NY Times Article
Sept 1, 2007 7:42:18 GMT -5
Post by LWPD on Sept 1, 2007 7:42:18 GMT -5
I saw this in the NY Times the other day. This is the type of positive mainstream coverage that was unimaginable just a few years ago. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's take is a lot different from that once publicly espoused by Senator John McCain. The money rolling into Nevada from UFC shows tends to do that.
Courtesy of NY Times
Getting Your Kicks on Television
By Seth Schiesel
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 26 — It was a hot night here on the Strip last Saturday. Amid the cabarets, gambling and just plain debauchery, more than 11,000 people, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, decided to take in the fights.
Not boxing, but the mixed martial arts league called the Ultimate Fighting Championship that in just a few years has emerged from almost complete disrepute to become perhaps the fastest-growing spectator sport in America. Even as boxing seems to implode in slow motion, millions across the country are becoming fans of the U.F.C.’s jigsawlike submission holds and lightning kicks and its athletic, even sometimes balletic, practitioners. The league’s popularity has made it the top pay-per-view television attraction in the country, and its basic-cable offerings have become a major draw, especially among young men.
“I’ve been a friend of the boxing industry for 35 years — I’ve been to hundreds of boxing matches — and this is better than I thought it would be,” Senator Reid said beside the trademarked Octagon arena (don’t call it a ring) after watching the lightweight Joe (Daddy) Stevenson win a decision over Kurt (Batman) Pellegrino with dazzling combinations of punches and holds. The senator said that it was his first time attending the league and that the scene at the Mandalay Bay took him back to his youth — except for all the referees, doctors and safety regulators.
“This is a fair street fight,” he said. “When I was a kid, we had street fights, but this reminds me of a street fight that’s fair.”
Since 2000, 29 states, including California, New Jersey and Texas, have come to agree, by sanctioning mixed martial arts under the same general drug testing and oversight rules applied to boxing. At least two other states are currently considering legislation to sanction such fights; New York is not among them.
Of course, most people don’t really know how it feels to be kicked in the face. They don’t know the sharp pain of a knee to the gut or an elbow across the chin. Most have never experienced the primal fear of suffocation a person suffers when his neck has been entwined by the thighs and ankles of a jujitsu master, constricting like an anaconda.
Those techniques, and hundreds of others, are all fair game in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But while mixed martial arts bouts were once known by terms like “Anything Goes” and even as human cockfights, the U.F.C. has won over both queasy regulators and fans with a long list of rules.
There are the more conventional rules, like no biting, no head-butting, no hair pulling, no eye gouging and no attacks to the groin or throat. Then there are the more exotic restrictions, like no “fish hooking” (putting fingers in an opponent’s mouth and ripping at the cheek from inside) and no “small-joint manipulation” (yanking, bending or breaking an opponent’s finger or toe).
Flying to Las Vegas from the East Coast a few days before the fights on the U.F.C’s brown Gulfstream IV, Dana White, the league’s muscular, articulate 38-year-old president, was reclining in his customary black T-shirt, explaining an earlier fight on DVD, when he said there had never been a death or serious injury in his league.
“Do you know why people die in boxing all the time?” he said. “Neurological damage. In boxing my goal is to hit you in the head and knock you out, or hit you in the head more times than you hit me in the head. That’s basically all there is. And with the boxing glove they have actually created a weapon for repeated brain trauma.”
He leaned over the aisle and make a quick, athletic flick of the shoulders. “You know what would happen if I punched you in the face right now?” he said. “Yes, it would hurt you, but since I’m not wearing a glove, I would probably break my hand. But in our sport there are 500 different ways I can win without hitting you in the head; boxing basically requires it.”
Ultimate Fighting Championship participants use light, fingerless gloves that are meant to protect the hand but not enlarge the striking area or increase the weight of a punch.
Another key difference relating to safety seems to be the culture of the two sports. A boxer who gives up before the referee stops the fight (as Roberto Duran is famously reported to have done, against Sugar Ray Leonard, in the 1980 “no mas” fight) is considered psychologically weak, if not a wimp. In the U.F.C. a fighter who submits, or “taps out,” generally seems to get credit among his peers for recognizing an impossible situation. (There are no female fighters in the U.F.C., though there are scantily clad “Octagon Girls.”)
In his bombastic style, Mr. White is fond of pointing out that all participants in state-sanctioned bouts are tested for steroids before every event, unlike members of most major sports leagues. Fighters who test positive (and some have) are generally banned for a year.
“Look at football,” he said at a prefight news conference. “If all those guys got tested before every game, like our fighters do before every fight, guess what? There would be no football, none. Maybe you’d have the quarterback and the kicker out there.”
