Friday, February 29, 2008

Photo Of The Week


I couldn't stop laughing at this. The standard UFC intro video, featuring a fighter shadow boxing in a cloud of mist offset by Roman gladiator imagery, is so lame I avert my eyes when it comes on. Evan Tanner looks like he feels the same way. "Are we really doing this? Really? With a spritzer thingy?" Click here for Tanner's full set of photos and comments on his fight tomorrow.

Short Jabs


  • ProElite Inc.'s stock (Symbol: PELE), parent company of EliteXC, finished the day at $7 a share, a 137.29% increase from the previous day's close of $2.95, a 52-week low.
  • I guess updating your blog is a good way to get noticed by your employer. Ryo Chonan posted this yesterday: "I got a call from my manager about my next fight this afternoon. What a coincidence! I wonder if someone who works for the UFC read my blog yesterday? I'm going to accept a fight with any fighters, so I think I can officially announce my next fight sometime soon. I am motivated to train."
  • Kazushi Sakuraba is opening his own gym. He's calling it "Laughter7," adding yet another chapter to the great Japanese tradition of giving mundane things bizarre English names ("GOD Coffee" to start your day? How 'bout some "Pocari Sweat" after you're work out?) Sounds intimidating, eh?
  • Tito Ortiz was fired last night on NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice." Click here for a summary of how it went down.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

EliteXC Moves To Network TV

Obviously, the huge news today is EliteXC signing a multi-year television deal with CBS, the first time MMA will be shown on a major network in the U.S. (the IFL was technically the first on network television with its events on MyNetworkTV.) The deal is reportedly for four live fights a year on Saturday nights, probably in the 9-11PM EST slot, with the first fight set for sometime in April.

The implications of the deal are vast. First, a broad new audience will have the chance to watch MMA, and whether or not they tune in (and keep tuning in) will probably make or break the sport's future on network TV. If the ratings are big for CBS, other networks may hurry to cut their own deals with other promotions, and the sport could go mainstream.

But as Dave Meltzer points out, the highest rated UFC event ever, UFC 75 on September 8th, drew 4.7 million viewers. EliteXC will have to do quite a bit better than that to be considered a network success, a tall order for the young promotion. If it flops, MMA may become the next poker: a sport that grew too fast, too soon and is now relegated to cult status.

Second, EliteXC has positioned itself as the only legitimate rival to the UFC in the near future. The UFC's bizarre insistence on maintaining total production control over their events (what other sport would even think of doing that?) allegedly scuttled their own network TV negotiations, and that stubbornness has now come back to haunt them.

EliteXC pales in comparison to the UFC in most categories (quality of fighters, production values, promotional reach), but this deal may well change all that. EliteXC, a partnership between Gary Shaw and Showtime, clearly had cash to begin with, as evidenced by their purchase of a handful of other promotions, but now they'll have a lot more. The agreement requires CBS to purchase 10% of the company, an immediate injection of cash that, if it is used to sign big name fighters and improve production quality, may completely change the look of EliteXC.

Dana White has long stated his desire for MMA to be synonymous with the UFC, a nightmare scenario for those that value the health and diversity of the sport. While the confusing factionalism of contemporary boxing would be just as bad, fans will benefit from the healthy competition this deal creates.

And hey, it's free MMA on TV. Can't argue with that, right?

Nothing To Do This Afternoon?

If you answered "yes" to that question and you've got ten bucks to burn and you're a geek for obscure Brazilian MMA events, then you might want to check out the Rio Fight Club event happening today.

It's actually a pretty solid fight card for what it is, with guys from Brazilian Top Team, Nova União, Gracie Barra Combat Team, Black House, and Gracie Fusion fighting. Some of the fighters have competed in international events like DEEP and Shooto Japan, but the most intriguing competitor has got to be William Vianna, who has won two straight 8 man tournaments in the vale tudo competition Rio Heros. This guy won three straight fights in the same night under bare knuckles, vale tudo rules twice in the space of three months (the last one about a month ago, listen to him talk about controlling his ego after that feat.) It'll be interesting to see how he does under MMA rules against stiffer competition.

Anyway, I'm not getting paid for plugging this or anything, I just thought it sounded better than playing solitaire in a cubicle or watching Seinfeld reruns.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Jake Shields Gets A Black Belt

EliteXC contender and life-long vegetarian Jake Shields was awarded a black belt by Cesar Gracie on Tuesday. Shields joins Nick Diaz and David Terrell as the only fighters to receive black belts from the well-known jiu-jitsu trainer.

Shields, the former Shooto world champion, is reportedly set to take on Drew Fickett for the first ever EliteXC welterweight title on March 29th.

Perhaps some day Shields and Mac Danzig can fight it out for the title of world's most dangerous herbivore.

Check out the video of his most recent fight, against Mike Pyle, here.

