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For a company that has traditionally been very careful about how it controls access to its fighters, the UFC has thus far been surprisingly supportive of Twitter.
Company President Dana White is on Twitter and the promotion's play-by-play team of Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan have taken to shouting-out their own Twitter accounts during live UFC broadcasts. The UFC's Web site even contains an area that updates fans on the latest tweets from its fighters.
Indeed, the company seems to have formed quite a bond – perhaps a financial one – with the latest craze in information-overload. But as larger mainstream entities like the NFL and NBA make moves to restrict the use of such social networking devices by their athletes, will the UFC soon follow suit?
Recently, some fighters have been making a pretty good case that it should.
It's all fine and good when Dan Henderson is using Twitter to announce an autograph signing or Shane Carwin is just letting us all know he just plans to spend a quiet evening with the family, but what about when fighters take it upon themselves to break UFC news with their personal accounts?
Several times during the last few months, technologically savvy MMA fighters have skipped the formality of press conferences of media releases – never that popular in MMA circles to begin with – and have begun posting information to their Twitter followers that one might guess the UFC might want to have a look at first.
Mike Swick, for example, alerted fans when he had to pull out of a scheduled bout with Martin Kampmann at UFC 103 before the company could itself announce the news or even line-up a replacement. Swick then kept us all updated on this pleas to the UFC to give him a fight with former champ Matt Hughes.
Carwin has beefed publicly with bloggers on his Twitter page and just this week, Tito Oritz proved he was not to be left out of the Twitter bonanza when he broke the news that Mark Coleman was out of their schedule co-main event at UFC 106 with an awkward, totally unedited post on his personal account Monday evening:
"Coleman, Coleman, Coleman to bad he sissies out!!!" Ortiz wrote. Wait, Ortiz tweeted? Shoot, I don't even know. Anyway, he went on: "Who's next??? I'm kicking someone's ass on Nov. 21st!"
Coleman's manager, understandably upset, responded with a torrent of insults directed at Ortiz and his porn star wife, Jenna Jameson. The manager, Mike DiSabato, later apologized, but not until after the news had already made the rounds on all the requisite blogs.
Now, you can imagine the public relations headache that someone like Tiger Woods or Roger Federer would create for themselves if they took to insulting the competition on their personal Twitter accounts. Luckily, MMA is still enough of a niche sport that the mainstream media doesn't yet care to take notice when a guy like Ortiz pops off.
But for the UFC, the danger is definitely there. It's bad enough that a guy like the recently retired Quinton "Rampage" Jackson dry-humps a female interviewer once every six months or so and that loose cannons like Junie Browning are pulling public freak-out sessions in hospital emergency rooms. Now you've got Ortiz entering into the public domain by calling Coleman a "sissy" and Coleman's manager firing back that Tito is married to a slut.
So far, the ESPNs of the world haven't noticed. But it's a strange new world out there, MMA fans. That time is coming, and when it does, the UFC and some unlucky fighter are gong to have a lot of explaining to do.
Perhaps the UFC – since it already requires some fighters to sign away lifetime rights to their own images for the use in things like videogames – should try to get ahead of the curve on this, before someone says something on Twitter that we're all going to regret.
Chad Dundas is a daily contributor to the Sporting News blog The Rumble and writes a weekly MMA column for CraveOnline. He lives in Missoula, MT.
