Tag: Wyoming MMA

Tragically Enough, Junior Maranhao Defends Those Who Failed Him During RFA 14

By Seth Falvo

MMA fighters are supposed to be tough. They’re supposed to Face the Pain, Never Back Down, Go Out on Their Shields, and embody every Gatorade commercial cliche you can think of. They’re supposed to believe that they’re indestructible, partly because they’ve been told their entire lives that they’re damn near invincible.

Which is all to say that most of us weren’t surprised when flyweight Junior Maranhao — despite falling off of his stool between the fourth and fifth rounds of his title fight at RFA 14 and needing his coaches to revive him — made the decision to answer the bell for round five. Professional fighters are rarely the best judges of their own mortality, making objective parties such as coaches, referees and cageside physicians all the more necessary to save a fighter from excessive damage; this makes it all the more disturbing when these parties are as reckless as they were at RFA 14, and when the Wyoming State Board of MMA refused to acknowledge that there even was anything wrong with the way that this match was handled (much to the shock of the Association of Boxing Commissions).

There have already been countless articles scorning the coaches, the referee and the cageside physicians who allowed Junior Maranhao to continue fighting. There have also been just as many articles scorning the Wyoming State Board of MMA for encouraging the exact things that athletic commissions are supposed to protect our sport from. But lost in our collective outrage is perhaps the biggest tragedy to come from this incident: that Junior Maranhao is still willfully ignorant to the fact that he was in any danger at all during RFA 14. In fact, Maranhao has gone as far as to defend the very people who failed him that night.

By Seth Falvo

MMA fighters are supposed to be tough. They’re supposed to Face the Pain, Never Back Down, Go Out on Their Shields, and embody every Gatorade commercial cliche you can think of. They’re supposed to believe that they’re indestructible, partly because they’ve been told their entire lives that they’re damn near invincible.

Which is all to say that most of us weren’t surprised when flyweight Junior Maranhao — despite falling off of his stool between the fourth and fifth rounds of his title fight at RFA 14 and needing his coaches to revive him — made the decision to answer the bell for round five. Professional fighters are rarely the best judges of their own mortality, making objective parties such as coaches, referees and cageside physicians all the more necessary to save a fighter from excessive damage; this makes it all the more disturbing when these parties are as reckless as they were at RFA 14, and when the Wyoming State Board of MMA refused to acknowledge that there even was anything wrong with the way that this match was handled (much to the shock of the Association of Boxing Commissions).

There have already been countless articles scorning the coaches, the referee and the cageside physicians who allowed Junior Maranhao to continue fighting. There have also been just as many articles scorning the Wyoming State Board of MMA for encouraging the exact things that athletic commissions are supposed to protect our sport from. But lost in our collective outrage is perhaps the biggest tragedy to come from this incident: that Junior Maranhao is still willfully ignorant to the fact that he was in any danger at all during RFA 14. In fact, Maranhao has gone as far as to defend the very people who failed him that night.

During the aftermath of the fight, Maranhao offered his version of the events to MMAFighting.com. He chalked the entire situation up to fans overreacting to him clumsily missing his stool when he attempted to sit down; never mind that the video clearly shows he was already sitting down when he collapsed. Maranhao then goes on to offer these quotes:

“I think that the doctors made the right call. I think I would have gone crazy if they had stopped the fight.”

…

“I saw that some people are trying to blame the commission, the promoters or even my coaches, so I’m really upset about it,” he continued. “I want to make clear that nothing happened. It’s a mistake (to blame them), and it can hurt us.”

Before we go any further, let me be clear that I wasn’t expecting Maranhao to call for anyone’s license to be revoked. But to outright refuse to acknowledge that anything dangerous took place that night?

With all due respect to Maranhao, of course he would have been upset by a stoppage. That’s the entire point of having a doctor at cageside: to protect the fighter from taking excessive damage just because the fighter wants to keep competing. The fighters are trained to play Superman when they’re hurt, the doctors are trained to know the dangers of Second Impact Syndrome. Maranhao may have dodged a bullet on Friday night, but the reframing necessary to say that the situation was handled correctly is incredibly unsettling.

As for the argument that his coaches don’t deserve ridicule? If Maranhao insists on believing that his coaches would never put him in harm’s way for their own personal gain, perhaps he should look up “That Part of Muhammad Ali’s Career We Never Talk About.” You know which one: the one when Ali suffered lopsided beat-downs at the hands of Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick — Holmes wound up beating Ali so badly that he actually cried after the fight for Ali – simply because his coaches knew they could still profit off of Ali’s legacy. For what it’s worth, Pat Healy also disagrees with Maranhao on this.

We can — and should — continue to talk about how the failures of leadership on display at RFA 14 could have gotten a fighter killed. But equally important is that the fighters involved at least acknowledge that situations like these are dangerous. We’re all in agreement that the system currently in place in Wyoming is broken, but we can’t actually fix it until the fighters the system is supposed to protect start advocating for themselves.

Wyoming to Create First Ever MMA-Only Commission Starting July 1st


(Pictured: Wyoming’s remaining residents react to the great news.) 

