Traces of illegitimate culture stil evident in MMA
Published by Charles Jay on December 6th, 2008 in Operation Cleanup

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Commentary on MMA history….as it’s happening

TRACES OF ILLEGITIMATE CULTURE STILL EVIDENT IN MMA

Dana White often feels like the guardian of the sport of mixed martial arts.

“It disgusts me,” White told Boston Herald reporter Dan Duggan, in the wake of the Kimbo Slice fiasco that took place in Florida in October. “I”ve been busting my (expletive) for 10 years flying all over the planet to show everybody what a great sport this is and what amazing people are involved in it. Then CBS throws this guy who fights at people’s barbecues on the main event because they’re trying to compete with us, and he gets knocked out in (14) seconds by a guy who didn’t win ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ and couldn’t fight in the UFC. Then the guy turns around the next day and says, ‘The promoters actually paid me to not go to the ground with this guy. They paid me to stand up,’ which I’m pretty sure is illegal.”

White is understandably concerned, because some fans, and some media, may not be able to make the distinction between the UFC and other organizations. And he has a right to talk, since his UFC has captured such a large portion of the marketplace that everything that happens outside of its own scope of control still affects it. Terms that the UFC has trademarked, like “Ultimate Fighting,” are being used by the layman to describe the sport itself. And so when something like the Kimbo Slice-Seth Petruzelli fight is refereed to as “Ultimate Fighting,” that just illustrates the downside of being so much in the public domain.

In one interview that was caught on YouTube, White also talked about how the “boxing scumbags” have infiltrated the sport and polluted it.

The statement has a ring of truth to it. Many people who have come over to MMA from boxing are purely opportunists, and look at the sport in much the same way they look at their own – as a short-term chance to make some easy money. Certainly if they are bringing various “manipulation” techniques into mixed martial arts it has the affect of bringing the general atmosphere down. But I hope he wasn’t making a sweeping statement about all boxing folk (if he did, I’d be willing to go toe-to-toe with him on that issue). That notwithstanding, his point is not a bad one. You don’t want for MMA to be taking on the image of boxing’s darker side, or that of pro wrestling’s scripted nature.

Say what you want about the UFC. You can cast aspersions about the fact that it functions simultaneously as both sanctioning body and promoter, and that it plays hardball in terms of putting the squeeze on its talent. But the competition in the Octagon has proven to be nothing but legitimate. At least as far as I know, anyway.

White was also correct in pointing out that the ‘Johnny-Come-Latelies” in the business will not hesitate to cut corners, and few of them have avoided losing considerable amounts of money, despite any reputed attempts to stage, fix arrange or manipulate the proceedings. That makes him happy in a sense, I’m sure, as it would any competitor in a business like this. You just naturally take some kind of pleasure in the failures of your rival, and you want to nudge things in that direction as much as possible. Why else would the UFC go out of its way to run a counter-programming while Affliction was running its first pay-per-view show, you know what I mean? Still, you don’t want to see anyone fail to the point where it embarrasses the entire sport, and by definition, your own company as the far-and-away leader in the industry.

White went on to tell Duggan, “Promoters have a bad rap as it is because of the last 100 years of boxing. We actually started to turn that around and were doing the right things and then you have these guys coming out and doing (bleep) like that. It hurts us.”

Well, I give White all the credit in the world for avoiding some of the pitfalls that boxing may have found themselves falling into in recent years. But in the interests of being balanced, I don’t think people in MMA should become so self-righteous about how “clean” their sport is and how “dirty” boxing is by comparison, because the roots of what we know as mixed martial arts in America trace back to fights in Japan that were not necessarily on the up-and-up. I’m certainly not going to educate any close followers of the sport on this, but it is common knowledge that those things which served as the progenitors of MMA – things like Shooto, Pancrase and the UWF – were filled with “worked” fights, in which a winner was predetermined. I have spoken to competitors who have supplied more detail on how these fights transpired. It was simply the way “business” was done, is what I hear most. Many of the early combatants in mixed martial arts, and some who are still around today, came directly from those organizations.

In other words, there was a culture of fixed fights that was somewhat embedded in the consciousness of a large part of the MMA world, and it hasn’t exited completely. There are still fighters who go overseas, to Japan specifically, in most cases, and engage in contests where the result has been “arranged.” With the manipulations that Elite XC tried to put in effect for the Kimbo Slice-Seth Petruzelli fight, that brings a reminder that the mentality is not a distant memory. And that is a big threat to the aspirations of White and others interested in the future of MMA to make continued mainstream inroads. This sport, like it or not, has the strain of illegitimacy, and it needs to get it OUT.

That’s why I would hope White, and others who are concerned, would follow up on something I wrote about some time ago, which involves taking those “fights” that took place in those aforementioned Japanese organizations, and others like it, and removing them from the mixed martial arts records of the competitors in question, so as not only to reflect a more realistic LEGITIMATE record in each case, but also to create the kind of distance from that culture that is so badly needed, and entirely justified. No one needs that stain.

I hope some people are listening.