The big matchup between the lightweight champions of DREAM and Sengoku took place New Year’s Eve with Shinya Aoki recording a devastating technical submission via hammerlock against Mizuto Hirota. The fight was halted by the referee upon Hirota’s violent screaming after his arm was snapped broken. A video replay of the Dynamite – Power of Courage 2009 fight can be viewed below.
Generally considered the #2 and #3 lightweight fighters in the world, the fight was one of the most anticipated in Japan in years. Words between the fighters camps had heated up leading into the fight, with both fighters wanting to make a statement in the fight. Aoki would be the one that placed his stamp.
Right from the bell, Aoki attacked with a single leg that he switched off to an ankle pick for a takedown. He then worked up the body for a lock and was able to pin Hirota’s arm behind his back. Aoki then teed off with a barrage of punches in a full mount position. Hirota’s only defense was to move to his base to avoid the shots.
Aoki then ratched up the hammerlock to break Hirota’s base. Aoki was able to slip in a scissor body lock with the hammerlock and snap Hirota’s arm with the contrasting pressures. The arena was filled with Hirota’s shriek of pain as the referee jumped in. Aoki then stood over top of the fallen fighter, delivering the middle finger to the disabled Hirota. The crowd reigned down boos on Aoki and he then turned his middle finger to the arena.
The actions of Aoki were clearly intentional and aimed at injuring Hirota. His dominant display was diminished by his display of poor sportsmanship after the serious injury. Aoki is clearly amped up by the negative catcalls from the UFC and he intended to send a message to Dana White and B.J. Penn.
Message heard and received.
Is the UFC ready to co-promote this one or will it continue to shield the UFC fighters from true tests? We’ll find out in 2010.
Mixed martial arts had a tremendous year om 2009. The UFC put on more fights, garnered its largest attendance levels and generated the most revenue in the history of the company and the sport. Everything was clicking on all cylinders and mixed martial arts is on the cusp of a breakthrough. All of this in spite of a struggling economy
Happy New Year UFC
With all the success, Dana White and his organization have still not reached the pinnacle, that being reaching a mainstream sports audience. To reach that “tipping point”, as defined by Malcolm Gladwell in his famous book, White and the UFC must make a few changes to its business to make mixed martial arts. Once those changes are implemented, the unstoppable force will come into line and take MMA mainstream.
The following are a few New Year’s Resolutions for the UFC to consider that will finally get mixed martial arts into the mainstream.
Resolution #1 – Pay The Fighters
If the UFC is the elite promotion, then it should pay fighters correlative to the gate. Over the course of 2009, many other promotions are sharing the proceeds at events at a much higher rate. Bellator Fighting Championship guaranteed its tournament champions $150k over the course of three fights. Strikeforce’s recent Evolution event featured on Showtime paid out $481k on a gate of $634k (76% of gate went to the fighters).
In contrast, Zuffa took in $818k at WEC 41 while paying out salaries of $216k or 26% of gate. For UFC 106, they took in a live gate of $3.00M and paid salaries of $1.02M, or 33% of the gate. At UFC 104, they took in a live gate of $1.9M and paid out $922k, or 48% of the gate. These revenue figures do not include PPV revenue and sponsorship fees. When included, this doubles to triple the gross receipts. What we can surmise is that fighters appear to be getting about 10%-20% of revenue. The remainder goes into Zuffa’s pockets.
The UFC needs to begin improving its payouts into the 75%-100% neighborhood of live gate. The fighters are being paid peanuts in relation to the revenue they are generating. If improvements don’t occur, expect more defection like that of Dan Henderson in 2010.
#2 – Fine Tune or Cancel “The Ultimate Fighter”
The original concept of The Ultimate Fighter served as a launching pad for the organization in 2005. It introduced the sport to new fans and found a special recipe of connecting the fighters personally with the fans. The most recent season jumped the shark and has shown that the reality show is not about creating a training ground for new fighters, it’s just Big Brother in a cage where losers of the fight are banished from the house.
Not since 2007, Season 5, has the show produced a quality contender. The focus has shifted to personality rather than fighting ability. Season 10 epitomizes the problem. While scoring record-level ratings with its media barrage of Kimbo Slice, his time in the house helped him little and he displayed why he should not have been considered for the show during the TUF 10 Finale.
Either the show needs to return to its roots of seeking out talent or the UFC should shut it down. The Ultimate Fighter is part of the branding of MMA, and the circus-like stench of the show lowers the sport to the ranks of professional wrestling.
