Barnett, Ortiz Jockey For Spot As Fedor’s Final Opponent

Bellator president Scott Coker is looking to set up a last fight for the Russian heavyweight, and he’s got some good options already lined up.

Heavyweight GOAT contender Fedor Emelianenko didn’t fight in 2020, just another thing the Coronavirus took from us last year. And it may be a while yet before we see him in the cage again, as Bellator president Scott Coker attempts to wrangle an ambitious massive last hurrah for “The Last Emperor.”

“I really want Fedor to finish his career in front of 30,000 people in Moscow, to be honest, Bellator MMA’s first fight in Russia,” Coker told MMA Junkie recently. “Do a fight in Moscow. For him, the prodigal son has returned. Fedor is the greatest fighter of all-time, and he’s now coming home to retire and put his gloves up and hang it up to retire.”

Of course, that’s going to be difficult until COVID-19 vaccinations are well underway in Russia. A slightly less difficult but no less important issue is who to put across the cage from Fedor. Two Bellator signees that would make solid headliners are Josh Barnett and Tito Ortiz. Both men volunteered their service when the question was raised over Twitter.

Barnett vs. Emelianenko is a match-up that should have happened forever ago in the wild days of Pride Fighting Championship, and was then snatched from us in 2009 when a drug test failure pulled Barnett off an Affliction card. It’s almost on par with Ferguson vs. Khabib for those oldschoolers who have been around since the early 2000s, however many of those there are still around and active today.

And then there’s Tito Ortiz, who has seen his post-UFC career go 5-1 over the last seven years (with 4 of those fights being with Bellator). Anything that pulls Ortiz away from the US political scene where he’s become a Huntington Beach city councilor on anti-mask QAnon rhetoric would be an improvement in our books.

But for all this talk about Fedor’s last fight, there’s one man who doesn’t seem too into it: Fedor Emelianenko himself, who continues to show up for Bellator press conferences promoting a ‘Fedor Farewell Tour’ and refusing to commit to retirement.

“My sports career is slowly nearing its conclusion, though I am looking forward for more fights,” he told Russian outlet TASS in August of 2020. “Time will only tell. It will all depend on the way I feel and on my desire to carry on fighting.”