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Boston Globe article on UFC
By Zach Arnold | July 11, 2006
By Zach Arnold
Update: Jeff Thaler responds.
Ron Borges, one of the more famous mainstream media boxing writers, attended the UFC 61 show and filed a report in the Boston Globe newspaper. (A second article by Borges can be found here.)
For those who have been frustrated about the way the media covers the “transformation” of UFC from it’s SEG-owned days to today’s administration, expect to be highly frustrated again after reading the article.
Combs’s choice was wise and the same can be said of the one made by Las Vegas casino operators Frank Fertitta 3d and his brother Lorenzo, and former Boston boxing aficionado Dana White, the three men who in 2001 resurrected UFC from the scrap heap of bad marketing and no-holds-barred mayhem when they bought the company name from Bob Meyrowitz for around $160,000. At the time ultimate fighting had a sullied reputation. No state would sanction its bouts because it had no rules and boasted of its refusal to cooperate with state regulatory bodies. Not even cable television would carry its bouts, having dropped it in part because of pressure from people as powerful as Arizona Senator John McCain, a prize-fighting fan who termed the no-holds-barred form of mixed martial arts “human cock fighting.”
By 1997, no-holds-barred events had been relegated to smoke-filled rooms in unregulated states. Mixed martial arts had become a fringe sport even by the lowly standards of fringe sports. But by using Lorenzo Fertitta’s connections as a former Nevada boxing commissioner, doors began to open within the regulatory community when UFC came up with a set of rules. Where once anything was allowed, turning events into bloody barroom brawls without the cocktail glasses, White and his associates added strict adherence to such things as weight classes, five-minute rounds, judges, mandatory drug testing, and, perhaps most importantly, the banning of kicking, kneeing, or head-butting a downed opponent, downward striking elbows, strikes to the spine or back of the head, and strikes to the groin or throat.
An interesting part of the article is when UFC President Dana White talks about UFC’s relationship with the Internet:
“If there was no Web when we started we wouldn’t have been able to sustain it. UFC stayed alive on the Web. Our [demographic] could never have found out about us without it because the mainstream media was ignoring us.”
Update: Dave Meltzer comments on the Boston Globe article(s):
The story features the same b.s. about how in 2001, no state would sanction MMA when Bob Meyrowitz owned it and how the old UFC refused to cooperate with state athletic commissions (the truth is the exact opposite, but so many people have written this that it seems to have become truth). Borges noted that while Shamrock and Ortiz sold out the Mandalay Bay on Saturday night, that Fernando Vargas vs. Shane Mosely will not sellout MGM Grand this Saturday. White claimed the internet saved UFC, which sounds so much more hip than saying getting on television saved UFC. Yes, another story about how the new owners added rules, and embraced regulation. It’s almost sickening how much this crap gets propagated and nobody does one iota of research to see how bogus it is. Old-time wrestling fans will love this one. The old UFC was held in “smoke-filled rooms in unregulated states.” That was the old Vince McMahon line about taking pro wrestling out of smoke filled arenas (what took both out of smoke-filled arenas were the creation of indoor smoking laws, not promoters). The new Vince McMahon story is that they were dying before getting on television (actually they turned the corner in late 2002, a couple of years before TV, with several 100,000 buy shows, but were not yet consistently profitable). He also has a side bar story on personalities like Liddell, Couture and local fighter Kenny Florian.
Update II: Here’s another puff piece on UFC, this time by Adam Goldman of the Associated Press.
Topics: All Topics, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 5 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
When I was editor-in-chief at Boxingranks.com, now defunct, Borges was one of the writers. He is on my private mailing list. We have each other’s phone numbers. He never contacted me about mma.
Just repeating what Dana White said without checking this with someone who had been there during that early UFC period demonstrates how bad the state of American journalism is, especially in the obsolete newspapers, and most especially in boxing.
The other day some guy in the Las Vegas Review Journal wrote that rear naked chokes caused fighters to bleed. Now Borges writes, supposedly quoting Ken Shamrock, that they are in essence strangulations. Maybe we should have Gene LeBell choke all of them out.
The usual misinformation…I like this quote “rising star Tito Ortiz”…guess they have not been following!
Makes you wonder what’s REALLY behind the push to go into Iraq doesn’t it. If they can’t get the facts straight about something as simple as MMA what other stories are they misinforming the public about.
Indeed, indeed, but if writing for a newspaper is anything like writing a research paper in college, well, then the rush to get a story done out weighs looking into the facts, and double checking your sources.
Hence why I never got a research paper done in college, I was too concerned about making sure my facts and information was right.
Newspaper writers got to eat too :D.
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