Tuesday, October 13 9:05 pm PT: News travels so fast in this sport that commenting on something that happened nearly 48 hours ago is like wondering if the DuMont network has a future. But it’s not every day that MMA gets as warm a reception in popular culture as it did during a Sunday episode of “The Simpsons.”
Many of the show’s fans have turned bitter, professing little interest in a show that exhibits little of the warmth toward its characters that it did 15 years ago. (The series is now in its 20th season.) But someone is watching: 7.5 million people tuned in to “The Great Wife Hope,” which had Marge concerned over the violent, impressionable content of the “Ultimate Punching Championship” and its Septagon. (That’s seven sides, not eight, for you patent attorneys at Zuffa.)
“Because this is not to my taste,” Marge told her collection of clucking mothers, “no one else should be able to enjoy it.”
Ignore the ludicrous climax -- Marge fights the promoter in competition, a stunt that could only play on cartoons or in Japan -- and it is absurdly surreal to consider that one of the most biting satire programs on the air thinks enough of the sport to riff on it. In the pre-“Ultimate Fighter” era, it was newsworthy if some UFC footage was playing on a TV in the background of a film; now Marge Simpson is applying an armbar on broadcast television. This is progress. Bizarre progress, but progress.
Tuesday, October 13 9:01 pm PT: Chuck Liddell is still dancing on “Dancing with the Stars.” CraveOnline’s Heyman Hustle has a full photo gallery of his most recent performance.
Tuesday, October 13 8:01 pm PT: And suddenly, construction work begins to look appealing: Benson Henderson, a probable Fight of the Year finalist for his efforts in a win against Donald Cerrone at WEC 43 on Saturday, celebrated by collapsing in the locker room and being shuttled to three different emergency rooms. Originally believed to have a detached retina, Henderson’s condition was upgraded to simply and blissfully messed up. His eye -- the recipient of a Cerrone kick -- still requires a diagnosis; he was put on IV fluids to replace the water lost in the five-round fight.
Most fighters would probably tell you they’d do the actual fighting for free: it’s the consequences that require compensation.
Scoring calculators FightMetric, meanwhile, had the bout tallied as a draw using the sport’s 10-point must system. I still maintain the decision comes down to whether Henderson’s two minutes of control and striking trumps Cerrone’s 90 seconds spent locking him up in submission attempts, all in the first round. An obvious rematch -- and possibly one worthy of a pay per view campaign.
Tuesday, October 13 4:20 pm PT: Following a wild and woolly weekend of MMA, I was back on the Sherdog Radio Network Tuesday with the usual formula of listener-led discussion and commentary.
All things Cerrone-Henderson were on the slate: my scoring, FightMetric's statistical assessment of the fight, the criteria of the Unified Rules, and in-depth discussion of the fundamental "value" of a submission in the scoring of an MMA bout.
Cerrone-Henderson aside, topics du jour included the recently announced fights for Takanori Gomi and Jorge Santiago, the slated Yoshihiro Akiyama-Wanderlei Silva bout, athletic commission bureaucracy, the postponement of the WEC flyweight division, The Simpsons and even a little War Machine.
Tuesday, October 13 3:51 pm PT: TOKYO -- In chronicling the UFC’s measured march into the seemingly impervious Japanese market, I find myself getting a chance to write about two subjects I normally keep separate: video games and mixed martial arts.
“UFC 2009 Undisputed” game developer Yukes and publisher THQ officially introduced the Japanese version of the game on Tuesday, ahead of its scheduled Oct. 15 release date. Meanwhile, Japanese premium cable provider WOWOW announced the premiere of the Japanese-dubbed “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 9, which featured fighters from the United States and the United Kingdom.
Though I’m used to seeing most of the same faces from the Japanese fight media whenever I cover events or pressers, this double-billed presser brought out a great many people in suits that I’d never seen before. One of my reporter friends here, Shu Inagaki -- who coincidentally does commentary for the Japanese UFC broadcasts and is a script supervisor on the redubbing of TUF for Japanese television -- mentioned to me that the collected suits were people from the local video game industry and press. It was surprising to me, given how they outnumbered the usual suspects in local fight reporting.
