Bjorn Rebney: 'Monster amount of depth' kept Bellator 120 a pay-per-view

MEMPHIS – When Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney lost the main event of his first pay-per-view for the second time, there could have been a freak-out moment, and understandably so.

This past fall, Bellator planned its first pay-TV show. But when Tito Ortiz fell out of a fight against Quinton Jackson late in the game, the promotion scrapped its plans to go on pay-per-view and shifted the card to its regular broadcast partner, Spike TV, with a headlining lightweight title rematch between Michael Chandler and Eddie Alvarez.

This past Saturday, it was Alvarez who fell off the main event of the promotion’s second attempt at a pay-per-view, bowing out of his trilogy fight with Chandler thanks to a concussion. But this time, Rebney said the depth of Saturday’s Bellator 120 event allowed the promotion to move forward on pay-per-view rather than again scrapping that plan to move to Spike TV.

Bellator 120, which takes place at Landers Center in Southaven, Miss., just south of Memphis, now will be headlined by Jackson in a light heavyweight tournament final and grudge match against Muhammed Lawal.

Rebney told MMAjunkie that there was no real panic when he got the call that Alvarez was off the card.

“I’ve been in this 20-plus years, so these are calls I’ve gotten before,” Rebney said. “The difference between this call and the call that I got (for November’s show) was that this was an incredibly deep card with two true main events that were getting promoted equally – just a monster amount of depth. It was just one of those moments where you say, ‘There ya go,’ and we got through this.”

Jackson-Lawal had been slated for the co-main, but now leads the pack. Chandler was shifted to the co-main event with a newly installed interim bantamweight title on the line against Will Brooks, a recent lightweight tournament winner. And a fight between middleweight champion Alexander Shlemenko moving up to light heavyweight to fight Ortiz also is on tap.

It could be argued that Bellator 106, the first pay-per-view attempt from November, had big depth, as well. That card went on Spike TV with three title fights – Chandler-Alvarez 2, Lawal vs. Emanuel Newton for the interim 205-pound strap, and Pat Curran vs. Daniel Straus for the featherweight belt.

But Rebney was confident enough in this event, with Jackson-Lawal headlining, to keep it barreling forward on pay TV.

“The call that I was expecting to get for the last two and a half months was Tito,” Rebney said. “Every time my phone would ring and it said ’949' or ’714' on it, I panicked and thought it was going to be Tito going, ‘I broke my neck, I hurt my knee, I did this, I did that.’ But he’s 110 percent. So (Alvarez) was an unexpected call, but in the bigger scheme of working in this business for 20-plus years, it wasn’t that unexpected.

“You just pivot off of it and change all the advertising to exclusively focus on ‘Page’ and ‘Mo’ and you just move on because the card’s that deep.”

Rebney told MMAjunkie that even if he never had the possibility of Alvarez-Chandler 3 in the main event, the fight between Jackson and Lawal was big enough that it would have been worthy of pay-per-view.

“Oh, without question. It’s a premium-level fight,” Rebney said. “‘Rampage’ has won his last two with back-to-back knockouts. He looks like the old ‘Page’ again – he’s excited, he’s enthusiastic, he loves the game again. And ‘King Mo’ is ‘King Mo.’ If both Mike and Ed had fallen off, I never would’ve given it a second thought. It’s a totally different situation than we had last November. Last November, we were like, ‘Yeah, maybe we should go to Spike,’ and our partners said, ‘Yeah, let’s bring it to Spike.’ But the thought never crossed my mind on this one.”

For the latest on Bellator 120, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.

(Pictured: Bjorn Rebney)