to take on this challenge. But in the end, we just didn’t have enough time to promote a new fight to our standards.”
This sucks, especially considering how excited everyone was getting over the potential replacements for Fedor. The MMA community was making a case for Brett Rogers to get a shot, which would be a Cinderalla tale for the ages. Not even a year ago, Rogers had to return to his job balancing tires at Sam’s Club because he couldn’t make ends meet as a fighter. A surprise win over Andrei Arlovski last month propelled him into everyone’s top ten lists and a fight with Fedor would have made for excellent movie fodder, win or lose.
On top of that, Vitor Belfort was said to have actually signed a bout agreement to face Fedor, but never heard back from the promotion to confirm the bout.
So why cancel the event? Well, Affliction has already taken pretty epic financial beatings from their past two events. And relying on all this drama to turn into ticket sales and PPV buys is a risky proposition, especially when you don’t know how the silent masses will react to a last second main event shift. Word is Affliction’s pay per view partner Showtime had a big say in the final decision to shut the event down. I have no idea how they’re affected exactly but I don’t think it’s foolish to think it all had to do with money … or the lack thereof.
No one has said if this is the end of the road for Affliction but people are already talking about how the company will spread it’s card out amongst other events to fulfill it’s contractual obligations. That doesn’t exactly make it sound like they’re gonna ask for a do over.
