WEC 37 Results & Review: Torres Cements Pound for Pound Status
Last week’s WEC 37 event was a card filled with far more questions than many MMA fans and pundits have lent credence to, almost all of them surrounding the 135lb Mexican-American headliner—and a man who literally exploded onto the mainstream scene in 2008—WEC bantamweight champion Miguel Torres.
Contrary to the pathetic attempt at a media build-up of—admittedly capable—challenger Manny Tapia, Torres stood alone at the top of the card as the sole attraction for casual fans. While the hardcore audience eagerly anticipated the WEC debut of former IFL fighter Wagnney Fabiano, an affair that turned into a sluggish grappling clinic, albeit with Fabiano coming out on top, as well as an unofficial bantamweight title eliminator between the undefeated Brian Bowles against the Olympic Brazilian boxer Will Ribeiro, none of the aforementioned fighters could hold a box office candle to the headliner.
As previously touched upon, while the under card did its job—sometimes exciting, sometimes boring—but always with a clear winner in each contest, it was Torres who cemented his status not only as the greatest bantamweight in the world, but also as one of the top five pound for pound fighters in the world. Anyone who argues against that claim is, at this point, quite blatantly mistaken.
Some could point to the bantamweight division’s lack of serious depth as one of the leading contributing factors to Torres’s domination of the division (he holds just one loss in 36 professional fights by decision, a loss he has since avenged in dominating fashion) however, this claim is fueled only by mainstream ignorance of the lighter divisions, as classes such as bantamweight and featherweight have only recently laid claim to serious exposure with the emergence of the WEC as a leading fight promoter.
The fact remains that, while Torres could use a step up in competition—possibly a super fight with former featherweight champ Urijah Faber or current champ Mike Thomas Brown, or possibly a match with some of the Japanese standouts—he has not only beaten his four WEC opponents handily, but he has done so without any semblance of a game plan.
In a world of Greg Jacksons, Mark Delagrottes, and other MMA mastermind strategists, Torres trains in a local gym in Chicago where he could spend one session sparring with a 230lb behemoth and the next rolling with an overweight 14-year-old kid. As one of the most accomplished ground fighters in MMA today, with 21 submission victories, Torres chose instead to stand and bang with one of the division’s most dangerous and explosive strikers in Tapia. The result? A dominating, one-sided second round TKO by Torres.
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The only other headline worthy of noting on the WEC 37 card was the aforementioned title eliminator between Bowles and Ribeiro, a high-octane, competitive affair with the more explosive, more aggressive Bowles finishing it off with a well-timed guillotine choke early on in the third round. While Bowles lacks the experience of a Miguel Torres, he makes up for it with a tenacity to match and a lean, explosive frame capable of giving anyone in the weight class serious trouble.
Should their fight come to fruition in the near future, expect Bowles to give reigning champ Torres the biggest challenge to date in his WEC tenure. Time will tell whether or not he can be beaten, and at a just ripe 27, the champion has certainly got a lot of time.
By Steven T. Kelliher
ProFighting-fans.com Staff Writer