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Why MMA Fans Are the Most Obsessive in Sports

The idea that MMA fans are sometimes a little ungrateful and other times may resent the growth of the sport they love so much has been covered before. You know something else about MMA fans? They’re the most obsessive in sports, and it’s no…

The idea that MMA fans are sometimes a little ungrateful and other times may resent the growth of the sport they love so much has been covered before.

You know something else about MMA fans? They’re the most obsessive in sports, and it’s not a close race.

Sure, football in the U.S. gets people painting their faces and drinking for 10 hours in the parking lot before the game, and football anywhere but the U.S. causes riots and summits on the sport on a per-nation basis.

Hockey does the same thing in Canada.

But MMA fans, rarely divided by imaginary lines printed on a map, are more obsessive than any of them.

Hours spent on Internet forums arguing the merits of one man’s grappling credentials over another, or what background is best for entering the sport.

Money paid to watch shaky streams of events involving guys never heard of in hopes of seeing the next big thing before the world does.

Inspiration to get off the couch and go to the gym in hopes of learning the game taking place inside the cage, age be damned.

Aggressively pursuing the man who runs the biggest promotion in the sport through Twitter or other means just to tell him what they like or don’t like about it.

And he responds.

Simply put, there are no better fans out there. They live and die with the sport.

In reality, the seeds of ungratefulness or resentment over the growth of the sport come from that place—they love it so much that they can’t help themselves sometimes.

In a sport that still looks to find its footing, and in some ways may have currently taken a step back to take two forward in the future with the UFC’s wide-spreading new TV deal, those obsessive fans are going to be the ones that keep things afloat.

Fans will continue to be the ones analyzing matchmaking, discussing wrestling prospects who could be making the jump to MMA and offering up hypothetical generational fantasy fights for argument.

Fans will do it as long as they have to, as long as it takes for new faces to get hooked on the sport and join the party.

More than any other sport, MMA involves a sense of ownership for its fans. It may be because the sport is so young or so nuanced, but once a person becomes a serious fan, they jump in with both feet.

It’s that reality that supports the idea these fans are the best in the sport. Sure, you can love baseball and love your home team, but do you feel like you own it? That you own the sport?

Probably not.

That feeling, that’s the heartbeat of an MMA fan’s obsession. It’s what drives them to know all the nooks and crannies of a sport that surely has enough of them.

So yes, some fans can tell you who wore No. 19 on their favourite team three decades before they were born, or who won the team MVP in chronology since the beginning of time.

That’s great.

MMA fans live their sport, from trading old tapes to spending the workday on the Internet arguing over it. That’s how their sport was born.

It is grassroots.

And now it’s blown up bigger than ever, with plenty more to come and fans are only scrutinizing and speculating more.

If that’s not obsession, nothing is.

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MMA: Ronda Rousey Could Be a National Star

Finding my seat at the IZOD Center last week was easy. Trying to grasp what I walked past on the way to it was the hard part. Juggling concessions and talking to a couple of friends as I navigated the concourse, I was met by a throng of wild-eyed fans …

Finding my seat at the IZOD Center last week was easy. Trying to grasp what I walked past on the way to it was the hard part.

Juggling concessions and talking to a couple of friends as I navigated the concourse, I was met by a throng of wild-eyed fans moving along and clustered around someone.

I couldn’t make out who or what it was, but I figured it was a fighter or known face from the UFC front office. If you’ve never been to an event live, it isn’t crazy to see fighters you know more or less all over the place, or even catch someone like Joe Silva out around on a walkie-talkie trying to get things in order.

As I shrugged it off though, the crowd broke and I saw what all the commotion was about. Ronda Rousey, Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion and perhaps the fastest rising star in MMA, had made her entrance.

And wow. What an entrance.

Equal parts athlete and rock star, she was clearly appreciative of the attention despite being on her way down to the floor to take in the night’s festivities. Once she got there, she took time for pictures and a few quick discussions with fans, and headed to her seat.

