MMA says Goodbye to the Wild West Days

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The dust has barely settled in Las Vegas after WWE pro wrestler/part-time MMA fighter/athletic circus freak Brock Lesnar returned from a five-year absence from fighting, and this morning the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has announced the company’s sale to WME | IMG. The sale comes at a price of $4 billion, the largest amount of money to ever trade hands for a sports league. Not bad for a sport that started out as a tough guy contest at UFC 1 when a boxer wore one glove, and a sumo wrestler’s tooth flew across the stadium.

The UFC rose to prominence, amongst a sea of competing fight leagues, during the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show in which competing fighters lived in the same house to fight for a “six figure contract.” UFC President Dana White has said the future of the whole company rested on that show, and the finale was a slobber knocker between former cop Forrest Griffin and multi-sport athlete Stephan Bonnar. In a sport that relies on cajones, Griffin and Bonnar hung them out on the line and were both awarded a UFC contract.

Prior to The Ultimate Fighter, the UFC had a rocky future due to a lack of unified rules, which lead to sometimes grisly outcomes. It also didn’t help that the sport, now called mixed martial arts (MMA), was billed as “human cockfighting” by Senator John McCain.

Part of what has drawn fans to MMA is the idea that anything can happen. Fighters all have their own social media pages and sometimes crash and burn to their own public accord. MMA provides the mystique that anything can happen, that anybody can become a champion, that anybody can get knocked out or submitted at any moment, and that three guys can buy a company for $2 million and build it into an international sport. The sale to WME | IMG could threatens that very aura of unpredictability.

Well, MMA has become legitimate and the UFC is being sold to a bunch of other acronyms. Pretty far from the days Wild West days of groin punches and hair pulling and head stomps. The UFC fought for legitimacy and won. Everything has gotten branded and packaged and as sanitized as much as an “As Real As It Gets” fight can possibly be. But as a fan, I’ll always mourn for the Wild West days of MMA, as we watch our crazy ass sport ride off into the sunset of legitimacy. When it comes to the fighting game, I hope that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.