As MMA Celebrates Long-Awaited New York Passage, a Word of Caution

With one last showing of absurdity, the New York State Assembly finally passed a bill that will pave the way for legalizing mixed martial arts within the state. Only the governor's signature and the adoption of rules stand in the way of cagefighting in Madison Square Garden.

No lie, during this official government meeting, one assemblyman described MMA as "gay porn with a different ending." Another compared the spectacle with public hangings. Yet another saw parallels to slavery.

I'll be the first to admit that MMA's overt violence is not for everyone, but this state Assembly hearing made me feel far more uneasy than any of the hundreds of combat sports events I've attended. All across America, government is broken, with few functional bodies.

And not to rain on anyone's parade, but while MMA celebrates this long-anticipated passage, we must stop for a second to recognize that some of these same uninformed voices who shoot the sport down in ignorant ways will be the same ones to sanction it.

That is how we end up with the problems that are so prevalent in athletic commissions around the country and the world.

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

These days, almost every event delivers some bizarre judges' decision or refereeing error that leaves careers irrevocably harmed. And in most cases, there is little accountability or transparency. 

You don't even have to go back far in time to find events that simply boggle the mind.

Just last month, the Colorado Boxing Commission approved 68-year-old Ann Perez de Tejada to fight a 24-year-old opponent. Not surprisingly, she lost via TKO in less than 90 seconds. 

Around the same time, down in Texas, the state's Department of Licensing and Regulation that oversees MMA saw fit to sanction a Bellator main event matchup between legends Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock. Combined age: 101.

And it licensed a featured combatant, Dhafir "Dada 5000" Harris, who was 38 years old, had only two pro fights in his career, had not fought in five years and had never before competed in a major promotion. 

While Bellator scored with monster ratings, it was not exactly a shining example of regulatory diligence from Texas. Harris nearly died after suffering cardiac arrest immediately following the fight, according to documentary filmmaker Billy Corben; meanwhile, Shamrock flunked a drug test, testing positive for nandrolone and methadone, according to MMA Fighting's Marc Raimondi.

While Colorado might be excused as relatively inexperienced due to a light slate of events—even though, really, how hard is it to tell a near-septuagenarian that no, she cannot continue to professionally fistfight forever?—and Texas is widely regarded as the wild west of "regulation," even many far more established state commissions make terrifically poor decisions.

Take, for instance, Nevada, the state that is supposed to set the gold standard for athletic commissions due to its long history in combat sports. Even within the last few months, you can examine its treatment of Nick Diaz and Wanderlei Silva to see that.

Last September, the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC) banned Diaz for five years for a third positive marijuana test, a penalty that surpassed its own rules and guidelines. A few months later, threatened by a possible lawsuit, NAC relented, reducing the penalty to 18 months without comment, apology or explanation.

Silva, meanwhile, nearly saw his career ended after NAC hit him with a lifetime ban for evading a drug test, a penalty later reduced to three years after a lawsuit. While Silva's crime was far more serious and egregious than Diaz's, again, NAC showed its power-hungry streak while overhauling its penalty guidelines, determining that avoiding a test would be a more serious offense than testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug.

For your first offense of avoiding a test, you might say goodbye to as much as four years of your career; for shooting up with steroids, your first offense will cost you three years at most. The recommended penalty is 33 percent greater for the former than the latter. 

By comparison, World Anti-Doping Agency guidelines have the same penalty—four years—for both. Ostensibly, NAC's message is that messing with the commission is worse than messing with PEDs.

All this is not to say that New York's sanctioning is a bad thing. The sport deserves to be in every market, and this opens up the biggest media market in the world. It should be a boon for several athletes who have worked so hard to carve out a living.

But we must be prepared to take the bad with the good. State-by-state sanctioning has helped legitimize the sport, but it has also offered innumerable headaches. Judging and refereeing are uneven. Rule sets and regulations differ. Oversight ranges from virtually nonexistent to overbearing. Enforcement and penalties are often scattershot. 

There's a reason that after years of Dana White offering "We're tested by the government!" as the UFC's official stance on fighting PEDs, the promotion dug into its pockets to hire USADA to implement random year-round testing. And that reason is that time after time, commissions have proved they are not good enough. Yes, they are hamstrung by budgets—but often by incompetence, too. 

Where New York stands on the spectrum of effectiveness remains to be seen, but if its Assembly hearing is any indication of what is to come, expect the best but prepare for plenty of absurdity.