Resolution #3 – Make The Best Championship Fights By Cross Promoting
The UFC’s biggest issue for 2010 is the lack of bonafide championship belt matches. Outside of the light heavyweight division, there are no interesting championship bouts on the horizon. Anderson Silva, George St. Pierre, BJ Penn and Brock Lesnar are head and shoulders ahead of their competition. Simply put, who is left in the UFC for these guys to beat?
Fans want to see Lesnar hook up with Fedor Emelianenko. They want to watch Penn hook it up against Shinya Aoki or Eddie Alvarez. They are aching for GSP to fight Marius Zaromskis or Jay Hieron. Or how about Anderson Silva against Jake Shields or Gegard Mousasi?
For the good of the sport, the UFC must break its stance on cross-promotion that will help the sport as a whole breakthrough. The upcoming “Dynamite” event in Japan that pairs DREAM and Sengoku’s best fighters is the road map for the future. If the UFC’s champs are truly that great, then what is the issue?
Resolution #4 – Expand The Number Of Fighters Under Contract
While the UFC has expanded the number of events it hosts, the number of new fighter signings have not increased at the same rate of growth. This has left the UFC to regurgitate the same fighters over and over again on its PPV broadcast. You can really only enjoy so much of the same guys until it gets old…and old quickly.
The great thing about combat sports is the belief that there always somebody coming up the ladder behind you to take your belt. As noted previously, none of this is happening in the UFC. The champs stand at the top and the contenders are a few rungs below, not one. This can only be turned around by signing new fighters and developing them.
Recent contract cancellations for Jake Rosholt and Brock Larson are key examples of bad judgment by the UFC. These guys were thrown to the lions immediately and tossed out with the garbage after two losses. If you want to develop fighters, black marks eventually have to occur on their record. Every UFC champ has a blemish on their record. Its better these blemishes occur in the UFC rather than elsewhere.
UFC 107 has come and gone, finalizing a less than exciting year for the leading mixed martial arts promotion. Racked with injuries, fighter defections, controversial results and upstart promotional competition from Strikeforce and Bellator, the year couldn’t have ended sooner for Zuffa and its President Dana White. UFC enters 2010 in a very weird position and last night’s awful mismatch between BJ Penn and Diego Sanchez personifies the problem.
The UFC, outside of its Light Heavyweight division really doesn’t have one marketable championship fight any time in the near future. Its champions BJ Penn, George St. Pierre, Anderson Silva and Brock Lesnar really don’t have any competitive fights on the horizon. These are the headline fighters of the organization and the UFC basically has nobody of quality for them to fight.
BJ Penn’s destruction of Diego Sanchez last night was the prime example. Dana White gave us the Vince McMahon sale that Diego Sanchez was the unquestioned second best lightweight fighter in the world and that Penn was going to get his first real test. Sanchez told us he was going to storm across the cage, attack Penn like nobody has before and take him down to the mat for a beating.
None of this transpired.
Instead, Penn manhandled Sanchez like a rag doll and displayed just how weak the talent level is in the UFC at lightweight. Sanchez, the former TUF 1 Champion, displayed no real martial arts skills. His fighting approach that got his the championhsip fight invite was to bullrush, takedown and pound. Last night, the talented Penn nullified these basic skills, fended off every weak takedown attempt and handed out one of the most brutal beatings ever seen in the cage. So if Sanchez really was #2 as Dana White told us, Penn is out of competitors to fight under the UFC banner.
This leads us to the problem with the UFC…its refusal to cross promote. What killed boxing were promoters that overprotected their fighters, controlled the matchups and didn’t deliver the fights people demanded to see. Multiple title holders from different organizations that were not making the fights to protect and hold their crowns. Dana White is displaying his Napoleanistic complex and is dooming the sport in front of our eyes.
Fans are calling for the UFC to sign new top lightweight fighters. The bloom is off the rose. The fans will only drink so much kool-aid. People have figured out that they are not being served shinola now.
Every forum board last night online had discussion threads discussing what fight matchups would look like for Penn with all the great lightweights that are not fighting at UFC. Even commentator Joe Rogan called for it during the broadcast, something I am sure he will get admonished for by Zuffa. The UFC can make these matchups and they don’t have to sign anybody.
Penn is in the driver seat now to help take MMA mainstream. He can push UFC to start cross-promoting to make the biggest fights for him or threaten to bolt to another promotion that will do so. He has reached the point in his career where he controls his destiny, not the UFC.
