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March, 2018
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On March 26, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Demotivating Factors

“There can be no doubt that the Ultimate Fighting Championship has been a successful business venture. Its story of going from a $2 million company in 2001 — and one that wasn’t even profitable until 2005 — to a $4 billion company in 2017 is staggering enough, but consider the fact that this growth occurred in a marketplace where virtually every other competing organization struggled to stay in the black. The UFC’s rise has been a remarkable achievement on paper.

Yet in spite of the evidence of the business savvy working behind the curtains, the powers that be still continue a puzzling practice: incentivizing fighters through win bonuses. For most fighters, their purse consists of “show money,” which is then doubled if they win. In theory, this sounds reasonable, but reality paints a different picture…”

 

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On March 19, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

More Than A Fight

“Eight decades ago, former International Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage stated that politics is “a savage monster” bent on disrupting the purity of sport. Ten years ago, former European Union President Milan Zver stated that “[Sports] is too important to use it as a political instrument.” These are some of the most noteworthy instances of the “stick to sports” sentiment, a phrase that has recently come back into fashion as NFL players started taking knees during the national anthem.

It’s an understandable feeling. If you have played sports non-professionally — which is the vast majority of people who have played sports — your experience of athletic participation is colored as an inherent good, a pastime that cultivates life lessons like sportsmanship, the importance of practice and physical well-being. Thus, it’s only natural for us to think of sports as apolitical; we never had an opportunity to politicize them, even if we wanted to.

Yet sports are undeniably political, if for no other reason than the fact that money is involved…”

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On March 13, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Making Sense of McGregor

“If you’ve been a fan of this sport long enough, you’ve no doubt tried to spread the gospel of violence to friends and family. You convince them to watch a fight with you, show them highlight videos on YouTube to get them excited for it and hope for the magic of the sport to reveal itself come fight time. If you can’t make them diehard fans, at least you can turn them into casual appreciators of an otherwise off-putting sport. When it works, it’s great. When it flops, it’s a specific kind of shame, an embarrassment that feels less like bad luck than an indictment of your character.

The worst time that happened to me was when Mirko Filipovic fought Gabriel Gonzaga for the at UFC 70. After hyping “Cro Cop” to my friends for weeks and subjecting them to dozens of head-kick compilation videos, he went out and got demolished in ironic and ignominious fashion, suffering the same fate he had dished out countless times prior. For my friends, that was their introduction to “Cro Cop,” and it stuck. No matter how many old fights I showed them, it couldn’t supplant the experience of watching him become irrelevant in real time.

I’ve thought of that moment a lot lately as I’ve watched Conor McGregor — the first simultaneous two-division titleholder in Ultimate Fighting Championship history — gradually devolve into a Twitter troll…”

 

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On March 6, 2018 By In Mixed Martial Arts

In With The New

“Change is inevitable. Whether we’re talking individual lives or macro-level societal change, everything is in constant flux. Change can be hard to detect day-to-day; in three months of interminable sub-freezing winter temperatures, every day feels the same as the one before it. Spring seems perpetually distant, no closer to reality one week from the next. Then one day, all of a sudden, it’s 50 degrees and sunny outside. It’s like everything is the same until, almost instantaneously, everything changes.

That’s how this weekend felt, like new life was breathed into a coldly inert Ultimate Fighting Championship. Of course, the ranks have been changing across several divisions, but the drag of 2017 made the UFC appear to be more stagnant than it really was. With UFC 222 on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, spring had finally emerged from the winter of last year…”

 

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