Let’s face facts here, the discussion of Sport of Spectacle is one that has raged when it comes to the UFC for years now, and as we saw last night at UFC 100, it shows no signs of slowing down. Dana White has long been an advocate of Mixed Martial Arts being promoted as a “sport.” Scathing critiques of K-1 and formerly PRIDE for their affliction for freakshow fights to fill up cards, attract media attention and fill up arenas. Unleashing a beast in the theater only meant it would soon go berserk and nobody would love it anymore, or love the carny promoter. The shine wears off.
Dana White, as much as I’m not a fan, is not a stupid man. He has gone on record saying that freakshows are not how you build a brand or a sport. They are short term solutions that just end up hurting in the long run. The growth that you see out of freakshow interest is not sustainable growth. The people that tune in to see a freakshow are not going to purchase your t-shirts, they aren’t going to travel to your basic shows, they aren’t going to order your lesser cards and spread the word to their friends.
So then the real question is, has the UFC lost sight of this very simple concept with freakshow fights? The signing of Brock Lesnar was the first sign that UFC was starting to really reach with their big draws like Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock no longer in the mix and the crop of stars that they built during the TUF explosion were starting to lose their luster; Chuck Liddell was looking like a shell of himself, Randy Couture was holding their title ransom, Rich Franklin was decimated by Anderson Silva whose non-company-man attitude wasn’t doing them any favors.
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Posted in Brock Lesnar, Dave Walsh, UFC | 6 Comments »
Posted by Alan Conceicao on 12th July 2009
Any discussion of the show begins with the headline act, Brock Lesnar. He did exactly what I anticipated. Having learned from the first loss to Mir, he’s improved his submission defense greatly and simply overwhelmed the former proper UFC Heavyweight champ and then interim belt holder. Ignoring the post fight antics for a moment, Brock looked sound in there. He took some pretty solid hits from Mir in the second and ended up wrestling him to the ground and smashing him. Mir looked lost for much of the fight, totally unable to deal with the overwhelming strength of his opponent, and his attempts at offense were more characteristic of a bravado/desperation mix than they seemed to be calculated moves as part of an extended game plan, like the leg lock attempt in the early going of the first.
However, what Lesnar encountered last night is not what he’ll see if he fights Shane Carwin or Cain Velasquez, and you can bet your ass that the UFC is cognizantly aware of that. Its why Noguiera/Couture is happening as a #1 contenders fight. They’re going to give Lesnar plenty of face time with his belt before dispatching him into the truly deep waters against the kind of guys that will pose a problem for him. In the meantime, he’s convinced his fanbase that he’s an unstoppable monster through beating a career journeyman, a 45 year old man who hadn’t fought on over a year, and an argurably (as Brock himself put it) fraudulent belt holder. If Fedor struggles at all with Barnett (and he probably will), its only going to further inspire endless chatter about how Lesnar would dominate him from the fans of faux fighting.
In the meantime, sit back and wait for the end of the year show, where we will likely (in my opinion) see Lesnar mix it up with Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera in what is an infinitely well matched for Lesnar. Nog beating Couture would come as a surprise to many fans in spite of Couture’s advanced age and lack of a win in 2 years, but I see it as extremely likely given the remaining strengths of both. And while he’s a live dog against Lesnar with his elite submission skills, as the Bob Sapp fight proved years ago, Noguiera’s core strength is deficent against the bigger heavyweights. Brock is infinitely more talented than Sapp was and will obliterate Noguiera with a similar showing to Sapp’s early ground and pound flurry at Dynamite/Shockwave, should they match up.
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Posted by Tommy Hackett on 11th July 2009
It’s fight night! While some of you new fans are entering “Akiyama” in your favorite search engine, old guys (like myself) are getting a big kick out of this video UFC 6 which has recently resurfaced. Watch here as UFC 5 contestant Ron Van Clief, a multiple time US karate champion, is asked what he sees as the future of the sport. His response: “I see UFC 100.” Here’s to you, Ron. How great would it be to see this clip tonight, as UFC hits that very milestone, fourteen years later, in Las Vegas?
