Amidst all the chaos, a once quiet organization has come forward onto the main stage of MMA.
Strikeforce, a U.S.-based mixed martial arts promotion, based in San Jose, CA, paid a cool $3 million for the assets of the now-defunct ELITE XC and has now emerged as second fiddle to the UFC, and deservedly so.
What Dana White and the rest of the UFC brass may or may not realize ... Strikeforce could be the best thing to happen to them since the TUF Season One finale between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar.
Often times, the second fiddle can act as the tipping point for bigger and better things.
Think of the American football league, circa 1960-1969. The whole idea for a new professional football league seemed so far-fetched, that even after AFL teams started playing, the original eight team owners became known as the "Foolish Club."
What no one could have anticipated is that almost every element that makes pro football the sport that it is today can be traced to the AFL and the huge changes its presence eventually brought to the sport when it was merged with the NFL in 1970.
By the time the fierce AFL-NFL war of the 1960s was over, the expanded National Football League of the 1970s stretched from coast-to-coast and from border-to-border. The resultant “Super Bowl” would go on to become the most watched sports spectacle in the history of the world.
Football is not the only sport where we have seen such instance.
The American Basketball Association (ABA) was a professional basketball league founded in 1967. The ABA ceased to exist with the ABA-NBA merger in 1976. While the circumstances surrounding the merger were different, it offers further evidence of an up-start organization merging with a more established organization to improve the overall quality of a sport.
While calling Strikeforce the “AFL of mixed martial arts” may not draw full parallel, fans can remain cautiously optimistic that the organization will serve as catalyst for the growth and evolution of this “new” sport.
Now when you are asking yourself questions like, “has the sport peaked?,” you will have a new point of reference. Remember, history is said to repeat itself, and sports are no exception.
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