UFC: Fighters' Behavior a Potential Deterrent to Future Success

While the UFC has been taking large steps toward becoming an established global sport, its fighters have been acting as if no one’s watching.

But people have been, and UFC president Dana White stated recently that he would address this problem during an upcoming summit. After a recent press conference, White explained that fighters need to watch themselves when using any medium of communication—namely Twitter—that places them in the public’s eye: "There's only so many characters on Twitter, and you can't explain the context in which you sent the text. You just have to use common sense."

White’s reaction speaks to derogatory comments made by a number of fighters using the social medium, including Rashad Evans’ allusion to the Penn State scandal, Miguel Torres’ tweet about rape, and Forrest Griffin’s tweets about rape, which became a lead story around the internet on many non-MMA related news sites.

The tweets became such a problem that one of the UFC’s major sponsors, Anheuser-Busch, promised to act against the UFC if its fighters continued this unbridled vulgar speech.

White admitted he, too, is certainly guilty of making poor decisions when using the medium. However, he seemed a little less apologetic, saying, "Listen, if you ever watched the sport, you knew what you were getting into with me. It's not like I all of a sudden lost my mind and started saying stupid [expletive]. I've been doing it for 11 years."

And so the UFC finds itself at a crossroads, a place where the organization we once knew, one that marketed itself to “mature audiences only,” is edging into a more global arena. White himself compared this problem to the same shared by the other major American sports organizations, including the NBA and the NFL: “Same stuff that all the other organizations go through. NBA, NFL—they all go through the same thing.”

At first, this seems like great company for an organization that has taken huge strides this year to gain a more worldwide presence. The UFC has hosted some of its greatest cards this year, and some of the most exciting will happen before year’s end, including UFC 148. The UFC has been getting results and building an audience like it never has before.

But with all of these advancements comes a delicate benefit that can quickly become a problem: people are watching, and people are listening.

Honestly, I’ve got no problem with the banter of White and his fighters on Twitter, during interviews, or wherever else they decide to broadcast their innermost thoughts (White calls this a “personal relationship with the fans”). It likely doesn’t take long for new fans to get used to these various personalities, and there’s no doubt that fans relating to fighters’ humor or hating them enhances their relationship to the sport. And yes, this does happen in all sports.

The caveat is simple: jokes about rape, pedophilia, and other similar subjects are offensive, and they mark the UFC with a personality it can’t have if it wants to be taken seriously as a sport.

Yes, other professional sports organizations are facing similar problems. Regardless, the reality is that the UFC doesn’t have the image that the NFL or NBA does yet, and it never will if White continues to act insouciant toward these offenses. These organizations can deal with their problems as they have because they’ve earned national and global recognition beyond the limitations of a grassroots audience.

It seems to me, however, that White and his organization plan to make MMA more popular on an international level than these other sports. Sure, most of us enjoy the UFC as it is and happily dismiss the quirks and offenses of its fighters. Nevertheless, even the most nostalgic fan has to understand that the sport is growing rapidly in both viewership and legitimacy.

The good news, which is part of the same reality, is that the UFC absolutely can become as popular as it wants. To do this, though, White and the UFC will have to start dealing with various offenses—from some fighters’ behavior on Twitter to others’ use of PEDs—more critically.

When the public sees that both the UFC and its fans are taking the presence of MMA as a sport seriously on all accounts, they’ll do the same.