Thread: From banned to big time

Interesting article on MMA:

From banned to big time
Ultimate Fighting — or MMA — growing in popularity

Whether you think it is “human cockfighting,” as U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) once described it, or a bona fide sport, so-called mixed martial arts (MMA) is gaining more adepts throughout the country.

A hybrid of disciplines such as Thai boxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu, MMA had long been the best-kept secret of a reduced number of practitioners and fans who exchanged information about upcoming events through the internet.

This changed when the reality TV show “The Ultimate Fighter” debuted on Spike TV in early 2005, capturing the attention of nearly 2 million viewers. The ratings success prolonged itself throughout the season, leading the station to renew its contract with the Las Vegas-based company Zuffa, producers of the U.S.’s biggest MMA show, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

Five years ago, “when we held our first show at the Trump Taj Mahal (in New Jersey), we sold 3,500 tickets and had a gate of some $205,000,” UFC President Dana White said.

The UFC’s most recent event — UFC 57 — was held at the Mandalay Bay Events center in Las Vegas on Feb. 4. The show garnered a paid attendance of more than 10,000 and grossed over $3.3 million dollars.

The success has spurred more events, the latest of which was the King of the Cage show Feb. 10 in Moline. The card included six UFC veterans plus several state fighters and will be the first MMA event in Illinois to be shown on PPV when it’s broadcast on March 10.

“There was a time when I felt like I was a carnival guy promoting these shows,” said Monte Cox, an Iowa-based promotor of the Moline show who also manages 40 MMA fighters, including UFC world welterweight and middleweight champions Matt Hughes and Rich Franklin, respectively. “That all changed with Spike TV showing the sport on a regular basis.”

Part of MMA’s growing appeal might also be attributed to the structure of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality TV show, which is set to air its third season on Spike TV in early April. Sixteen up-and-coming fighters are picked by the UFC and subjected to a grueling training regime, eliminating each other in successive MMA fights as the fighter who emerges victorious earns a contract with the UFC.

As White bluntly puts it, “reality shows are all the same. You put people in a house and after a few days they get tired of each other, become aggravated. In The Ultimate Fighter you actually get to see them get their (butt) kicked.”

Spectacle vs. sport

The UFC was originally launched in 1993 as a forum for different martial artists to test the efficacy of their styles in what was marketed as a “no holds barred” competition. Bouts had no time limit and fights were rarely stopped before a KO. Its rapid success in the pay-per-view market caught the attention of people such as Sen. McCain who, shocked by what he saw, launched a nationwide campaign to ban the sport. McCain wrote letters to all 50 state governors and prompted cable providers to drop the event. By 2000, the UFC was effectively shunned from PPV and its promotion relied on the word-of-mouth of its reduced fan base.

Followers of the sport, however, included Lorenzo Fertitta, a former vice chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission and owner with his brother Frank of a chain of casinos in Las Vegas. The Fertitta brothers bought the ailing operation in 2001 and along with making former boxing instructor Dana White its president, secured sanctioning by the state athletic commissions of Nevada and New Jersey.

MMA officially acquired a set of rules including weight classes, rounds, time limits (usually three 5-minute rounds for regular bouts and five 5-minute rounds for title bouts) and a strict list of fouls and ways to end a fight. The days of marketing the UFC as a blood sport were over and the road paved for a return to PPV and a growing popularity.

These days, MMA shows and academies are proliferating all over the U.S.

According to Richard Whitenack, owner and head instructor of Rockford’s No Joke Martial Arts, 7315 N. Alpine Rd., “MMA is the evolution of martial arts and the idea of self-defense where you have an arena that can show what works and doesn’t work in a combat situation.”

No Joke Martial Arts is described by Whitenack as “an MMA academy” and offers different classes for the disciplines that coalesce into MMA, including kickboxing, boxing, and grappling.

Not all practitioners of MMA, however, are in it to test their skills in competition. Nashua Rodriguez, 19, trains regularly at Whitenack’s academy.

“I’ve been training on and off since I was 17 years old,” Rodriguez said. “Although at first I found it intimidating, you build up the skills eventually.”

Nashua, whose Peruvian father was a fan of martial arts, was drawn into MMA by her brother Gustavo, an instructor at No Joke. Gustavo, who works part-time at UPS, has competed in boxing, kickboxing and MMA events throughout the Midwest.