It was one of the only times I can say I was genuinely blown away by a person’s presence, and it made me realize one thing: Ronda Rousey could be a national star.

Not even a star outside of fighting, either. Not movies or TV or books or magazines or whatever else. She could be a national star right now, today, for this. For MMA.

Rousey has created a persona that flies in face of the conventional “nice girls” of MMA, and coupled with her looks and ability to thrash people senseless, it’s become one of the most marketable in the game. In a little over a year she’s gone from being a relative nobody to replacing Gina Carano as the face of her sport.

After witnessing her magnetism firsthand, there’s no telling where she could go from here.

Many enjoy her antics, others just like to look at her, and still others want her to take a beating and go away. Whatever side they’re on though, they’re all paying attention. Nobody since Carano—not even Cyborg Santos at her peak––has done that in women’s MMA.

Before seeing her handling her celebrity, I felt that a lot of her personality was manufactured. Her trash talk, Twitter jabs, and perceived brashness all seemed like the work of someone who saw an unfilled niche and decided she could fill it. Now I’m certain she was born to play the role she’s created for herself.

It’s no longer about how she got there or why, the fact is that she’s the first champion in the history of her sport that has the looks and the tools to change the game. Really, on account of women’s MMA going from life support to something even Dana White is reconsidering, she probably already has.

There’s no way to know what’s next for her, but there is no ceiling for Ronda Rousey. If she can keep winning fights and keep people paying to watch her do it, she could be as big as any star in MMA–female or otherwise.

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MMA: Why Do Some Fans Resent the Growth of the Sport?

It’s no secret that MMA fans are a fickle bunch. All sports fans are. It kind of goes with the territory. Some people may argue that it’s a sign of being ungrateful, and while that argument may be viable in some instances, it isn’t always. …

It’s no secret that MMA fans are a fickle bunch. All sports fans are. It kind of goes with the territory.

Some people may argue that it’s a sign of being ungrateful, and while that argument may be viable in some instances, it isn’t always. Fans have a right to speak out and be heard, and within reason that should hold weight.

One particular area that is puzzling, however, is that MMA fans at times almost seem to resent the growth of their sport. At their core, they’re happy that others are starting to jump on board and see it for how exciting and engaging it is, but there’s also just a hint of frustration at concessions being made for fans who are newer to the game.

No other sport seems to be so preoccupied with grouping fans into generations, or trying to link knowledge of their sport to the date someone joined a message board about it. It’s nothing to pop over to The Underground—the most prominent forum in MMA, and, along with its sister forum The Otherground, perhaps among the most entertaining on the internet—and see good points gunned down aggressively because they came from a guy who signed up in 2011.

And don’t even start on the dreaded 10ers.

Obviously that’s a very small portion of the population of fans, but it does represent a decent sample of the attitude.

Ask a jiu-jitsu white belt what got him into the sport, and there’s a far better chance that he’s going to tell you Royce Gracie and UFC 1 than Kenny Florian and the original Ultimate Fighter, even if the latter is actually true. And he’s definitely telling you it was Royce if it was actually Mayhem Miller and TUF 14, because no one could ever admit to being such a noob and live it down.

It raises the question: what about this sport, this culture, makes it such a crime to be part of a new wave of fans? Why is it that some fans who’ve been around for so long feel the need to cast down those who haven’t?

It makes for an interesting yin and yang.

These long-term fans are entirely over the moon that the sport is garnering ESPN recaps and FOX-televised main events. There’s no way they’re not, not after reading old Tripod websites for PRIDE results in 1999 or swapping poorly bootlegged UFC tapes during the dark ages at the turn of the millennium.

And yet a small part of them feels the need to defend this old guard from the very mainstream attention that has been coveted for so long. Part of said attention is new fans, many of whom can’t identify a kimura and don’t understand that training in a gi is actually beneficial to a fighter’s technical acumen, but rather just want to see heavyweights knock each others heads off.

