All these brawls are getting to be a little too much for the guys running Real American Freestyle.
Saturday night’s RAF10 was headlined by Khamzat Chimaev vs. Dillon Danis, a match-up between two historically volatile fighters with something to prove to the world. Things got pretty tense during a impromptu pre-fight run-in, and that tension turned into a full-on brawl after Chimaev tech falled Danis in just 50 seconds to win their freestyle wrestling match in St. Louis, Missouri.
Here’s how it went down: Chimaev caught Danis in a fireman’s carry and pinned his shoulders to the mat. Danis tried to lock an illegal choke on Khamzat and then kicked the former UFC middleweight champion when “Borz” stood up. Chimaev responded by kicking Danis back, and then the floodgates opened and what seemed like 50 men ran out onto the canvas to engage in a Royal Rumble.
Ever since Arman Tsarukyan brawled with Georgio Poullas at RAF06, it almost seemed like RAF was leaning into similar shenanigans. They immediately invited Tsarukyan back for a rematch with Poullas and have booked both men repeatedly since (leading to this bit of great publicity for RAF). They started booking Dillon Danis, one of the biggest instigators and trolls in the sport today. And they enjoyed the coverage of every brawl, near brawl, or threat of off-the-mat violence that went down.
But now former WCW figurehead and RAF co-founder Eric Bischoff is sternly pushing back against the scene we saw at RAF10.
“It was not a good situation at all,” Bischoff said (video via MMA Fighting). “Listen, we’re committed to being family-friendly combat sports. There’s such good will in the sport of wrestling across the board so that’s what we want to nurture and that’s what we want to grow. What we saw tonight was not what we want to grow, and it will be addressed going forward. So we will stay true to our brand and the culture we want to use to grow this company and what you saw tonight [won’t happen again].”
“98% of what you saw knocked it out of the park for us and we’re so proud of it,” he added. “All the way up until that point. So we’ll address the issue, we’ll correct it and like any other sport we’ll continue to grow.”
His partner Chad Bronstein also expressed his dismay with Khamzat and Danis.
“We talked to both of them prior to the match and said, ‘Keep all wrestling on the stage, there should not be anyone getting on that stage.’ The show was amazing before we got to that issue and the wrestling world deserves wrestling which is what we’re here to provide, right? So to answer your question: no, we didn’t want that.”
“We’re ten shows in and that has happened once, now twice. We have to make sure again any time one of these matches happens that security is even bigger so we don’t have that situation.”
A comical amount of people rushed onto the wrestling mat the moment things started getting hairy, so RAF definitely has to do better with security or just with the people it allows into these events. If they were serious, anyone who does anything like that should be banned from attending, whether they’re the athlete or a corner or a friend.
Not to be all ‘back in my day,’ but back in my day people were railroaded out of the promotions for stuff like this. That’s how it was kept from descending into the kind of thuggish stupidity you’d expect to see from Rutube street fights. We’ll see if RAF is serious about stopping this from happening again, or if they’ll turn around and book Chimaev and Danis for the next available RAF slot.
