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Sports Illustrated on MMA

I was always a fairly “hip” kid coming up and I’m still ahead of the curve on music and other matters of pop culture. I had been listening to Nirvana since the release of “Bleach” in 1989 and had long pegged the band for mainstream success. I had no idea that they’d blow up the way they did, however, nor did I envision how the Pacific Northwest “grunge” sound and culture would sweep the country. I do remember the weekend when it happened in late 1991–”Smells Like Teen Spirit” off the CD “Nevermind” was released and quickly became a huge hit. The weekend in question is when it really reached critical mass–you couldn’t turn on any kind of rock radio station without hearing it, you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing the video and it seemed like the song was blasting from every car and jacked up pick up truck nationwide.

This weekend’s UFC 71 card could end up being the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” of mixed martial arts. The sport has been touted by the mainstream media as “hip” and “up-and-coming” for months now but this past weekend everything blew up. The Quinton Jackson/Chuck Liddell fight was a lead story on ESPN’s “Sports Center”, indicating that the network is now treating MMA like an actual sport. There’s been no shortage of other mainstream media coverage as well, and I expect even more in the weeks to come as the always entertaining “Rampage” begins his title reign. There was perhaps no better indication of MMA’s newfound status as a legit sport than the cover story of the May 28 issue of Sports Illustrated.

I approached the article with some degree of trepidation, and the story’s title “Too Brutal for the Future: Ultimate Fighting–America’s Fastest Growing and Most Controversial Sport” struck me as somewhat exploitative and I was concerned that SI would be giving too much ink to the old kneejerk anti-MMA platitudes (like John McCain’s infamous “human cockfighting” line). I was also somewhat puzzled by the choice of Roger Huerta as the cover subject–he’s a good enough fighter but not exactly one of the sports’ superstars. It seems to me that there would be any number of better subjects including Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell or even the new light heavyweight champion “Rampage” himself. Of course since the most dominant image on the cover is the cage itself which almost obscures Huerta I guess its almost irrelevant who they chose.

The article itself was really pretty good, though it delivered little in the way of “controversy”. That’s limited to the usual narrative about the sports “dark ages” in the mid 1990′s suggesting that the early UFC events were “more spectacle than sport, a banquet of violence that lowered civilization’s limbo bar”. While I’ll agree that the better regulated sport of today is a positive thing, the meme that the early UFC’s were just this side of Roman gladiator fights is getting a bit tiresome. Of course this is the party line of the Zuffa run UFC and the mainstream media is eating it up, much as it still accepts the notion that Vince McMahon took pro wrestling out of “smoky bingo halls” as fact. McCain’s “human cockfighting” quote is mentioned, as is the difficulty in finding venues for many events–you’ll recall that at that time the UFC frequently held events in states without any sort of significant regulatory oversight from a boxing or athletic commission.

That’s pretty much it in the way of “controversy”, however, and the rest of the article gives an overview of the sport circa 2007. The big players are profiled, including Pat Millitech, Dana White and Randy Couture. Much is made of the sport’s impressive live gates and PPV buyrates. A few of the smaller groups like the IFL are briefly mentioned, as is PRIDE. There’s a little too much reinforcement of the stereotype of UFC fans as “bloodthirsty drunks”–the live event they cover is UFC 69 in Houston and I noted at the time that the “flyover country” fans didn’t seem as sharp as the ones who attend the shows in Nevada and California.

The article was, for the most part, positive and emphasized the relative absence of serious injuries. There’s a quote from well known boxing doctor Margaret Goodman (current chair of the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s Medical Advisory board) where she opines that despite the risk of worse cuts in MMA that, on balance, it is “safer than boxing”. Credit to SI for not buying into the ridiculous “boxing v. MMA” feud that the know-nothing mainstream sports media is foisting on the public:

UFC is more likely to draw viewership away from WWE than boxing. “Athletes want to compete and [MMA] gives you a chance to do that in a way that pro wrestling doesn’t” says former UFC Middleweight Champion Frank Shamrock.

The mainstream sports media understands less about pro wrestling than it does boxing, and they’re missing what could be the big story longterm, at least in the US market: MMA could very well marginalize pro wrestling in a way never seen before. At the very least, it could cripple the WWE. Vince McMahon’s well known dislike for MMA and denial of its threat to his product has been well documented–he’s been quoted as suggesting that the MMA can’t compete with the WWE since they don’t have any stars as big as John Cena. Were I a WWE shareholder that sort of myopia would concern me greatly.

My primary gripes about the SI article–there was no attempt to put MMA in a historical context, and the reader was given the impression that the sport didn’t exist prior to UFC 1. While you could make a case that it was the real genesis of the sport in the US, MMA and MMA like events had taken place in Japan for years. Additionally, I don’t like the way that they used “Ultimate Fighting” and “MMA” interchangeably. I’ve heard plenty of other media outlets do the same thing, so they’re not alone in this. I’m hoping that this isn’t something that Zuffa/UFC is encouraging–IMO the notion that MMA as a sport is bigger than UFC the organization is in the longterm best interest of everyone involved. At the very least it strikes this experienced MMA fan as a bit ridiculous–like a boxing sanctioning group tried to use the term “glove fighting” interchangeably with “boxing.” And the entire PRIDE pantheon of fighters was ignored completely–and since this includes countless top notch fighters including the consensus best MMA fighter in the world, Fedor Emelianenko, this is a glaring omission. I understand that the story was equally about the UFC organization as about the sport of MMA, but to write an article about MMA without even a mention of Fedor is damn near unacceptable to a knowledgeable MMA fan. This smacks of a lack of research by the writers or too much of a willingness to accept verbatim everything that Zuffa tells them. Again, SI isn’t alone in this lack of knowledge or perspective on MMA–with the rush by the mainstream sports media to cover this past weekend’s UFC event there’s been no shortage of writing and commentary that bordered on downright clueless.

All in all, the article has to be viewed as a positive and a tangible sign that MMA has arrived as an accepted component for the United States sports scene. This no doubt pleases the folks at Zuffa a great deal, but they’ve still got work to do in shepherding MMA to where it needs to go to reach its full potential as an equal to boxing.

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