Tuesday, October 13 11:27 am PT: Kids are dumb. Teenagers are dumber. This is not normally cause for concern, but when those same teenagers begin to mature physically before they do mentally, it usually results in stories like this one.
According to the Kansas City Star, a high school wrestler in Missouri is suing Blue Springs High over injuries sustained during an impromptu “MMA” bout in 2008. After wrestling practice was canceled one day last October, it’s alleged that one student initiated an amateur fight card by pulling out some four-ounce gloves -- all under the consenting watch of an assistant coach.
The student -- who was apparently a willing party -- had teeth knocked out that resulted in extensive dental work. The suit also alleges the school had a fetish for unarmed combat: wrestling apparel for the team featured the UFC logo. (If things are bad now, wait until Zuffa’s lawyers get wind of it.)
Stupidity squared, but I always find it difficult to place blame on impressionable kids: save the venom for the idiot coach who, according to the text, “watched and cheered” as the wrestlers traded punches. We’re entering a generation that will take their behavioral cues based in part on “Ultimate Fighter” marathons and men who beat each other up for a living. And it may not be pretty.
Tuesday, October 13 10:34 am PT: The handful of times I’ve stumbled upon professional wrestling in the past ten years, I’ve witnessed the following:
1. A man getting hit over the head with a bed pan.
2. A woman being dragged around by her hair by a man.
3. Vague recollections of Ken Shamrock eating dog food and David “Tank” Abbott behaving as some kind of bodyguard for a faux-boy band. The latter made me tear up a little.
Clearly, I have not been exposed to the right parts of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment empire; in an interview with the Mercury News on his company’s business climate and outlook, McMahon describes his product as “more sophisticated.” More sophisticated than what? A lump of clay? Pots and pans clanging together? A test pattern?
No -- mixed martial arts. "You really can't compete with that," he said of the rival pay per view attraction. "Why not deliver a more sophisticated product and not go to those extremes? If the audience wants those extremes, they know where to go and how to get it.” And if they want misogyny, bad acting, or below-syndication-level scriptwriting, they know where to get that, too.
Tuesday, October 13 9:51 am PT: Look at fight footage from the past several years and you’ll notice a recurring presence in the background behind several winning, beaming faces: Shawn Tompkins, the Xtreme Couture trainer whose fight IQ helped shape that Las Vegas brand into a Mecca for top athletes.
5thRound.com reports that Tompkins is packing up his things and heading down the street to help establish a Tapout-branded gym. There’s no word on whether the split is amicable or not, but if Tompkins has engendered any loyalty among names like Vitor Belfort, Gina Carano, Tyson Griffin, and Forrest Griffin, he’ll be bringing with him an immediate foundation for Tapout to build a sweat brand on -- though it’s probably only a matter of time before Griffin and Carano open their own franchises.
Tuesday, October 13 5:47 am PT: He hasn’t helped author a lot of truly spectacular fights, but any boredom generated by Paulo Filho in the ring is more than compensated for outside of it. In an interview with Tatame -- translated by Fighter’s Only -- Filho mused that the UFC had an anti-Brazilian agenda to promote.
“The UFC is a great event, but the Americans do everything so that you cannot get the advantage,” he said. “They [do] everything to get you down. American is American, they want to see Americans with the belt and so eliminate as many Brazilians as possible…”
We’ll assume Filho’s Internet access is limited: three of the UFC’s five champions are foreign-born, two of them Brazilian. (In Lyoto Machida’s case, Brazilian/Japanese.) While it’s true there are frequent matchups between Portuguese-speaking athletes, they also frequently match Americans against Americans. If anything, a duel between two non-English-speaking fighters guarantees one will continue to advance in the promotion. If this is discrimination, they’re doing a spectacularly poor job of it.
