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ANAHEIM - When a company hypes its first-ever event as "The Greatest MMA Show of All Time," there's a wee bit of expectation. Such was the case on Saturday, as Affliction was the latest mixed martial arts organization to pop up, putting on a show that featured an all-star cast of mixed martial artists, shoddy production, horrendous timing, the pimping of celebrities, highlight knockouts galore, quite possibly the world's best fighter, a 36-second main event that didn't disappoint anyone in a sold-out Anaheim Honda Center and perhaps a new dawn for the world's fastest growing sport. Oh, and apparently 1992 called and demanded Megadeath play the event, as well. At the end of all that was Affliction: Banned - as seems to have become commonplace in the burgeoning sport of mixed martial arts - just about every question centered around what's next. And to that, Affliction Vice President Tom Atencio offered: "I can't tell the future, we'll see." Affliction all started with a bunch of $60 T-shirts perennially worn by MMA superstars and "that guy" at your local nightclub everywhere. Eventually it evolved into Saturday, a card that boasted four former Ultimate Fighting Championship titlists, no fewer than 10 competitors who were at one time widely considered top-10 fighters and one Fedor Emelianenko - a borderline pudgy, gentleman of a fellow who moonlights as half-Russian bear, half-cyborg and, in all seriousness, might very well be the baddest man on this planet or any other.  Fedor Emelianenko was the baddest man of the night. With an unrelenting alphabet soup of new MMA organizations - the IFL, the WFA, Bodog, M-1 Global, YAMMA, World Victory Road, Elite XC, Dream and on and on - having popped up since the UFC became such a sensation roughly five years ago, it's hard to fathom that anything new will stick around or make an impact in the fighting world. But Affliction felt different. It was going to be big. It had big names, a big venue and all kinds of hype. Through roughly the first two hours of the event, all of that appeared for naught, though. The first two fights, set to air on Fox Sports Net before the pay-per-view broadcast began, limped along - two hours, two fights. Fighters were sent out to the ring and sent back, fighters could be seen backstage and in the ring during commercial breaks trying their best to stay warm, as the card failed miserably in its attempts not to grow cold. Even the crowd cooled down, as former UFC light heavyweight champion Vitor Belfort made his middleweight debut and looked everything like the "Phenom" he once was, as he knocked Terry Martin from consciousness and the ring. The highlight-reel knockout and the subsequent eruption of the crowd were easily forgotten, as the next fight didn't come about until roughly 30 minutes later. Then there was Megadeath. Their debut on the show, the centerpiece of a stage setup that offered an unrelenting and unnecessary fog machine and beaming lights that blinded at least a few fans, saw combatants from the top-four fights march out to get it all started - all the while, two preliminary fighters cooled down in the ring before their bout.
It was a show that looked and felt everything like a show put on by a company that had never put on a show before.
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