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#4: UFC 148: Silva vs. Sonnen II – 07/07/2012 – Las Vegas, Nevada
Why was it a big show?
Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen first fought for the Middleweight title in 2010, and somehow the stars aligned for both men; Sonnen took the fight to Silva more than any other fighter had done before despite losing in the end, and his pre-fight trash talk brought interest that Silva had always struggled to gain despite winning an incredible 11 UFC fights to that point. Essentially, the rivalry with Sonnen made Silva into the superstar he always should’ve been.
Suddenly he was one of the UFC’s most bankable fighters, and when the rematch with Sonnen was announced for UFC 148 – complete with an undercard featuring a Bantamweight title match between Renan Barao and Urijah Faber and the trilogy fight between Tito Ortiz and Forrest Griffin - Dana White was so confident that it’d break the buyrate record held by UFC 100 that he promised to base jump from the roof of the Mandalay Bay resort if it failed to do so.
What happened?
The card ended up weakened by various changes, as the UFC had to move the Barao/Faber fight to UFC 149 when that show lost its main event, and were forced to remove Rich Franklin from his fight with Cung Le and replace him with a lesser star in Patrick Cote. In the end, Ortiz/Griffin acted as co-main event to the long-awaited Silva/Sonnen rematch.
That fight went very differently to the original – this time Silva never felt like he was in danger and finished Sonnen by TKO in the second round. And Griffin vs. Ortiz was very different from their previous two fights as well, as both men were clearly past their best.
Basically, UFC 148 just about failed to live up to all the hype despite being a decent show overall, and it wasn’t as big a box-office smash as Dana was hoping it would be either – drawing 925k pay-per-view buys and missing out on the record. With the weakening of the card, it was perhaps the first sign that the promotion was spreading itself too thinly – a criticism that still holds weight today.
Success rating: ***
