It's 17 days out from his clash against Georges St. Pierre at UFC 111 and the Dan Hardy hype machine has arrived in the New York area. Hardy posted his first stateside video blog. There's not a whole lot to it aside from cup shopping, some awful teeth and revealing the nugget that he'll be spending some time on Long Island, the home of Matt Serra, the last guy to take out GSP.
We're hoping Hardy can find the manufacturer of Adam Lambert's spiked cup. That would be a real weapon come fight night!
In a previous blog at DanHardyMMA.com, Hardy tried to clear up a couple of things Cagewriter has blogged about in the past few weeks. One was Hardy tattoo-gate. The Brit lost his gut tattoo on several posters:
But another item I've read online I'd like to clear up is why my stomach tattoo has been Photoshopped off the official UFC 111 poster. Maybe I am the wrong guy to moan about getting Photoshopped, but I'm not really very happy about it and don't understand the reason behind it at all.
I've been told the people who designed the poster felt my tattoo would be "too distracting". Well, I'm very happy with my tattoo. Makes no sense they airbrushed it out. But some of the guys at the gym have found it very amusing, so at least they got a laugh out of it.
Hardy found it funny that some message board posters tried to get to the story behind the story.
Some of the theories out there as to why it was removed were very funny. I had no idea MMA fans were such hardcore conspiracy theorists. If they ever do another series of the "X-Files", the producers should look no further than the MMA fan forums for their writing team.
Through his P.R. minions Hardy, also said his last wrestling singlet blog was not attempt to disparage GSP. It was only intended to mock on his own wrestling abilities.
Check out the day 2 vlog. Serra, Hardy and Ray Longo should provide some blog magic.
Despite a fight card that had highlight knockouts, quick submissions, a championship belt changing hands and lots of blood, ratings for the WEC 47 broadcast on Versus were low. According to MMA Junkie, the fights drew a 0.46 share and 373,000 viewers.
In comparison, WEC 46, which featured Urijah Faber in his first bout back since injuring both hands in a fight with Mike Brown and a title unification bout between Ben Henderson and Jamie Varner, drew 640,000 viewers.
In Columbus, the fight card was a success. After strong walk-up and day before sales, 8,345 people filled Nationwide Arena, the WEC's fifth largest crowd ever.
So what is the problem? Versus being pulled off DirecTV is partly to blame, but Versus was off DirecTV in January when WEC 46 pulled in such strong numbers.
Was it the line-up? Though Dominick Cruz and Brian Bowles, the card's headliners, are not the most well-known fighters, Jens Pulver and Miguel Torres were both on the card. Regardless of the fact that they both lost, they're usually both popular enough to get people to watch.
The good news is that if you didn't tune in, you still have a chance to see Scott Jorgensen's foot-dangling submission, Cruz taking the bantamweight belt from Bowles and Torres' head getting busted open by Joseph Benavidez's elbow. WEC 47 is replaying on Versus tonight at 9 p.m. ET.
In the meantime, we want to know. Did you watch WEC 47? Why or why not? Take our poll and tell us in the comments.