After the Kimbo-Shamrock stuff and Fight Night Berlin, what patterns were present last weekend?
I liked the Jedrzejczyk-Penne card. I liked it before it was announced, and I liked it once it was over. The fighters didn’t have much name value, but it almost every bout featured someone with a lot of potential; at least one participant with a bright future in the sport. There weren’t many of the blue-chippers who seem destined to challenge for a belt at some point, but the card was a spiriting collection of well-matched fighters being given opportunities and grabbing them with both hands.
Not only did it represent a small cross-section of some the young talent coming up through the UFC, but it represented a sample of potential marketplaces the UFC is looking to break into. MMA as a whole has, by most metrics, been slowly deteriorating in popularity from its height in 2009. This isn’t necessarily the doomsday scenario that many have it as: most things have peaks and troughs. Negative perceptions of how damning this fade could be for the future of the sport have been helped by a largely American MMA media weaned on a combination of unrealistic expectations of growth and remembrances of earlier fragility.
Still, the initial bloom of the US-centric love affair with wrestlepunching is likely over. It is worth noting that as interest from the US side of things has declined, there’s been something of a pick-up from other countries. It’s not actually compensating, as the overall trend is still downwards, but a geographic Google Trends search for the term “MMA” over the last decade or so gives a picture like this:
(click on the Google Trends and then click “view change over time.”)
You can literally watch interest draining out of the States and rising elsewhere. While basic US centrality is unlikely to change, an idealized image of the future of the sport includes one where quality fighters are generated from all over the world. Zuffa can hopefully maintain its revenues by hop-skipping around the countries which it hasn’t visited yet (or recently), while waiting for probability to inevitably toss up an interesting star from one of its marketplaces. This is something which happened with that Irish feller with shocking and unlikely speed.
One part of the bedrock of that kind of future is cards like the one on Saturday. It wasn’t a big event by any stretch of the imagination, but it was an international card, with an appropriately multicultural feel. Mairbek Taisumov picked up a brutally efficient stoppage win for Chechnya where he dismantled Alan Patrick’s flashier style. Israel fought Sweden and came out on top: Noad Lahat might not necessarily have deserved to win his fight against Niklas Backstrom (almost all media members scored the fight as a draw), but he confirmed a number of gaping flaws in the Swede’s game. Makwan “Mr Finland” Amirkhani tapped out his Latin American opponent, as he was expected to, but flipped the script post-fight, making a tearjerker dedication to his mother instead of a call-out.
UK stand up
As mentioned by Roy Billington, the UK has been struggling in recent years to bring quality prospects to the table. With Dan Hardy confined to the commentator’s booth for medical reasons, Brad Pickett and Michael Bisping have gamely shouldered the burden as the UK’s standard-bearers. They’re getting a little long in the tooth, however, and as their divisions deepen it becomes increasingly obvious that they’ve gotten about as far as they’re likely to.
However, on Saturday, Askham bounced back from a tough and stylistically nightmarish debut loss to Magnus Cedenblad to knock out Antonio dos Santos Jr, reigniting some of the hype that once had him as Bloodyelbow’s #2 unsigned prospect.
Arnold Allen also picked up a no-gi ezekiel / ninja choke on Alan Omer. Up until that point, it was the kind of fight you hope to see from a decent, outmatched prospect- he was losing fairly soundly, but he was constantly hunting for a way to bring himself back into the fight. It reminded me a lot of Pedro Munhoz against Raphael Assuncao. The obvious difference is that Allen actually found a way to win.
Whether this was actually good or bad for Allen’s career remains to be seen: it will probably put him on a much steeper career path, where failure will be both more likely and more damaging. Many prospects (Rory MacDonald, perhaps Munhoz himself) have benefited from early UFC losses and a subsequent rebuilding run against lower-level competition before their games were too established to be easily changed. Regardless, the UK was one of the UFC’s first markets that they made significant -and largely failed- efforts to break into, and it’s nice to see it showing some small signs of life.
Japan
Japan remains the cautionary tale of MMA expansionism. Anyone who talks about the manifest destiny of the sport as something which is inevitably going to go from strength to strength should remember: MMA got really, really big in Japan, and PRIDE put on shows which have still yet to be matched in gate numbers. Then it almost completely collapsed, through a combination of promotional f—-ups and people just turning away.
Yuta Sasaki was thought to be one of the brighter prospects in the twitching remnants of the last-mighty JMMA scene. Alas, he faltered, and in a particularly damning way. It’s not any kind of unique JMMA failing (although coming in with an unstable and unadaptive game is kind of Japanese these days), but more that he had a sprint-grappling approach which was uniquely suited to regional-level competition. It looked great, but like Messrs Hettes, Hazelett and Sass, it struggles badly against baseline UFC athleticism. As he circled out against the cage, with his hands down, and unbalanced himself repeatedly with kicks, it wasn’t difficult to see what was coming:
(OK, it was a left straight.)
For every loss there’s a winner, though. Taylor Lapilus looked great in actively punishing takedown attempts, in a surprisingly similar way to the champion Jedrzejczyk. If you’d told me I’d be enjoying watching a Frenchman and a female Polish strawweight bookending a card where they’d bop their opponents with next-gen sprawl and brawl a few years back, then I’d have been a little surprised.
Fight Pass
Speaking of the UFC’s strawweight kingpin, there have some who have said that it was wrong to put Jedrzejczyk on Fight Pass- she’s a champion who needs exposure, at the very least on FS1 if not as a Fox Sports or PPV co-main.
However, the UFC needs Fight Pass. Cable cards are, bluntly, horrendously paced. Broadcast times, watersheds and other sporting events make for an ugly potential melange of start and finishing times. Cable deals are a necessary revenue stream for Zuffa at the moment, but eventually it seems likely that more events will end up on Fight Pass. At least I hope they will. Cable sucks.
To keep the service going, the UFC needs to lace it with worthwhile fights. Jedrzejczyk, like Gustafsson before her, adds some real value. She was undeniably the star of the night on a card which, although it might not have been stacked or loaded with immediate divisional relevance, provided a small glimmer of the future. Also, Ken Shamrock and Kimbo Slice was a thing which happened. Bellator could debatably justify using that fight as a springboard to launch interest in younger and more relevant fighters, like Straus, Pitbull and Chandler, who are all awesome. That kind of bait and switch seems cynical, though.