Ryo Chonan Needs Some Bread

From Ryo Chonan's most recent blog post:

"It's sucks that I'm not injured but have no fight schedule. I know PRIDE light weight fighters were very patient last year.

My friend in the US talked to the UFC staff and told me that they offer me a fight sometimes soon. I haven't fought for a while and have no money. I cannot wait anymore, and decided to go to the US for 6 months from the middle of April."

He had his friend talk to the UFC 'staff', whoever that is? How in the hell are fighters communicating with Joe Silva? Seems a bit odd that there aren't more direct lines of communication between a fighter under contract and the company's matchmaker.

And he's out of money? Because the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board won't release fighter payouts, we don't know how much he made at UFC 78, but a public comment like that from a mid-level fighter should provide more ammunition to those that say the UFC underpays its athletes. Granted, he had two other fights in 2007, both for DEEP, which I'm sure isn't some kind of financial utopia for fighters, but a guy fighting in the big show shouldn't be hard up for cash.

Here's Ryo pulling off his legendary flying scissor heel-hook on Anderson Silva with some nice commentary from Josh Barnett:



Monday, February 25, 2008

UFC Turns Down Lindland, White Begins Search For Vertical Toupée




Dana White is one of the most vocal and relevant critics of boxing today. "Vocal" because, well, vocal is his style. "Relevant" because he's the face of the sport that is quickly replacing boxing in the hearts and minds of young sports fans.

Criticizing boxing is part of White's usual stump speech. He will tell you that Don King and Bob Arum have mortgaged the long-term health of the sport for selfish short-term gain. He will tell you that boxing is a mess because the egos of its power elite prevent fans from seeing the best fights. And when he says those things, he is right.

He also is fond of saying that MMA will never go down the path of boxing, that his sport will not be held hostage by its promoters. As recently as a few years ago, he was believable. In 2003, he sent one of his biggest stars, Chuck Liddell, to compete in the middleweight tournament of rival promotion PRIDE's Grand Prix. It was a huge win for the fans: Liddell knocked out a cocky Alistair Overeem before being mauled by Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, memorable fights both of them.

The exchange was supposed to be part of a trade involving Liddell and Wanderlei Silva, the second half of which never materialized supposedly due to the duplicity of PRIDE's ownership. Perhaps the sting of that failed transaction killed whatever goodwill remained in White's heart because he's looked more and more like King and Arum every day since.

Today comes the news from mmajunkie.com that Matt Lindland, a top-ten middleweight in the estimation of many observers, tried to get a fight with the UFC and was flatly turned down. According to Lindland, "I made it very clear to Dana (White), and he’s the final decision-maker on all that stuff, I made it very clear that I was looking for them to make me an offer. I said, ‘Make me an offer, and let’s talk. Let’s do business.’ I got back a, ‘We’re not going to make you any kind of an offer’ response."

For those not familiar with the back story, Lindland was let go by the UFC supposedly for wearing an unapproved sponsor's logo to the weigh-in of UFC 54. It's hard to believe that the sport's preeminent promotion would part with a quality fighter over such a minor squabble, so we're left to wonder if there might not have been other issues at play. Whatever the reason for the split, White's apparent inability to push aside his towering ego two and half years after the logo incident is one step down the same painful, self-destructive path pioneered by boxing.

Like him or not, Lindland is a top-flight middleweight, a world class wrestler and grappler who competes at the UFC's weakest weight class. Refusing Lindland's offer undercuts the UFC's credibility as the world's premier fighting organization and deprives fans of the best possible fights. If personal enmity prevents fans from seeing Lindland fight Rich Franklin, Nathan Marquardt, Yushin Okami, and UFC champion Anderson Silva, then White will have truly begun a Dorian Gray-like transformation into that which he despises most.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Revisiting "The Smashing Machine"

Yesterday I rewatched the HBO documentary "The Smashing Machine," a part biopic, part exploration of MMA (mostly PRIDE) in the early 2000's. The ostensible subject of the film is Mark "The Smashing Machine" Kerr, a talented but flawed fighter trying to make a living fighting in Japan.

It's a stimulating film, but not exactly a flattering portrait of Kerr or MMA. While not necessarily designed to be unflattering, the director's choice of Kerr makes for dramatic viewing rather than a representative example of mixed martial artists. The result is a brutally honest look into the life of a guy barely holding it together while competing at the highest levels of his sport.

"The Smashing Machine" isn't a favorite of many MMA fans, and it's not hard to see why. Watch as Kerr head butts, gouges, and stomps his way through early vale tudo tournaments. Watch as he pumps himself full of an alphabet soup of painkillers every single day, his career slipping further and further away with each injection. Watch as he ODs on opiates, makes a heroic recovery, and then fails to learn from his mistakes inside and outside of the ring. Watch Kerr's face get stitched back together as Mark Coleman, Kerr's longtime friend, wins the 2000 PRIDE Grand Prix instead of Kerr. Not exactly upbeat stuff.

