Well I just randomly found this out and was surprised to see that a rather exciting ex-champion of the UFC has decided to open his own regional fight promotion. I suppose this is a good thing to be able to showcase lower-level talent and perhaps that was his intention in the first place.
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It's called the APFC and while there was some chatter that this stood for "American Predator Fighting Championship" it actually stands for "Anthony Pettis Fighting Championship" which makes sense, is kind of self-glorifying, but whatever man! I hope this works out and I hope some regional attention can make some money for some lower-tier fighters.
Could this be the future of retiring or forcibly retired UFC fighters? We've already seen that Khabib started his own Russian fight promotion called Eagle MMA and it remains to be seen if he, or anyone else, can actually make these things popular enough to actually make any money doing it. One could argue that Khabib has significantly more clout than Pettis does, but Pettis has a secret weapon in that he is focusing, at least for now, exclusively on his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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APFC venues don't feature any names that you have probably ever heard of unless you are part of the Milwaukee fight scene, of which I am not so I don't know who any of the guys are on the card but I have to admit that I would like to see it. A lot of times I feel as though UFC is a bit boring because of the fact that it is so far up the ladder that often I feel as though the fighters are desperately trying to NOT LOSE rather than win. In the lower levels it is almost always a question of the guys and girls going out there trying to make a rather brutal name for themselves.
Pettis was originally slated to participate in this invitational but how to bow out because of broken hands. Talk about hardcore.
I don't have any idea how to watch this online. I've looked and there just isn't a great deal of information about it. It may just be for the local crowd but I would imagine that someone will be making video of it. One of the fights on the card that people should be most interested in is Angelo Pettis, who is 18 years old and is the cousin of Anthony. No doubt he will be getting a big push if he can manage to be any good.
This regional promotion idea reminds me of the way that professional wrestling was before WWE basically took over the entire industry. In many ways it was a lot better because having so many different brands to compete with kind of ensured that everyone was going to be doing as much as they could to deliver a high-quality product. It's kind of not a coincidence that once WWE was the only game in town, that I started to lose interest in the sport altogether.
Let's hope it's a winner!