Ultimate Means Ultimate
There’s this belief among some fans and pundits that MMA would benefit from many promotions of equal importance and caliber, as if they were cell phone companies or something. Wrong. MMA is not the mobile business, where competition of equals is good for everyone.
Sports organizations are incredibly expensive and difficult to run. Other than fans these organizations require bajillions of dollars to keep them afloat, especially in the formative years but even as time goes along. A stadium roof collapses, a recession hits or competition comes calling (often in the form of an altogether different sport) and deep pockets are required to keep the business viable. Rare talent is expensive. In league sports, like the NFL, MLB or NHL, winning teams can spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year just on contracts, and may even abort profit to acquire the talent needed to win.
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Similar economics occur in MMA. While some promotions have tried and failed, many have succeeded on some scale. There are hundreds of promos, from Art of War to ZST (Zest). None has succeeded to the degree the UFC has done, except PRIDE for a short stint before the Yakuza sucked it dry like a fat kid with a Slurpee, and none will, but still there are many fight organizations that help develop fighters and give local communities a chance to showcase their talent. While these smaller organizations are pilot fish suckling on the gills of the Great White UFC, they are important in their roles.
The predicament smaller organizations face in trying to become more relevant is that the UFC was the first in North America and is now the home page for MMA. While similar events were being staged in Brazil (Vale Tudo) and in Japan (Shooto) prior to the UFC, when the UFC came into being they utilized perhaps America’s greatest asset: Hollywood. Video and film art-director Jason Cusson designing the trademarked Octagon made the UFC synonymous with MMA, like Kleenex is with tissue paper, and catapulted them into the lead role in a new era in fight sports.
When originally thinking up a name the UFC undoubtedly took the best one: The Ultimate Fighting Championship. Done. Even other relatively good words found by raiding thesauruses pale when compared to this. Maximum Fighting Championship? Uh, no. This is because there are no exact synonyms. Each word has its own slight twist. Ultimate means ultimate and no one will ever improve on the name. It’s important to come up with a really good name when starting a business. Have you ever met a stripper named Gertrude?
MMA is not unlike football, where different leagues co-exist, survive and contribute but will never equal or surpass the NFL. College football in the US is high quality and many fans are rabid, more so than for their NFL teams. And some college teams, like Ohio State, Tennessee and Michigan to name but a few, even garner a hundred thousand plus fans to their games, more than any NFL team. But college players for the most part aspire to play in the NFL –the real proving ground and, hence, where you can make a real killing. The Canadian Football League, while having some fairly eccentric rules, like scoring a single point for punting the ball through the opponents end zone, and ‘free toque day’, nevertheless has a fast pass-oriented game, very high quality players and has been around longer than the NFL. But offer almost any CFL player an NFL contract and he’ll be gone faster than an intelligent conversation at Fox News.
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There’s nothing wrong with being a smaller league or promotion, with having your place as a pixel or three in the larger picture. There are only so many fighters to go around, only so much talent to showcase at $59 a pop. It's important to note that the UFC would have a harder time finding new talent without the smaller promotions. Without pilot fish nibbling on the Great White’s gills, parasites would eventually kill the beast.
Our experience with boxing’s many competing organization and how that template virtually guaranteed controversy regarding who is really champ (and often ensured we’d never see the fight we really wanted to see), should have us be thankful that MMA is more clear cut.
But where there's money there'll be more people. That's a law more trustworthy than gravity. Men don’t like seeing other men own something, and someone will always be trying to take down the big kahuna. Even a profitable begging corner on a busy street in any metropolis soon gets assaulted with competition, before one of the bums comes to work with a squeegee and revolutionizes the game. Eventually the street corners are flush with squeegee kids. Not a good thing.
Maybe some are upset Dana White and Zuffa rule large, but what’s the alternative? The WBA, WBC, IBF..... No thanks. The best model is one large fish with several feeders in the tank.
Is Dana an MMA dictator? Perhaps, but one I think we can trust -for now. Remember that Dana White is the one to consistently point out the mistakes that boxing's promoters made in that sport and publicly vows not to do the same.
If you want to improve MMA, keep Dana and the UFC honest through social media and your purchasing dollars. If Mubarak and Gaddafi can be punted through the end zone this way, Dana White must know he does have bosses that aren’t named Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta: Fans. And write a letter to the various athletic commissions to change the rules, scoring and judging to reflect the modern reality and not the fears of an uneducated group of people hearkening to 1970’s boxing.
By Renko Styranka
ProFighting-fans.com MMA Staff Writer