It all adds up to one of the fastest-growing sports and media properties in the world. In 2001 the casino magnates and brothers Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank J. Fertitta III bought the U.F.C. for $2 million and installed Mr. White, a former trainer, as president.
As a private entity, Zuffa, the league’s parent company, based here, does not announce financial results, but according to trade publications the league generated about $220 million in pay-per-view revenue alone last year. That compares with about $200 million for World Wrestling Entertainment, the scripted professional wrestling company, and roughly $175 million for HBO’s industry-leading boxing operation.
The average U.F.C. pay-per-view event now draws roughly 500,000 households, up from fewer than 100,000 just a few years ago. The league has been in negotiations with HBO for at least six months about having that channel carry some fights, though no deal has been reached.
Of course, pay-per-view results do not include merchandise sales, gate receipts or revenue from the company’s basic-cable programs, which include the “Ultimate Fighter” reality series on Spike TV — now one of the perennial leaders in cable ratings among young men — as well as live and taped fights also on Spike.
“In September alone we will have 56 hours of U.F.C. programming,” Kevin Kay, Spike’s general manager, said. “Over the last few years we have seen the U.F.C. become absolutely huge among men 18 to 34, which is our core audience. I really think they were thirsting for the new boxing. Boxing is like your grandfather’s sport, and there’s this sort of fascination with mixed martial arts now. Ultimately it’s a combat sport, and guys love to watch guys hit guys.”
In fact, the U.F.C. still seems to be in its infancy in appealing to a broad variety of fans. There were very few young children and very few people over 45 among the thousands of fans packing the concourse of the Mandalay Bay Events Center to see the weigh-ins and get autographs the day before the fight. The crowd was overwhelmingly, though by no means entirely, white. Many of the fans and fighters seemed to share the same West Coast aesthetic: a lot of black clothing, a lot of hard rock music and a panoply of tattoos.
Surprisingly, perhaps, women appeared to be at least a third of the crowd. Amy Moore, a 37-year-old veterinary technician from Cincinnati, was in line for autographs with her 14-year-old daughter. Ms. Moore said she had become a U.F.C fan over the last five or six years and that she was part of a 20-member crew of friends back home who made sure to watch every big fight together.
But she had a big problem: her brother, also a U.F.C. fan, was scheduled to get married at another Las Vegas hotel the next day, just as the main card was scheduled to start.
“Oh, let me tell you, both me and my brother tried to move the wedding to another day, maybe next week,” she said. “But my brother’s fiancée, the bride to be, just wasn’t having it. But she did make a concession and say we can bring a TV into the reception to watch. That’ll have to do until the next one.”
She did not say whether she meant the next fight or the next wedding.
Courtesy of NY Times
Getting Your Kicks on Television
By Seth Schiesel
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 26 — It was a hot night here on the Strip last Saturday. Amid the cabarets, gambling and just plain debauchery, more than 11,000 people, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, decided to take in the fights.
Not boxing, but the mixed martial arts league called the Ultimate Fighting Championship that in just a few years has emerged from almost complete disrepute to become perhaps the fastest-growing spectator sport in America. Even as boxing seems to implode in slow motion, millions across the country are becoming fans of the U.F.C.’s jigsawlike submission holds and lightning kicks and its athletic, even sometimes balletic, practitioners. The league’s popularity has made it the top pay-per-view television attraction in the country, and its basic-cable offerings have become a major draw, especially among young men.
“I’ve been a friend of the boxing industry for 35 years — I’ve been to hundreds of boxing matches — and this is better than I thought it would be,” Senator Reid said beside the trademarked Octagon arena (don’t call it a ring) after watching the lightweight Joe (Daddy) Stevenson win a decision over Kurt (Batman) Pellegrino with dazzling combinations of punches and holds. The senator said that it was his first time attending the league and that the scene at the Mandalay Bay took him back to his youth — except for all the referees, doctors and safety regulators.
“This is a fair street fight,” he said. “When I was a kid, we had street fights, but this reminds me of a street fight that’s fair.”
Since 2000, 29 states, including California, New Jersey and Texas, have come to agree, by sanctioning mixed martial arts under the same general drug testing and oversight rules applied to boxing. At least two other states are currently considering legislation to sanction such fights; New York is not among them.
Of course, most people don’t really know how it feels to be kicked in the face. They don’t know the sharp pain of a knee to the gut or an elbow across the chin. Most have never experienced the primal fear of suffocation a person suffers when his neck has been entwined by the thighs and ankles of a jujitsu master, constricting like an anaconda.
Those techniques, and hundreds of others, are all fair game in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But while mixed martial arts bouts were once known by terms like “Anything Goes” and even as human cockfights, the U.F.C. has won over both queasy regulators and fans with a long list of rules.
