“No, we’re not doing anything PRIDE.”
UFC President Dana White, launching a verbal missile at hardcore MMA fans in Japan, and those closer to home at MMA message boards across the web.
When Dana White talked his friends, the Fertittas, into buying the Ultimate Fighting Championship back in 2000—the struggling promotion, today a behemoth worth an estimated billion dollars—it wasn’t just a fading and failing business. Worse than that. It wasn’t even the top promotion in its field.
That honor belonged to the dearly-departed, not-soon-forgotten, Pride Fighting Championship. It was a promotion only a rap star, or a Japanese teenager, could love. To borrow a phrase, everything Pride did, they did it big.
Big entrances courtesy of the incomparable Lenne Hardt and an enormous ramp leading to the ring. Big action, thanks to the very best fighters in the world and a set of rules designed to encourage action, even fining fighters up to 20 percent of their purse for the crime of being boring. And, yes, big-time controversy thanks to the promotion’s pro wrestling roots and connections to a vast criminal enterprise.
Pride was the the sport’s glittering jewel, packing stadiums with tens of thousands of fans and attracting millions more on television when the UFC was still struggling along in Indian casinos, an ultra violent relic still looking for a second chance to shine.
Pride was leaps and bounds ahead of the UFC, to the point White, who abhors co-promotion with rival promoters, sent leading fighters like Chuck Liddell and Ricco Rodriguez to battle Pride’s best. Pride, in a telling sign of power, never returned the favor by sending its fighters into the Octagon.
Slowly though, things began to change. White’s leadership, with a timely boost from programmers at Spike TV who embraced the sport with open arms, led the UFC slowly into the black.
Soon the sport was buried in piles of cash, not just from pay-per-view, but thanks to an expanding bond with young American males.
This was our sport. We didn’t have to share it with our parents. There are no burdens of history bogging it down. It’s as pure a contest as could possibly exist—and we love it.
UFC broadcasts became a surefire place for companies to meet young consumers head on. Once too controversial even for pay-per-view, the UFC finds itself on network television, promoted heavily during NFL games, the most mainstream of all American sports.
While the UFC thrived, Pride was brought down in its prime. A Japanese magazine connected the company to the yakuza and its television partners ran scared from these mafia ties. Without this influx of TV money, Pride didn’t stand a chance. Fighters began bailing for safer shores. Soon the UFC swooped in, buying its top rival in 2007.
When the UFC bought Pride, one of many purchases that helped make the promotion the world’s leading MMA league, it was more than a little symbolic. The UFC wasn’t just eliminating a competitor and acquiring some of the top fighters in the sport. It was making a statement—we are the new big dogs on the block.
The UFC won the war with Pride, but still seems to be fighting the battles a decade old. Erasing those years of competition has been hard. You can see it when UFC matchmaker Joe Silva passes a note to announcer Joe Rogan as a former Pride star is getting mauled in the UFC Octagon. The message was simple and to the point: “This ain’t Japan.”
You can see the remnants of this feud when White tries to besmirch the great Fedor Emelianenko, one of the sport’s best all-time talents, and the one leading fighter who has never fought under the UFC banner. And you will see it this weekend, when the UFC returns to Japan for the first time since 2000.
The UFC could enter the Japanese market with a full-on nostalgia show. They could have brought all the big guns of the Pride era into the cage, put on the kind of spectacle of a show that Japanese MMA fans grew to love. Instead, White is drawing a line in the sand. “We won the war,” he seems to be saying. “Japan will get our show and they’ll get it our way.”
“We’re going in there and we’re going to put on a UFC event,” White told Fuel TV’s Ariel Helwani. “…no matter where we are, there is no denying we put on one of the best live shows in all of sports. We’re going to go there, we’re going to put on the UFC show. People are like ‘Are you going to play the Pride music?’ No, we’re not doing anything Pride. Everything you (normally) see on TV, is what you’re going to see at the event in Japan. People will leave that event, and it will spread. Just like everywhere else we go.”
As usual, I think White is being incredibly savvy here. The truth is, MMA in Japan is on life support. Attempts to conquer this market are really little more than nostalgia. There’s nothing wrong with giving this market a go—but as the UFC, not as a Pride clone trying to bring the dwindling Pride fanbase to the arena.
If the UFC succeeds like gangbusters, and partnered with advertising giant Dentsu it just might, that’s great. Another market caught in the UFC’s spell. But it isn’t worth sacrificing the integrity of the sport and the product for that kind of short-term success.
When the NFL plays regular season games in England, they don’t “soccer it up” in a misguided effort to make British fans more comfortable. They present American football. It’s up to the audience to decide whether they want to embrace it.
Like the NFL, the UFC has a very distinct product. It’s not Pride, but in many ways, that’s a good thing. The fights are often more competitive, the matchmaking more succinct. It’s a cleaner game than the Japanese version that had such success a decade ago. Perhaps the Japanese will love it. Perhaps they will pine for the days of Naoya Ogawa and Nobuhiko Takada when pro wrestlers ruled the roost.
If they do, so what? There are bigger fish to fry in China and Korea. And that’s not even mentioning the UFC’s incredibly successful Australian adventure.
The UFC can thrive in Asia without Japan. They’ve made a mint by being the UFC, not by being a Pride knockoff. If they succeed in Japan, it will be the same way. By their rules, presenting the sport as they envision it. As it should be.
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