Kerr's life and career are true stories, but the film does nothing to correct the impression that all fighters exist in some state of desperation. Part of the fault for that can be laid on Coleman, who is constantly saying that he fights to put food on the table, often with his young children in the same shot (this is Coleman's standard line even now, many big purses later. Makes you wonder if the Coleman family is subsisting on a diet of nothing but truffles and caviar). Kerr also says he fights for the money, but it's harder to sympathize with his money problems when he's shown driving a $70,000 sports car. Either way, there's the distinct impression that fighters are driven to brutalize each other because they couldn't survive any other way--a vast oversimplification.

Kerr is more compelling when he talks about the unparalleled emotional high of fighting and winning, a high he seems to love more than his own body. There's a lot Kerr's fight footage in the film, and you can't help but root for the poor guy. But as Coleman humbly admits early in the film, the sport passed by guys like Kerr and Coleman, leaving them with nothing but their ground and pound game. Admittedly, it can be viciously effective in some cases, as the many close-ups of punches landing on prone heads can attest, but it's not enough to win consistently on the sport's biggest stage.

Kerr has tried to continue his MMA career, but the results have been underwhelming. He's 2-5 since the film was made, and he hasn't shown anything in the ring to indicate that he's improved much in the last seven years. He's obviously an intelligent, charismatic guy, but he's also a relic of the past, as is this film in many ways. There are certainly still drugs, brutality, and desperation in the sport, but the same can be said of football, among other sports.

The world is still waiting for a great MMA documentary, one that shows all the highs and lows of the sport as it is now contested. Until that time, "The Smashing Machine" will serve as a reminder of just how far the sport has come and how far it still has to go.

BTT, Chute Box And The Commission Controversy

So on Tuesday, Sherdog's Tim Leidecker posted an article with the shrill title "The Downfall of BTT and Chutebox," making his story on fighters that have moved away from the highly respected Brazilian camps sound like a plot line from Julius Caesar.

The article doesn't contain any news, since it mostly just recounts the list of fighters who have started their own camps in the last year, but as far as an explanation for the phenomenon, the best Leidecker can manage is the insinuation that the camps charged exceedingly high commissions on their fighters' purses.

However, Leidecker never states the supposedly exorbitant rate, and apparently didn't conduct any interviews or any other, ya know, research to see if that is in fact the reason for the fighter exodus. So what we're left with is a piece of apparently unconfirmed speculation, and the announcement that Leidecker has a hard-on for the recently formed Gracie Fusion camp (no word on what they're charging, however.)

The article seems to have seriously gotten under the skin of Murilo Bustamante, the fighter face of BTT. Today, Tatame posted a very cranky response from Bustamante, much of it about BTT's commission rate. He says that BTT charges fighters 10% of their purses for training and 10% for management, a rate Bustamante claims is half of what he paid as a fighter prior to founding BTT.

He argues that a 20% commission is more than reasonable when you consider what that amounts to for low-level fighters: in his example, $17 a month, based on $200 purses earned five times a year. He goes on to say that a guy can train for a couple of years paying these meager commissions, and if he flops on the fight circuit, he can always open a small gym in some Brazilian suburb and happily live out a quiet middle class life on the income from his dojo.

All good points, but you can see how the math gets less favorable as you go up the pay-scale. A fighter who is headlining events in Japan and raking in half a mil a year is paying about $8,300 a month in commissions, a pretty big chunk of change in a country where the average monthly salary is well under a thousand dollars. But how does a guy get into a position to make that kind of money in the first place? Well, with top-level training and an agent who can get you booked at the Saitama Super Arena, that's how. So it's not exactly highway robbery, as Leidecker implies, but at the same time you can see where the incentive comes from to start a break-away camp.

Either way, it would be nice to hear from the fighters themselves. Naturally, fighters that have broken off from BTT or Chute Box won't want to burn bridges, so they may not provide completely satisfying answers. But still, it's not unreasonable to expect the MMA media to do a little grunt work to answer the important questions in a story, such as: what do other camps in Brazil charge? Is that the same standard in the U.S.? Might there be other factors? Are the break-away camps really trying to do the same thing as BTT and Chute Box? I hope we can answer questions such as these at some point in the near future.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love (Or At Least Tolerate) The Slice

There is a specter haunting MMA…a raw, sparkly bearded, 235 pound specter named Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson, and he’s giving some people flashbacks to the mid-90’s. You remember the mid-90s, don’t you? You know, the bad old days, when MMA was more like a distilled version of the Jerry Springer Show than the professional, sanctioned athletic competition it is today. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so bad back then, but that was how MMA was perceived in the United States. So it's understandable that fans that have stuck with the sport aren’t exactly nostalgic for the last decade of the 20th Century.