There are the more conventional rules, like no biting, no head-butting, no hair pulling, no eye gouging and no attacks to the groin or throat. Then there are the more exotic restrictions, like no “fish hooking” (putting fingers in an opponent’s mouth and ripping at the cheek from inside) and no “small-joint manipulation” (yanking, bending or breaking an opponent’s finger or toe).
Flying to Las Vegas from the East Coast a few days before the fights on the U.F.C’s brown Gulfstream IV, Dana White, the league’s muscular, articulate 38-year-old president, was reclining in his customary black T-shirt, explaining an earlier fight on DVD, when he said there had never been a death or serious injury in his league.
“Do you know why people die in boxing all the time?” he said. “Neurological damage. In boxing my goal is to hit you in the head and knock you out, or hit you in the head more times than you hit me in the head. That’s basically all there is. And with the boxing glove they have actually created a weapon for repeated brain trauma.”
He leaned over the aisle and make a quick, athletic flick of the shoulders. “You know what would happen if I punched you in the face right now?” he said. “Yes, it would hurt you, but since I’m not wearing a glove, I would probably break my hand. But in our sport there are 500 different ways I can win without hitting you in the head; boxing basically requires it.”
Ultimate Fighting Championship participants use light, fingerless gloves that are meant to protect the hand but not enlarge the striking area or increase the weight of a punch.
Another key difference relating to safety seems to be the culture of the two sports. A boxer who gives up before the referee stops the fight (as Roberto Duran is famously reported to have done, against Sugar Ray Leonard, in the 1980 “no mas” fight) is considered psychologically weak, if not a wimp. In the U.F.C. a fighter who submits, or “taps out,” generally seems to get credit among his peers for recognizing an impossible situation. (There are no female fighters in the U.F.C., though there are scantily clad “Octagon Girls.”)
In his bombastic style, Mr. White is fond of pointing out that all participants in state-sanctioned bouts are tested for steroids before every event, unlike members of most major sports leagues. Fighters who test positive (and some have) are generally banned for a year.
“Look at football,” he said at a prefight news conference. “If all those guys got tested before every game, like our fighters do before every fight, guess what? There would be no football, none. Maybe you’d have the quarterback and the kicker out there.”
It all adds up to one of the fastest-growing sports and media properties in the world. In 2001 the casino magnates and brothers Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank J. Fertitta III bought the U.F.C. for $2 million and installed Mr. White, a former trainer, as president.
As a private entity, Zuffa, the league’s parent company, based here, does not announce financial results, but according to trade publications the league generated about $220 million in pay-per-view revenue alone last year. That compares with about $200 million for World Wrestling Entertainment, the scripted professional wrestling company, and roughly $175 million for HBO’s industry-leading boxing operation.
The average U.F.C. pay-per-view event now draws roughly 500,000 households, up from fewer than 100,000 just a few years ago. The league has been in negotiations with HBO for at least six months about having that channel carry some fights, though no deal has been reached.
Of course, pay-per-view results do not include merchandise sales, gate receipts or revenue from the company’s basic-cable programs, which include the “Ultimate Fighter” reality series on Spike TV — now one of the perennial leaders in cable ratings among young men — as well as live and taped fights also on Spike.
“In September alone we will have 56 hours of U.F.C. programming,” Kevin Kay, Spike’s general manager, said. “Over the last few years we have seen the U.F.C. become absolutely huge among men 18 to 34, which is our core audience. I really think they were thirsting for the new boxing. Boxing is like your grandfather’s sport, and there’s this sort of fascination with mixed martial arts now. Ultimately it’s a combat sport, and guys love to watch guys hit guys.”
In fact, the U.F.C. still seems to be in its infancy in appealing to a broad variety of fans. There were very few young children and very few people over 45 among the thousands of fans packing the concourse of the Mandalay Bay Events Center to see the weigh-ins and get autographs the day before the fight. The crowd was overwhelmingly, though by no means entirely, white. Many of the fans and fighters seemed to share the same West Coast aesthetic: a lot of black clothing, a lot of hard rock music and a panoply of tattoos.
Surprisingly, perhaps, women appeared to be at least a third of the crowd. Amy Moore, a 37-year-old veterinary technician from Cincinnati, was in line for autographs with her 14-year-old daughter. Ms. Moore said she had become a U.F.C fan over the last five or six years and that she was part of a 20-member crew of friends back home who made sure to watch every big fight together.
But she had a big problem: her brother, also a U.F.C. fan, was scheduled to get married at another Las Vegas hotel the next day, just as the main card was scheduled to start.
“Oh, let me tell you, both me and my brother tried to move the wedding to another day, maybe next week,” she said. “But my brother’s fiancée, the bride to be, just wasn’t having it. But she did make a concession and say we can bring a TV into the reception to watch. That’ll have to do until the next one.”
She did not say whether she meant the next fight or the next wedding.