The fights that matter for Penn which hold the greatest monetary take for him reside with fighters in other organizations. The fans don’t want to see him maul another second-rate UFC fighter. They want to see him fight Dream’s Shinya Aoki, Tatsuya Kawajiri or Joachim Hansen. They want to see him square off against Bellator’s Eddie Alvarez or Jorge Masvidal. Or perhaps throw him in the cage with Sengoku’s Mizuto Hirota. These are the fights that fans want to see, not matchups against an overrated 10 loss fighter like Joe Stevenson or a wrestler with no martial arts skills like Gray Maynard.
As this year comes to end, UFC needs to make some big decisions on how it runs its business and its impact on the sport as a whole. The WWE coattails that have been ridden thus far need to be cut and the UFC needs to recognize it is a promotion, not a league or “sports entertainment”. The sooner this happens the better.
Another UFC event has come and gone leaving a bad taste in the mouth of those shelling out $50 for the pay-per-view fights. Lets all breath a collective yawn and get ready for the next uninspiring card that will air in three weeks.
UFC 106 was viewed by many as the weakest event of the year due to the cancellation of the main event featuring Brock Lesnar and Shane Carwin. Even before the original main event was cancelled, not much interest was being generated on what was expected to be a main event mismatch of grand proportions.
Dana White Is Concerned About Judging, Not Fight Quality
How did Dana White try to fix the hole in the event? Well, lets sell Ortiz/Griffin as the main event and we’ll plug in Koscheck/Johnson as co-feature even though they will have just 3 weeks of training. People will drink the koolaid, just got to mix in the sugar.
This is now five straight events that were below the standards of the normal UFC product we’ve come to know. Uninteresting main events, weak undercards and too much WWE-laden drama. While UFC 107 stands to offer an interesting set of overall fights for the first time in months, the main event will be an extreme mismatch for the lightweight championship belt.
Which brings forward the question…are there really any true contenders out there for the championship belts?
If you breakdown each weight class, outside of light heavyweight, the gap between the champions and the “#1 Contenders” is widening. Lesnar, Anderson Silva, George St. Pierre and BJ Penn are all at no immediate risk of losing their belts. There is nobody coming up the ranks to deliver a challenge, which poses a big problem for the UFC. Whose the next real contender?
Great fighting events are defined by the main feature. Nobody goes home remembering the warmup fights. In fact, people don’t start streaming into the arena until the last couple of fights. The UFC cannot expect to sustain its dominance if it cannot fix the top of its fight cards. To fix these problems, here are a few things that the UFC is going to need to address:
Reduce the number of events per year
Larger win bonuses, lower minimum purse
Begin fostering new fighter development
Start cross-promoting with other organizations
The biggest problem with the UFC right now is that they are doing too many fights. When you couple this with not increasing the number of fighters under the promotion, it decreases the quality of the events. The UFC is clearly going after cash while sacrificing product quality and hording its profits. This has to stop soon or it is going to come back to bite them. If you can’t increase the number of fighters in the stable, you cannot put on this many events.
As shown during Season 1 of Bellator, if you hang the money carrot you get better fights. While Bellator didn’t have many of the big name fighters, just ask anyone that attended an event whether they got their money’s worth on the tickets. What made for the better fights was the incentive to win and the fighters went for the kill. In the UFC, the fighters are more worried about their next payday versus their current, and this can only be recitified by lowering their guaranteed purses and making them work for the payout.
Next, please put The Ultimate Fighter out of its misery. The show has turned into Big Brother inside of a cage. Its no longer about fighter development, its about tv ratings and advertiser dollars. How else can you explain the sad sacks on display in TUF 10 or the unbelievable decision to not invite the up-and-comer Tyron Woodley for TUF 9. Its about finding “personalities”, not fighters. The UFC needs talent development. When was the last time an undercard fighter made his debut with the UFC? I can’t recall. Reliance on the smaller promotions to build fighters and stealing them is not a long-term strategy for success.
And finally, the time for Dana White to swallow his pride and acknowledge that the other organizations now have equal fighter quality has come. Nobody wants to see BJ Penn fight anyone in the UFC, they want to see him against Shinya Aoki or Eddie Alvarez. Do you want to pay $50 to watch Silva slaughter the talentless UFC foes, or would you rather see him fight Jake Shields, Hector Lombard or Gegard Mousasi. And do I even need to bring up commentary about the heavyweight division…Fedor?
The time is now for the UFC to shore up its product. No more whiny calf sniveling from Dana White about the poor judging. This issue with the UFC latest string of fights has nothing to do with judges…it has everything to do with a stale business model that is prepared to get knocked down by the competition if it cannot recognize the error in its current strategy.