That’s fine. Whatever puts butts in the seats. They can love knockouts as much as they want, because the nuances of the sport are intoxicating enough that those fans will learn to love them in short order.

I began watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship at UFC 4. I was 9 years old and I watched it with my dad on VHS in my living room in a town you’ve definitely never heard of. Royce Gracie choked out Dan Severn, and it blew us away.

Does this mean that someone who started watching at UFC 84 couldn’t possibly know more about the sport than me? Absolutely not. Who cares if they do anyway? What does getting there before that guy actually entitle me to? I’d have to say nothing.

Am I more entitled to knowledge and fandom than a hockey fan because I worked in hockey for a few years? Is my grandfather more entitled to be excited by home runs than me because he can remember Roger Maris and I only had juiced up lunkheads to cheer on as a boy?

Again, I’d have to answer in the negative to both.

Then again, I took the time to make the point that I’ve been on board since the early days of MMA, didn’t I? How much further of a step is it for me to tell a new training partner to get off the mats because he’s inspired by Demian Maia instead of by Rickson Gracie?

The sport is growing, friends. We might as well grow with it, because it’s what we’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.

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MMA: Are MMA Fans the Most Ungrateful in Sports?

People love to hate things. They might not admit it, but as a wise man once said, “Hating something always feels better than feeling nothing at all,” which is why you get people hating on or complaining about things that they’ll profe…

And so it goes with MMA, and with fans of MMA.

For all the praise the sport receives from diehards and the excitement it produces, there’s an astounding amount of negativity as well. Some of it is warranted, some of it isn’t. Most all of it is extreme.

It’s pretty routine to see Dana White’s Twitter absolutely cluttered with fans of his organization complaining to, or outright accosting, him about happenings in the sport. Ignorant to the fact that the president of a multimillion dollar organization doesn’t owe them a personal explanation or even a comment, they’ll actively troll him until he says something nasty in response. Then they’ll attack him for that.

That’s only one example, though. It’s not that long ago that MMA was on life support entirely, kept alive by exchanges and Internet forums. At that time, no one could have ever foreseen pay-per-views every month—sometimes twice a month—or on network television a half-dozen times a year.

A weekly reality show? Out of the question.

Fights all over the world, sometimes accompanied by thousands of fans flocking to an accompanying Fan Expo? Even crazier.

But those things are here.

The UFC recently went seven weeks between pay-per-views, and people complained aggressively. There was a time when seven months was customary. Let’s all relax here.

It raises the question of just how ungrateful fans of the sport have become. Sure, sports fans in general are far more likely to point out the foibles of their favourite club than bask in a winning streak, but MMA fans are in a different position.

Fans pay for the bigger fights, and that probably gives them a right to be vocal to a degree. Not to excess, though. Just because you paid $50 for something doesn’t mean you should go on Twitter and tell the head of the company how much it sucked after the fact. There’s never a guarantee that you’re buying something incredible when you buy something with as many variables as MMA.

Even so, UFC events deliver more often than they don’t. As White is so prone to respond, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. It speaks volumes that the man would rather not have these people as fans than have to put up with silly complaints.

There’s also the reality that, with so many free fights happening now, with all PPV preliminary bouts being shown at no charge in one way or another and with the long-running TUF program on regularly (which gets a stunning amount of hate in its own right), the average MMA fan is getting his $50 worth per month even if the event he pays for doesn’t seem worth it on its own.

It’s not that it’s unreasonable for fans to be critical or to ask for the best possible product every time out. But it is unreasonable to act as though it’s an entitlement, that just because one considers themselves a fan that they should never have to suffer through a card that doesn’t live up to hype or some names getting shuffled around due to injury or whatever else.

It isn’t fair to call them the most ungrateful fans in sports, because all fans have a hint of ungratefulness to them. But it is fair to suggest that MMA fans aren’t always ungrateful for the right reasons, and the sport as a whole would be better served if that attitude became a thing of the past.

