BUTTERBEAN LAYS AN EGG IN MUSKEGON

by The Prophet, ProphetFighting

It's not a big secret that I don't like Eric "Butterbean" Esch. He's essentially the "Bizarro Bo Jackson" of fight sports. While Bo excelled in a couple of different pro sports, Butterbean has managed to defile not only boxing but MMA as well.

His less than stellar career may have reached its nadir on Saturday night. I'll make you head over to ProphetFighting to read the full account of the carnage, but here's the high points: Butterbean was in a flyover country town called Muskegon(I think its in Wisconsin or Michigan or somewhere) to fight a guy named Matt Blaine. Don't make the mistake I did and try to find information on Blane on BoxRec or Sherdog--he's an appliance mover by trade and neither site keeps records on manual laborers.

Unlike most of the nightclub bouncers, truck drivers and longshoremen that comprise Butterbean's not quite "Ali-like" professional resume, Blaine did something that caught the "Laughable Legume" by surprise: he actually fought back, and came into the contest with an actual fight plan. Blaine will never be mistaken for UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva, but he had a decent strategy of wearing down "The Bean" by launching some approximation of Muay Thai knee strikes into his opponent's corpulent gut. From the way he reacted, however, you'd have thought Bean *was* in against Silva (arguably the best pound for pound striker in MMA for those of you scoring at home)--he first cried to the ref about the blows being "low". He then quit on his stool between the 1st and 2nd rounds. Inexplicably, the C-List MMA promotion "Cage Rage" that sanctioned the event somehow managed to get the farce ruled a "double DQ". How a fight where one guy quits while the other wants to fight ends up as a "double DQ" is beyond me--I guess fighting an opponent who wasn't just going to stand there while the 'Bean teed off on him wasn't in his contract.

That's when things got ugly for Butterbean--the 3,000 mouth breathers in attendance launched into a "Butterbean sucks" chant--essentially the white trash equivalent of a parliamentary "no contest" vote. And since there's apparently not much else for the Muskegon sporting press to write about, 'bean was savaged in this morning's Muskegon Fish Wrap. Again, you'll have to head over to ProphetFighting to read the whole thing, but the highlight of the writer's tirade against Butterbean was him getting off a "goo filled stomach" blast against the man.

As a MMA fanboy it pains me to no end to have to acknowledge that Butterbean is an actual PRIDE veteran, but things like this help to restore the proper balance and order to the fightsport universe.

Butterbean's "MMA fight" turns into a fiasco @ ProphetFighting