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Posted by Alan Conceicao on 11th July 2009
While the UFC seems to be on fire coming into tonight’s event stateside, having finally achieved some level of mainstream interest for the show whilst the Fan Expo and tickets sales have already been roaring successes, there are some issues elsewhere. In case you were living in a cave the last couple months, a lot of money was spent on the production of TUF 9, which pitted coaches Michael Bisping and Dan Henderson in a nationalistic battle to find out who’s team of scrappy nobodies was best. Thanks to some thoughtful fighter choices on behalf of Joe Silva and Dana White, the UK was given an easy draw and had no problems winning the show.
However, while we as of yet don’t know how successful the winners of TUF 9 will be in terms of drawing the UK fanbase, the premier fighter from the UK is fighting tonight in what should be a hotly watched and debated fight back in his home country. Bisping may be a underdog, but he’s certainly live against the middle aged Dan Henderson, and a win here would propell him all the way to a world title fight. Unfortunately, TUF 9’s initial promotional component has been nullified. With the documented collapse of Setanta Sports (T-MMA was one of the first to bring you details of their impending and eventual destruction) in the United Kingdom, the UFC lost its TV partner. After sorting through many options from major television outlets, none of which paid anything near Setanta’s inflated price, the UFC decided to wait and see who would come to them.
In the end, nobody did. The UFC has been forced to work fast, and has acquired TV space on Sky’s FTA system on what was a dead horse racing channel, off the air now for some period of time. They did this at a price to themselves, and will recieve stark to nonexistent promotion from the network. To try and compensate for the 2/3 of the nation who can’t see them, they’ll also offer a free webcast. Historically, free webcasts of major events in this vein have an awful tendency to crash and have significant issues TV programming lacks (to say nothing of being inconvienent for friends to come over and watch). The UFC still does not have a hard contract going forwards after millions spent in the UK, and it will be interesting to see how they try to compensate for this failure in thinking when it comes to their biggest show ever, featuring one of their biggest draws in what was their most successful emerging market.
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Posted by Dave Walsh on 10th July 2009
UFC 100 — tomorrow night — marks a very important milestone for the Ultimate Fighting Championship as they will put on their 100th numbered UFC event. The countdowns and the hype have been non-stop now for the past few weeks, with things really heating up now as we are in the home stretch. UFC has taken over a ton of major media outlets, with the ESPN main page featuring some prominent build-up to UFC 100 to Yahoo! Sports giving up even calling its MMA section “MMA” and now renaming it to their “UFC” section.
On top of that, ESPN’s MMA Live has a slew of broadcasts tonight and tomorrow from the Mandalay Bay Events Center hyping up the show, including the Weigh-In Special tonight and a special preview later on tonight as well.
Sports Illustrated’s website has a ton of UFC 100 coverage as well, with Josh Gross being one of the few “mainstream media” writers that seems like an actual fans.
Some other UFC 100 stuff from around the web;
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Posted by Tommy Hackett on 4th July 2009
This week’s news of the passing of four-division champion Alexis Arguello has hit the boxing world hard. For those who missed it, the Hall of Famer’s body was found early morning Wednesday in his hometown of Managua, Nicaragua. Reports from Associated Press describe the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart.
Eulogies have poured in from around the world. Barry McGuigan published one of the best today, “Let The Bells Ring in Honour of Alexis Arguello,” for Britain’s The Mirror. A former world champion in his own right, McGuigan describes “El Flaco Explosivo” (The Explosive Thin Man) as “the kind of fighter that I aspired to be but never quite made it…”
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Posted by Jonathan Snowden on 3rd July 2009
Alan and I discuss Ultimate Chaos, the UFC’s shady business, a boxing slugfest, and much more
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