UFC's "Fight for the Troops" Raises $4 Million; Event Injuries Cost $5.2 Million

The UFC's "Fight for the Troops" event, which aired on SpikeTV on Wednesday night and featured one of the most violent cards in mixed martial arts history, raised $4 million for the "Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund". Unfortunately, thanks to injuries sustained by nearly every combatant on the card - Corey Hill's fractured leg, Yoshiyuki Yoshida's fractured skull, Jonathan Goulet's decapitated head and subsequent reattachment surgery - the price tag for the event exceeded the money raised by $1.2 million dollars, a tab that the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund had to pay. "Ain't that a kick in the pants," said spokesman retired Army Colonel Haverstrom "Machine Gun" Jessup. "I mean, it's a shame this Razak Al-Hassan kid needed a prosthetic arm and Brandon Wolff and Matt Wiman had to have face transplants, but really, we needed this money for the soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan." Lamented Colonel Jessup, "We're worse off now than we were before."

Observations from My Couch: UFC "Fight for the Troops"

• Most. Depressing. UFC. Ever. Seriously, I love me some fights, but all those vignettes about wounded soldiers was heartbreaking.
• For this event the ratio of clobbered fighters to non-clobbered fighters at the end of the night was insane. Corey Hill had his shin snapped in half in an unaired preliminary bout (check it out on the UFC website), another fighter wound up with a busted arm, and more than a few did their best to give viewers an firsthand look at just what this Traumatic Brain Injury thing is all about.
• Jim Miller's domination of Matt Wiman was so complete, Wiman had to see a rape counselor after the bout.
• Kudos to Razak Al-Hassan for reminding us how useless Tae Kwon Do is in an MMA fight.
• Nate Loughran's game plan of letting Tim Credeur repeatedly punch him in the face came so close to paying off. So close.
• Jonathan Goulet and Yoshiyuki Yoshida: getting knocked the hell out and going into convulsions so you don't have to.