Bellator President/CEO Bjorn Rebney announced that the fight league has acquired top British prospect “Judo” Jim Wallhead this week to compete in it’s season II welterweight tournament. Wallhead joins young standouts Dan Hornbuckle, Jacob McClintock, and Ben Askren in what’s becoming an increasingly packed division supporting a vast array of styles (i.e. “Judo” Jim Wallhead’s expertise is pretty self-explanatory, Askren’s a former Olympic wrestler and amateur standout from Mizzou, and McClintock is a 21 year-old, 2nd degree jiu-jitsu black belt).
While these four fighters aren’t exactly household names yet, Wallhead’s signing shows the company is looking all over to beef up the competition for their current champ, Lyman Good, who fought just over 15 minutes total for 3 fights to win the season one tournament (not to mention a cool $175,000).
With the spotlight being put more on Eddie Alvarez (universally ranked top-5 Lightweight & current Bellator LW champ) and middleweight champ Hector Lombard, these additions will most definitely make for an exciting tournament and would help catapult the winner, most notably Good, into discussion as one of the best WW’s not signed by the UFC or Strikeforce.
Now if only these fights didn’t have to worry about getting preempted by baseball…