“I became interested in MMA after I saw the first UFC when I was 12 years old. There, you could see a smaller fighter win a match over heavier opponents simply by using his skills,” Gustavo said.

A staple of Vegas

By now, the UFC has become a regular attraction to visitors in Las Vegas, where most of its events are held.

Although the past UFC 57 was not the first show to take place at a sold-out venue, “it is the first event that sold out so fast,” White said. “Sixty percent of the tickets were gone in the first five hours” when put out for sale back in December. Prices ranged from $100 to $700.

During Super Bowl weekend, a specially hectic time even for Las Vegas standards, hundreds of UFC fans wearing t-shirts with the image of their favorite fighters prowled the lobbies of the Mandalay Bay in search of an autograph.

The excitement was just as evident during fight night, where the audience was treated to a rubber match between the UFC"s biggest stars, light-heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell and contender Randy Couture. What was anticipated as a close bout ended in the second round with a TKO loss for the 42-year old Couture, a former all-American wrestler and UFC champion.

Couture subsequently announced his retirement inside the eight-sided fenced enclosure known as the “Octagon,” the UFC’s trademarked caged ring.

“This is the last time you’ll see me in these gloves and these shorts in the Octagon,” Couture said. “This is it for me. It’s time to do something else.”

Rules and Regulations

In spite of the undoubtedly violent image that MMA projects and its reputation as a no rules competition — largely based on the unregulated UFC events of the early ’90s — the UFC and MMA events in general abide by a set of stipulations. Known as the “unified rules” of MMA, they were officially adopted by the Nevada State Athletic Commission in July 2001, and eventually implemented by other states such as Florida, Louisiana and, as of last year, California.

Beside the weight categorization and the use of 4-6 oz. gloves, the rules prohibit the more dangerous strikes such as head-butts and groin shots.

According to Whitenack, the adoption of these rules has been pivotal for MMA to gain more credibility as a sport.

“It’s getting safer and safer for the fighters, which is the ultimate goal,” he said. “Before, there used to be not as many rules and there were no weight classifications. It was dangerous.”

The UFC is actively involved in a campaign to have each state adopt the unified rules for their events, including the growing number of smaller local shows that tend to escape mainstream attention.

By adopting these rules, the UFC and other MMA promotions such as King of the Cage effectively managed to dissuade some of their most vocal critics and their concerns about safety hazards.

Promoters of other combat events such as the “Toughman” competitions have not been as successful in convincing the sanctioning bodies that theirs is a bona fide sport.

This is the case of Mark Bjelland, a promoter of Toughman fights in Illinois, including Rockford. The MetroCentre hosted 24 consecutive annual Toughman events until 2004, when state lawmakers passed a bill to put unregulated fight events under the oversight of the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation. The IDPR, which also sanctions boxing, had previously stated that it would not tolerate events that paired trained and untrained fighters or posed serious health risks to competitors.

To Bjelland, the measure is contradictory because even though he is quick to point out “Toughman is very different from MMA” and he personally dislikes the latter, “I believe that you should be free to promote those events and compete in them if that is what you want.” Bjelland argues Toughman is safer than MMA because, among other things, contestants “wear headgear and use padded gloves.”

Unlike Toughman or even established sports such as boxing, MMA events in the United States have registered no fatalities in their decade-long history. The push to ban Toughman in Illinois, largely instigated by Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the IDPR, was prompted by the 2003 death of a 30-year old Florida woman, Stacy Young, from a beating she suffered during a Toughman bout. In recent years, boxing has similarly experienced an onslaught of criticism due to the number of competitors that have been severely injured or died as a result of a fight. A recent instance of this was the death in September 2005 of Leavender Johnson five days after losing the IBF lightweight title to Jesus Chavez by an 11th-round TKO.

Both MMA promoters and practitioners emphasize how the adoption of stricter rules and regulations have helped it gain more mainstream credibility.

“There is a revolution in sports and it is called MMA,” said White.

I tried to, but I hit the 10,000 character limit (not a 10k word limit mind you, LOL). I had intended to post a follow up post with the details of where it came from... sorry, I got distracted

From banned to big time
Ultimate Fighting — or MMA — growing in popularity
Published: February 18, 2006

I actually found this article when I did a search for the UFC at Yahoo! News just out of curiosity...