MMA: The Sport's Biggest Hurdle Is the Old Guard

After coming across an article recently that examined violence in sports and being confused at its misguided ideas and general lack of attention to how the real world operates, something struck me: all the stigma attached to mixed martial arts, all the hurdles its cleared and still has ahead, all come from one source.

That source is the proverbial “old guard” of sports media.

Sure, many of you reading this will head to comment box to berate me for not realizing this sooner, but stay clear of that scroll bar to the right for just a minute here.

Really think about what that means, and how it’s going to influence the growth of the sport. It’s actually a scary proposition.

The sports media is entangled in the transitional phase of the modern world and often writes articles or holds court on television with discussions that are aimless and lost. They’ll argue that modern culture glorifies violence and injury more than any that has come before, ignoring completely that hockey players in their generation skated helmet-less and shot on unmasked goalies, or that football players once used helmets that you wouldn’t slap on a kid in a stroller today.

That was okay though. It was part of men being men. It was just toughness in those days.

The media needs something to cover, and violence is a sexy story. Spinning it to act like violence in sports is worse than ever: that’s the icing on the cake. There’s no news like bad news, after all.

Invariably, all these people will point to “the rise of mixed martial arts” as a sign that the world is going straight to hell and taking a road paved in blood to get there. Yet they all grew up on boxing, a sport that has produced countless punch drunk legends and more slurred speech than competitive drinking.

And I love boxing. Imagine how someone who hates it must assess it.

Wait.

Actually, you don’t have to. You’re seeing it in the very assessment of mixed martial arts I’m talking about.

I’m not silly enough to sit here and tell you that the legends of MMA will be any better off at 80 than Muhammad Ali is. It’s going to hurt to see Wanderlei Silva or Chuck Liddell in a few years, when the toll of their careers shows more noticeably. But nobody can convince me that they’d be better off if they’d boxed exclusively their whole lives, and the old guard of which I speak would argue that with anyone willing to listen.

Unfortunately, many people do listen. This old guard has the power to influence the public, often with uneducated or lazily-researched sentiment. It inevitably trickles down to concerned parents and wild-eyed advocates against the sport, and MMA loses any foothold it might gain from positive coverage.

Perfect example:

Guy who trains Tae Kwon-Do kills a man in a drunken bar fight, one of probably a hundred thousand such fights that take place nightly around the world. It gets national coverage under the guise that he was a mixed martial artist, despite the fact that Tae Kwon-Do and alcohol have never accounted for anyone’s success in MMA, ever. The sport becomes banned in his county, revisited entirely across his state. The Helen Lovejoys of the world shout “won’t somebody please think of the children!”

A few weeks later, a guy who trains jiu-jitsu sees a failed carjacking, follows the carjacker for a bit to see him try it again, jumps on his back and chokes him out. He saves an old man, holds the guy there until the police show up.

Jiu-jitsu has accounted for grossly more MMA success than the aforementioned drunken Tae Kwon-Do, and he gets a one-page article in his local paper. Plus they called him a “local martial arts student” instead of a “local mixed martial arts fighter.”

Pretty big difference in those two titles, especially when you consider the nature of each of their stories. As I said though, there’s no news like bad news, so the crazed cage fighter-turned-murderer goes national.

Every time a misinformed reporter says something silly, people take it as gospel if they don’t actually follow MMA or study martial arts. It hurts a sport that deserves better, a sport that has gone to great lengths to legitimize itself and grow from its roots in no-holds-barred competition.

Perhaps it’s that thirst for legitimacy that scares people. Maybe the idea of a new kid on the block scares competing promoters, media members who don’t want to have to cover a new sport and spend more time on the road away from their families, or parents who see their kids being killed on the playground with a triangle choke.

I don’t know, but I don’t see how MMA deserves its label when violence has been part of our culture since gladiators battled to the death in Rome. I’d venture more kids have been undeservedly hurt on playgrounds by failed pro wrestling moves or cohorts who thought they were Mike Tyson in the past 20 years than by kids practicing their jiu-jitsu.

No one’s calling for bans on pro wrestling, and Iron Mike is quietly racing pigeons and doing cameos in The Hangover films in his retirement. Why is MMA such a popular target, then?

As much as Dana White will say the sport is only growing and he’s taking it everywhere, there has to be legitimate concern over the influence of those who just don’t care to see the sport succeed. It’s great that big outlets like ESPN are covering the UFC, but there are still plenty of ink-stained wretches who need a pariah on the sporting landscape and will target MMA on the regular.

Until those individuals have moved on into retirement or at least have stepped down from their soapbox and called off the witchhunt, the sport may be in a holding pattern for a while.

To paraphrase modern philosopher Chris Rock: “when you’re other sports, the sky’s the limit. When you’re MMA, the limit’s the sky.”

For now, anyway.