In most states, the battle for sanctioning by athletic commissions has been won and the sport has even caught on with cable television companies like SpikeTV and Versus as well as finding at least a temporary home on the CBS network. MMA is still niche, but its popularity is growing all the time.
There is still a long way to go, before names like Randy Couture and Fedor Emelianenko are as recognizable as Tom Brady and Alex Rodriguez. Unfortunately, some aspects of the way the sport presents itself still need to change. If MMA wants to be considered on par with baseball, football and basketball in the USA, it still has a little bit of growing up to do.
1. Promote sport, not spectacle.
Critics will take any available opportunity to write off MMA as nothing more than as “human cockfighting,” a circus sideshow for untrained brutes. Let’s not give them the chance.
EliteXC may have done a good job with its second broadcast for CBS in portraying its fighters as legitimate athletes, but that still doesn’t get the company off the hook for turning Kimbo Slice into its main draw. For MMA to catch on as a true sport, oddities like Slice need to take a backseat to trained pros like Couture, Anderson Silva and B.J. Penn.
Even the UFC, recognized as the industry leader, often times goes overboard in painting its fighters as “warriors,” who fight at any cost. That’s probably wrong-headed in the American marketplace. The UFC would be best suited to ditch its current tired gladiator themed intro and start promoting its talent as the best athletes in the world, which is exactly what they are.
2. Start enforcing the rules inside the cage.
Punching in the back of the head, grabbing the fence or ropes, the kicking of down opponents, and eye pokes are all epidemic in MMA right now. All of it serves to make the sport look amateurish and poorly regulated. Nobody likes a sport where cheaters seem to prosper, yet that is the unwritten rule in MMA.
For proof, look no further than UFC Fight Night in July, when Kevin Burns was awarded a TKO victory after Anthony Johnson couldn’t continue because Burns poked him in the eye. The gouge was unintentional, but Burns shouldn’t have been given the W. It was an example of the kind of thing that still happens in MMA fights.
Referees will never be perfect, but more tightly officiated bouts where rules are enforced uniformly, across the board, for every fighter will make the sport look better, even to the untrained eye.
3. Take out the elbows.
With the notable exception of David Louiseau, few fighters effectively use elbow strikes on the ground to end fights by TKO or verbal submission. More often than not, elbows just cause cuts. Cuts cause stoppages and nobody – not fans or promoters and certainly not fighters – like it when the doctor gets to decide the winner.
MMA purists say taking out elbows will water-down the ground game but the reality is, it will force fighters to work more on the ground, improve their submission game and become more complete athletes. It will also reduce the cringe factor for the average viewer.
4. Standardize the judging criteria.
Like refereeing, judging is isn’t easy. Usually the officials ultimately come to the right decision, but far too often three judges can take strikingly different views of a single fight. Such was the case when Forrest Griffin recently took the UFC light heavyweight title off Quinton “Rampage” Jackson after very close contest. Griffin probably rightly won the fight, but three judges’ scorecards were so different as to be laughable.
In America, fights are scored according to the 10-point must system used in boxing, which doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit for MMA. Not only does the scoring system translate awkwardly to a three-round fight, criteria for judging who wins and loses can often be based around murky concepts like “ring generalship,” and “aggression.”
That needs to change. Promoters, fighters and judges need to back to the table and hash out better way to score fights. Questionable decision might be good for causing controversy and giving people something to argue about, but they’re bad for the image of the sport.
5. Stop the infighting.
The answer is to work together. It’s an idea many promotions give lip-serve to, but have yet to actually make happen. Perhaps it’s Pollyannaish to even suggest it, but if rival MMA companies could put aside their differences (and their egos) long enough to put on some super-cards featuring matchups between their best talents, America would probably be forced to take notice. Then MMA could finally step out of the shadows and into the limelight with the respect it deserves.
Well, it’s a nice idea, anyway.
Chad Dundas is a sports journalist and a fiction writer living in Missoula, Montana. He writes a weekly MMA column for Crave Online and is a regular contributor to www.mma-america.com and www.mmarated.com.