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UFC on FOX 3: Is the Nate Diaz vs. Jim Miller Winner Worthy of a Title Shot?

UFC 145 marked the end of a lengthy break between major events for the promotion, and May 5 will mark the return of the UFC to mainstream consciousness when they broadcast on FOX for the first time since January. Nate Diaz and Jim Miller will enter the…

Nate Diaz and Jim Miller will enter the cage in Newark, New Jersey, as they headline UFC on FOX 3 in a lightweight title eliminator. Dana White has said the man who wins is likely to meet Benson Henderson or Frankie Edgar some time later in 2012.

The question is: Does that man deserve a shot at gold?

It’s actually proven to be more contentious than people realize.

In one corner, there’ll be Miller, an impressive 21-3 in his career and 10-2 in the UFC. His losses have only come to Henderson, Edgar and Gray Maynard—the other three men with him in the top four of his division.

Across from him will be Diaz, a polarizing warrior who is often under appreciated at lightweight because he’s not everyone’s favorite guy outside of the cage. Still, he’s 8-3 at 155 pounds in the UFC, and two of his three losses were hotly contested decisions that resulted in highly questionable losses.

He could easily be 10-1 and already have a title shot in his rear view mirror, but instead he’s on his way to Jersey to try and earn his first crack at gold.

Even so, some people are arguing that both men haven’t done enough to warrant a shot at the title. Miller’s loss to Henderson is less than a year old, and he’s only won one fight since. Diaz has only been back at 155 for two fights after a hiatus to welterweight.

In a division that’s so deep, there are arguments for a bunch of other guys who have been in the mix for a while.

Here’s the issue, though: None of those other guys have sprung up and grabbed the bull by the horns.

Maynard had two title shots in a row and couldn’t secure a win. Clay Guida lost to Henderson in his last outing and will match Maynard next time out. Anthony Pettis had some play, but couldn’t use a win over Joe Lauzon to springboard himself into a shot at gold. He’s elected for surgery while he waits things out in the division.

After those three, who else is there?

Nobody, really.

Miller, later revealed to be ill in his first meeting with Henderson, is as tough as they come and has repeatedly shown that he’ll beat anyone in the division who isn’t a champion. We don’t know yet if that carries over to title fights because he hasn’t yet had that chance.

Diaz is a born fighter and a handful for anyone at lightweight. He’s only been outwrestled at 155—never really beaten and broken—and though he lost to Maynard, there were few who felt it was overly convincing. After his decisive beatdown of Donald Cerrone—a man most had pegged to use Diaz as a launching pad for a title shot—he thrust himself right back into the thick of things.

So why not let these two go at it, and give the winner a shot at gold?

The beauty of a division that’s so deep is that there are plenty of credible threats for a title shot, and there are lots of roads to travel to get there. This isn’t boxing, where anything less than 40-0 isn’t worthy. Jim Miller and Nate Diaz are as deserving as anyone, even if they’ve taken unconventional paths to get there.

UFC on FOX 3 is exciting for a host of reasons, but Miller/Diaz is the biggest. It’s a lock to be a war, and it will also give the world a top contender in a division that presently needs one. Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s hard to hate that.

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UFC 145 Results: 5 Things Mark Hominick Needs to Improve on

A lot can change in a year. Just ask Mark Hominick. Fifty-one weeks ago he was in a cage with Jose Aldo, fighting like a maniac to try and wrestle the featherweight title from a seemingly invincible champion. He didn’t, and went on to lose two mo…

A lot can change in a year. Just ask Mark Hominick.

Fifty-one weeks ago he was in a cage with Jose Aldo, fighting like a maniac to try and wrestle the featherweight title from a seemingly invincible champion.

He didn’t, and went on to lose two more fights on top of it.

Three losses in a row in the UFC is usually cause for dismissal, though when one is in a title fight, there’s often more leeway. Still, goodwill from his bosses notwithstanding, there are things Hominick needs to work on going forward.

Things like:

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