Fedor Emelianenko provides shot of adrenaline (and sentimentality) to Bellator’s big boy tourney

If Saturday night’s main event was the true kickoff to Bellator’s Heavyweight Grand Prix, it got exactly what it needed — a flamethrower going right at a fuel tanker until the thing went boom. In the space of 48 seconds, the great Fedor Emelianenko got wobbled by Frank Mir, kicked up every doubt he’s amassed over the last five years, then slammed an uppercut into Mir’s grill that crashed him to the canvas. The crowd in suburban Chicago went crazy as he swooped in to finish the fight with lefts. And why the hell not? Fedor fights not only for Russia, but for an essential thing in MMA that’s hard to define.

He fights for something like faith in his own indestructibility, and it’s downright cathartic when he delivers on it. Fedor is the closest thing this dystopian landscape we call MMA has to a religion; at his best, he makes you want to pass the snake around.

And somehow, at 41 years old with his belly spilling over his trunks, he is doing what he did a dozen years ago in Pride, only he’s coming at it from a different angle. Back then Fedor was the tyranny of the heavyweight ranks, and people tuned in to see the greatest heavyweight of all time clobber another victim. These days people are apprehensive of losing the vintage vibe they’ve worked so hard to protect of Fedor. The heavyweight GOAT has become the underdog in this latest field of big men, a sentimental favorite that taps — ever gently, it seems, so as not to disturb the golden past — into that same sense of caring.

That’s why what he did to Mir felt good. It felt good because Fedor looked like Fedor, and we could — perhaps for the last time — luxuriate again in his many myths. It felt good because Mir, though he’s been out two years and well past his prime, still cuts an imposing enough figure. It felt good to not see Fedor turned into human putty, like he was against Matt Mitrione last June. It felt oddly satisfying to get nostalgic about a man who is advancing into the semifinals of a tournament that some of us winced to see him enter. How do you reminisce about the future, you ask? Fedor Emelianenko, that’s how!

But most of all, it felt novel to see the bracket come to life on the strength of Fedor’s punches. Those punches never get old. We have seen him reduced to rubble against people like Bigfoot Silva, but Fedor is best thought of as a disher of pain. He’s best thought of exactly how he appeared on Saturday.

If there was a comical side to the night, it was when his next opponent, Chael Sonnen, came into the cage to confront him. “I think the only thing I hate more than being in the cage in Chicago is being here with you,” Sonnen bellowed into the mic. “And I assure you the next time I am, it will not be for long.” Meanwhile there stood Emelianenko, stoically aloof to whatever was being said, so deep in his own eyes that Sonnen may as well have been some mundane detail in his periphery, no different than the Dave & Buster’s logo on the canvas or Scott Coker’s blazer.

It was two layers of consciousness a million miles apart standing within two feet of each other. You’d be hard pressed to find such dissimilar personalities as you’ll get with Sonnen and Fedor. One is the heckler in church, the other the severity of cathedral quiet. Bellator is lucky this is how it all shook out.

Does a Sonnen-Fedor fight become one of the biggest in Bellator’s history? Probably not. But it’s a best case scenario fight that captures the bizarre nature of the tournament itself. A former middleweight who sells fights through extraordinary irreverence versus a heavyweight legend that nobody can truly fathom, and who gets talked to during fight week by the FBI?

That is the Bellator grand prix in a nutshell.

And the Fedor-Mir fight really did feel like the actual kick-off for the tournament. Matt Mitrione was able to get by Roy Nelson a couple of months ago, and Sonnen got by Quinton Jackson, but the entry point for imagination began Saturday night in Rosemont, Illinois, just 15 miles from where the great Fedor beat Brett Rogers and lost to Dan Henderson in Hoffman Estates. Mir wasn’t the Mir of old when he stepped in there, and neither was Fedor. But 48 seconds after touching gloves Fedor felt like the Fedor of old, and that was enough to do away with all doubt.

At least temporarily. It starts anew with Sonnen, but Fedor’s still there. He’s still there. And so is the rapturous awe he carries in his hands, which was cool to revisit if only for a single night.