You may initally be confused why I follow a piece about UFC 95 and 96 with a picture of Kelly Pavlik. Give me a moment to explain: Kelly Pavlik is touted often as the kind of guy to bring back interest in pro boxing to the young fans of MMA, whomever it is you think they are (as a side note, can you really argue with that when the internet is alight with praise for Koscheck: Mediocre Kickboxer?). Pavlik is close to a fight with former 154lb titlist and star of the biggest failure in the history of reality TV, Sergio Mora. This has come with little complaint from boxing fans in the US, and its a bit odd. Consider then that Kelly Pavlik has made only two defenses of his middleweight crown against the murderer’s row of Gary Lockett and Marco Antonio Rubio to no real negative response. I can’t help but think of the recent interview on The Daily Show between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart and the faux-wonderment in Stewart’s repeated questioning of who exactly Jim is doing his show for.

This is not to say that Dan Rafael is working on behalf of the boxing promoters to “save the sport” no matter what the cost or the reality, but consider then Anderson Silva. He fights the somewhat worthy Thales Leites in a few weeks, and no one seems to really be bothered that he hasn’t fought someone considered universally to be a top 5 middleweight since last February. 

But don’t get me wrong: this is not going to be one of hundreds of previous demands that he face Yushin Okami. However, I am using that fact to illustrate a point: Star power matters over all, to the fans, to the bloggers, everyone. There is a reason why there were play-by-play blogs for Wargods when a roided up Ken Shamrock is headlining against an obese bar brawler and not for Frank Trigg fighting an undefeated prospect, or for Fury FC shows. We all know it and we often admit it openly in endless, horribly constructed diatribes about “the business”. So why is everyone so bad at analyzing it for what it is?

When I wrote the first piece about weak cards, I facetiously wrote about the fans buying cards for Matt Brown. The truth is that no one on the planet buys MMA shows to watch Matt Brown, probably not even his own family. Everyone buys for the headliner, and the increasingly less “stacked” UFC cards are indicative not merely just of their supposed need to run more shows, but because they know they can get away with it. Don’t believe me? Look, for instance, at Mike Rome’s review of the “home run” that was UFC 96. Here’s a show where the UFC had to admit that they weren’t going forward with the main event for the PPV in a couple months and, in the end, lied about what the main event for UFC 98 was going to be again at the end of the night. There were listless performances by some and some horrible mismatches elsewhere. This still scores as a “great PPV”, which tells you how high the bar is for the UFC when it comes to matchmaking. If the reaction of the hardcore fanbase is this, why even give it a serious try more than once or twice a year?

And so we are back at Anderson Silva, and UFC 97 as a whole. Liddell/Shogun is a fight years late in the making, and the scheduled undercard is a morass of mediocrity (Hardonk? Soszynski?), but the argument is that they are pitted in fights that are competitive, a sad statement in itself about the supposed Super Bowl of MMA. Leites is not the most unworthy challenger to a UFC title in recent memory, but his predecessor was, and its remarkable to think that the UFC hasn’t pushed to actually create a legitimate title contender for Silva since March of last year. Backtracking again to Klosterman, the answer is pretty clear: the best option, Okami, is not a guy who is “crowd pleasing”; He isn’t a KO machine or get hit a ton in return, nor is he a submission machine. He is quietly effective, though, fighting a cautious wrestling based “hit and don’t get hit” artistic style that has only been foiled by the very best. And that is his problem and that of the argument against his opinion: The casual fans really are interested in the car crash at the car race. And not only that, so are some of the supposed hardcores.

There are deniers, of course. I particularly like the Lyoto Machida defense towards the Klosterman position; Machida’s popularity at best is lukewarm with the most hardcore of the hardcore, much less casual fans, and has gotten his title shot as a third choice for a PPV’s main event thanks in no small part to desperation on the part of promoters. There’s a reason Rashad was pushed into the ring at UFC 96, and it wasn’t to hype up the one time Inoki prodigy as a title challenger. Look at what got people to watch MMA in this country: Tito/Shamrock Trilogy, Kimbo Slice, and Brock Lesnar. Of course they want mashout undercards. They’re conditioned to want that. Every wrestler that decides that he’s a kickboxer is a part of that shift in the sport.

My last tracking back is, once more, to Pavlik. Pavlik’s push towards the stratosphere is clearly a result of the idea that people want to see a white guy who knocks people out, preferably quickly and brutally, and is willing to get hit in the face himself. Bob Arum regularly talks about him being able to get back fans from MMA, and if you can’t connect why with what I’ve just said, you probably aren’t following closely enough. What is most interesting is that years ago, boxing journalists would have called the spade a spade; They did for Sven Ottke, Roy Jones, Joe Calzaghe, Naseem Hamed, and countless others in the last 20 years, whether deserving or not. It seems then that boxing has in fact learned some things from MMA, but its a shame that its all the wrong things.