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That didn't last long.

That about sums it up.
So that's the impressive track record that would follow McMahon into this rumored venture. You can't blame the WWE for wanting to get in on the action.

Some hardcore, longtime MMA fans understandably resent the intrusion of disaffected wrestling fans into their sport, but this year's boom has been in large part fueled by fans who like MMA's larger-than-life personalities and see MMA as being like wrestling, except real.
Instead of trying to break into another business he doesn't know, what McMahon should do is learn lessons about the changing tastes of his audience and then adapt them to his own product. I watched a bit of McMahon's Raw show on Monday night, for the first time in awhile.

I felt like I stepped into some sort of time warp. The same tired storylines; the same desperate attempts to be controversial and edgy for its own sake; the same stale talent. All that was missing was Limp Bizkit music and Friends clips and my time-machine trip back to 1998 would have been complete.

In 2006, McMahon continues to promote tall, overly muscled, airbrushed pretty boys who all look and sound alike. Meanwhile, 5-foot-9, 170-pound Midwest farmboy Matt Hughes, a former college wrestler, is doing gates and domestic PPV buyrates that are putting WWE to shame. If Hughes walked into WWE offices looking for a job today, he'd likely be laughed out of the building for not having the right look to be a star, at a time when he's personally responsible helping tons of money that used to go into WWE coffers end up in UFC's hands instead.

Even someone like Chuck Liddell or Tito Ortiz would be considered too small by WWE standards, and that duo has a legitimate shot at knocking Oscar DeLa Hoya off his King of PPV throne come Dec. 30.
So instead of trying to get into the MMA business -- and given the core dishonesty of the wrestling business, I can tell you if ;the McMahons do, my initial gut feeling is I wouldn't touch his MMA product with a 100-foot pole, coverage-wise -- McMahon needs to focus his energies on adapting his own product to the times.

The general public today understands that someone like 170-pound Georges St. Pierre is a total badass, and that McMahon's 300-pound monsters aren't. And maybe if McMahon geared his product more towards MMA style strikes, takedowns, and submission moves, instead of wrestlers taking 20-feet falls off the top of steel cages, wrestling wouldn't have a death and injury rate that makes coal mining look like a desk job.

Or maybe we'll just end up with the MMA equivalent of the XFL.
On a somewhat related topic, I've heard a lot of talk about PRIDE's product presentation. I'll have more in-depth thoughts on The Real Deal -- which was largely a success for what a debut show is supposed to achieve -- in the next Weekly Tapout.

But my take on the stage presentation is, yes, it is spectacular, and yes, it is a part of what PRIDE fans expect when they see a PRIDE show. But I don't see it as a determining factor in whether fans will choose one product over the other in the long run. To me, the stage show is the equivalent of all the bells and whistles you get if you go to a baseball or football game.

Some people like it if fireworks go off when someone hits a home run or scores a touchdown, some people don't, but I don't think many people base their decision one way or another whether to go to a game because of the presentation. UFC used to have a stage, ramp, and so on for their big events, and when they got rid of them, I never heard anyone say man, they don't have a ramp, I'm not watching UFC anymore. Personally, I just want to see good action.

If they held Fedor-Mirko or Hughes-GSP in a dimly lit basement gym I'd be as interested in the fight as if it was done with the stage set.