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By nearly every tangible measure, you have to consider July 7’s UFC 117 a smashing success for the fight company itself and MMA in general.
The live event drew nearly 13,000 fans to the Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., and the televised pay-per-view unexpectedly approached one million buys. The main event fight between middleweight champion Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen thrilled most observers and left many clamoring for a rematch which (if booked) will no doubt sell ever more PPVs. Yep, it was an almost perfect night for our budding sport.
Almost.
The one glaring exception to the cavalcade of positives about UFC 117 is that the bay area’s biggest newspaper didn’t print a word about it. Not one word. The San Francisco Chronicle, in fact, so brusquely rebuffed the UFC’s efforts to interest it in covering the event that company president Dana White took to Twitter to even more brusquely bash the newspaper.
“San fran chronicle says they hate UFC and would NEVER cover the UFC and were such rude dickheads to our pr girl,” White wrote in his own classically profane style. “Hey SFC, fuck u!!!!”
Clearly, White has his own way of handling things. Some people like it. Others loathe it, but aside from the boss’s vulgarity, the significance of the Chronicle’s decision to cold-shoulder one its coverage area’s the biggest sporting event of the weekend cannot be overlooked.
There are still people – many of them, actually – who are ignorant of MMA’s place in the sporting landscape. There are also people who still consider the sport to be an ugly, brutal “human cockfight.” Unfortunately, a lot of those people work at newspapers.
I know this because I used to work at a newspaper. When I quit my conventional sports writing job to become a fulltime Internet MMA writer, the 40-something sports editor at my paper (who I actually like a lot and is a really good guy) just blinked at me for a few seconds before saying, “That’s a job?”
The roots of this disconnect could be largely generational. Another thing I know from experience is that a lot of people who work for newspapers are old. Many of them have been more or less doing the exact same thing over and over again every day for the last 20-30 years. They cycle from baseball season to football season to basketball season to baseball season in a seamless rotation that has become extremely comfortable over the years. Anything that disrupts that, anything new, is easily shortchanged as a fad or somehow “unworthy” of coverage.
Knowing no one who actually works at the Chronicle, I can’t say for sure that’s what’s going on here, or if the paper’s objection to MMA is more guttural. Either way, the paper is doing its readers a disservice.
The bottom line here is that it doesn’t really matter what the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle think about MMA. While news judgment is part of their gig, being the arbiters of what is appropriate for the reading public isn’t necessarily in the job description. The reporter’s job is, at base, to report. If enough people are interested, you write about it. Doesn’t matter if how you feel about what’s happening. Anyone who’s ever been to journalism school can tell you that.
Almost a million people paid money to watch UFC 117. The Chronicle meanwhile recently listed its own weekday circulation at 241,330. It’s not too hard to do the math here.
And they wonder why newspapers are dying.
Chad Dundas writes about MMA for CraveOnline, CagePotato.com and Versus.com. He lives in Missoula, MT.