Last Saturday’s EliteXC bout has brought up the traumatic childhood of modern MMA in part due to Kimbo’s opponent: the generously proportioned David “Tank” Abbott, one of the sport’s pioneers in the U.S. The UFC’s early promoters billed Abbott as a “pit fighter” with a “500 pound jackhammer” of a right hand and an alleged history of street-fighting success. Abbott’s brutal knockouts and hops-and-barley-based training regimen are the stuff of legend, and “legend” is exactly how some of MMA’s contemporary cheerleaders would like him to remain.

Slice has been compared to Abbott, primarily because both were known as street fighters before making the transition to professional competition. Kimbo fighting Abbott was supposed to be the old versus the new, the internet-age street brawler versus the slugger of yesteryear. It made for a compelling storyline, even if the fight itself was, as many had expected, brief and lackluster.

But there are important differences between the two men, differences that reflect the large-scale changes that have reshaped the sport in the last decade and a half. When Abbott entered the UFC, he trained and fought the same way he had as an amateur, which is to say without professional guidance and a game plan that can be witnessed in most American schoolyards.

Upon signing a professional contract, Kimbo, made famous by YouTube videos filmed in various Miami-area backyards featuring the dislodged eyeballs and gushing noses of his unfortunate opponents, took up training with Bas Rutten, a legendary fighter in his own right and a widely respected trainer. According to Rutten, Slice has been a workaholic in training, spending long hours in the gym humbly absorbing the fighting wisdom of his Dutch sensei. Slice’s chiseled physique, impressive at the relatively advanced (for a professional athlete) age of 34, provided a stark contrast to the corpulent Abbott, who just barely made the heavyweight weight limit of 265 pounds.

So why have MMA message boards been alight since Saturday with shrill warnings of impending doom? Why does a bald man with stylized chest hair inspire such fear in the MMA faithful? Part of it is undoubtedly the way the fight was promoted. Gary Shaw, EliteXC’s histrionic president, took the street-fighting angle and ran with it, naming the event “EliteXC Presents: Street Certified,” with the words “presents” and “street certified” scrawled in faux graffiti, as though a millionaire boxing promoter had decided to stage this particular event inside a circle of parked cars.

MMA has struggled mightily for acceptance in the mainstream sports world, and with the sting of Sen. John McCain’s 1998 “human cockfighting” comment still lodged in their collective memory, many fans are maternally protective of the sport’s image. Some view such lowbrow appeals as a threat to the sport, not just a throw back to a darker age, but a step down the path to extinction.

Such fears may be exaggerated, but they are the fears of a fiercely devoted fan base, a population segment that will not easily be convinced that a gold-toothed street mauler is good for their beloved sport.

Despite the hype of promoters and the anxiety of some fans, Kimbo himself has shown a fairly high degree of respect for the sport, modestly acknowledging his need for professional training and refusing to guarantee immediate success. Unlike Brock Lesnar, another MMA newcomer who has fans’ nervous about the public’s perception, Slice never claimed that he would make quick work of a former UFC champion, as Lesnar misguidedly implied in his comments on Frank Mir. Slice has made such quick work of his first three opponents, some have even criticized Gary Shaw for failing to pit his muscle-bound meal ticket against stiffer competition. With only two professional fights and one exhibition to Slice’s name, Shaw can hardly be faulted for bringing him along against less than all-world competition.

But after walking through Abbott, fans may begin clamoring for Slice to face higher quality fighters. Fortunately, Shaw can draw from a decent stable of heavyweights in EliteXC and its partner promotion Strikeforce, making it likely that Slice will face a series of legitimately challenging, and entertaining, tests in the near future.

The interest generated by Slice, and Lesnar, should not be a cause for concern for serious MMA fans. The sport is growing exponentially, but in order for it to be sustainable there must be multiple points of entry to MMA fandom. Many of the fans that have been with the sport for years came to it through traditional martial arts, a relatively restricted group compared to say, fans of professional wrestling and internet gross-out videos. It’s easy to dismiss the hype surrounding Slice as the excesses of a short-sighted promoter, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the fans drawn in by it as well.

Welcome To MMA Diehard!

I'm starting the MMA Diehard blog because I feel that there is a need for consistently good writing on MMA. Other sports have a bevy of witty, intelligent blogs featuring news, analysis, and commentary, and fans of those sports can waste an entire work day perusing them. Not so for MMA. While there are plenty of sites that offer up to the minute news (or rumors), only a small handful offer funny, entertaining commentary and insight on a regular basis. Many MMA fans spend their cubicle hours on forums instead, where the level of discourse is often below the standards of most 3rd grade classrooms. So in the interest of providing intelligent, enjoyable commentary and the opportunity to respond in kind, I've started this blog. Enjoy. And tell your friends.