After becoming the 45th state (we’re looking at you, New York) to regulate mixed martial arts last Thursday, when current Governor Matt Mead signed House Bill 87 into law, Wyoming will become the first state to assemble a commission focused entirely on MMA. As we know, boxing and athletic commissions carry this responsibility in many of the states that have legalized MMA, and this is where Wyoming ran into trouble in the first place. In the past ten years, state lawmakers have attempted to reinstate the position of State Boxing Commissioner, who would then be placed in charge of MMA regulation, five separate times, but were met with overwhelming opposition from the state’s boxing industry.

The bill to legalize the sport was unanimously approved on Thursday by Wyoming State Senate and House of Representatives, and though MMA was never dubbed “illegal” in Wyoming, all fights held within the state until this point were not recognized on fighter’s records due to a lack of a sanctioning body to regulate the sport.

Now here’s where things get interesting: the committee will consist of three individuals appointed by Gov. Mead and will be funded by a five percent tax on gross receipts from all MMA events. This stipulation apparently has local promoters and fighters up in arms, fearing that the tax will discourage big name promotions like the UFC from visiting the state. Because, you know, Wyoming was next on Dana White’s agenda after he figured out this whole “international takeover” thing. Wyoming hosts an average of 20 mixed martial arts events a year, with the average crowd holding strong at around 500-700 attendees. Local fight promoter Stephen Alley told the Casper Star-Tribune that he believes this additional fee will crush the already depleted MMA scene, telling the publication in an interview that, “If they bring in a commission, most of the people that you see operating right now, they won’t be around.”

(Pictured: Wyoming’s remaining residents react to the great news.) 

After becoming the 45th state (we’re looking at you, New York) to regulate mixed martial arts last Thursday, when current Governor Matt Mead signed House Bill 87 into law, Wyoming will become the first state to assemble a commission focused entirely on MMA. As we know, boxing and athletic commissions carry this responsibility in many of the states that have legalized MMA, and this is where Wyoming ran into trouble in the first place. In the past ten years, state lawmakers have attempted to reinstate the position of State Boxing Commissioner, who would then be placed in charge of MMA regulation, five separate times, but were met with overwhelming opposition from the state’s boxing industry.

The bill to legalize the sport was unanimously approved on Thursday by Wyoming State Senate and House of Representatives, and though MMA was never dubbed “illegal” in Wyoming, all fights held within the state until this point were not recognized on fighter’s records due to a lack of a sanctioning body to regulate the sport.

Now here’s where things get interesting: the committee will consist of three individuals appointed by Gov. Mead and will be funded by a five percent tax on gross receipts from all MMA events. This stipulation apparently has local promoters and fighters up in arms, fearing that the tax will discourage big name promotions like the UFC from visiting the state. Because, you know, Wyoming was next on Dana White’s agenda after he figured out this whole “international takeover” thing. Wyoming hosts an average of 20 mixed martial arts events a year, with the average crowd holding strong at around 500-700 attendees. Local fight promoter Stephen Alley told the Casper Star-Tribune that he believes this additional fee will crush the already depleted MMA scene, telling the publication in an interview that, “If they bring in a commission, most of the people that you see operating right now, they won’t be around.”

But according to UFC Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Marc Ratner, we could be seeing a Fight Night type event at Wyoming in the near future, stating, “We’re not going to bring a major pay-per-view there, but we can certainly do a smaller event.” Oh, the optimism.

If you recall, the UFC hasn’t held an event in Wyoming since UFC 6, which saw Tank Abbott score his infamous rigor mortis KO over John Matua, the first ever Superfight Championship bout between Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn, and the allegedly fixed fight between Oleg Taktarov and Anthony Macais.

On a positive note, the addition of a MMA focused board will surely help improve things like fighter safety, and help rid Wyoming of so called “shady” promoters (now we’re looking at you, Alabama) that have damaged the name of the sport over the past few years. When the legislation takes effect on June 1st, the commission will quickly begin to collaborate with other athletic commissions such as the Colorado Boxing Commission and set up new rules and regulations to further the sport, starting with the current lack of HIV and other disease-related testing fighters currently do not have to undergo in order to compete. Also on the agenda will be the addressing the lack of insurance many of the smaller promotions neglect to provide to their fighters, a notion that Wyoming based MMA trainer Jerry Davis said would “make sure that some of these individuals in the past who were, for lack of a better term, shady wouldn’t be in this industry and giving it a bad name and causing harm to those individuals who are fighting.”

In another bit of great news, it appears that long time NY State Assemblyman and renowned ignoramus Bob Reilly will be stepping down from his position after serving four consecutive terms in office. We have long lamented about this man’s uneducated dissection of the sport here at CP, and couldn’t be happier to see him off to greener pastures ie. retirement and staying as far away from the sport of MMA as humanly possible. Reilly claims that he will be backing the candidacy of “long time friend” and civil servant Kevin Frazier, who will be launching a campaign in the forthcoming weeks. Fantastic.

-J. Jones