With wins at UFC 95, Demian Maia and Nate Marquardt are standing on their soap boxes, asking for title shots.  Why?  I guess because they either really want the strap or they are deluded.  Let's look at the reality.

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It's January 16th, 2009, eight days prior to Affliction: Day of Reckoning.  I just got the promotional material I signed up for as soon as the site for the show was put up.  The poster looks exactly like the one on the site when I signed up, but it is torn.  Looking at the promotional material (in addition to the poster, there are 2 mini-posters that fold so they stand and a deck of cards, all with the same image), I am conflicted.  I look at the names: Fedor, Arlovski, Hieron, Nogueira, Barnett and I think about how good this card should be.  Then I think about how asinine it is to get this stuff eight days before the show!  Are these guys incompetent, assholes, or just plain stupid?

I live in New Jersey and I work in Manhattan.  You know, one of those small media markets.  I was willing, even looking forward to, putting up some of this stuff in the area around my office.  For the last show I signed up to get the promotional material and got nothing but emails trying to sell me shirts, so by now I had assumed that it just wasn't going to happen.  Now I doubt it's worth the effort.

Let me say that I loved the first show.  There were issues with the announcers (and Big John is much better at reffing than he is at interviewing), the ropes/stand ups were not handled well, and Megadeath was wrong on many levels- all mistakes that could be prevented.  I know I'm in the minority of MMA fans (see my fanpost about my opinion of elbows to the head on the ground), but I like ropes, when they are handled appropriately.  In Pride (and now in Dream), the ropes were taut, which made it more difficult for fighters to fall through.  The refs used the ropes to bounce the fighters off of them and there were officials surrounding the ring giving the ref, giving them information, such as whether a fighter is holding the ropes.  Although Affliction did about as poor of a job managing the ropes as you can imagine, the viewer had the advantage of angles impossible to get in a cage.

But this business with the promotional items bothers me.  Do they think that the east coast market is unimportant?  But then, I am reassured.  I haven't seen any advertising for this show at all, so I shouldn't take it personally.  It's not going to be the payroll that's going to kill Affliction MMA, it'll die because they're going to put on a show and no one is going to know it's happening. 

Before I begin to elucidate my assertion that elbows to the head of a downed opponent should be outlawed in MMA, let me address some inevitable criticism.  I am not a fighter; I have never fought.  I have not trained in any martial art, outside of grade school.  Such a lack of a resume inevitably invites the "you don't fight, what the hell do you know?" criticism from purists who have been blogging about MMA since strikes to the groin were legal.  I am aware that blogs and the internet are one of the driving forces of MMA as they originally provided a forum in which athletes in a sport shunned by society could come together as an international community uniquely able to understand the hardships of the fighting life.  However, as MMA has become "mainstream" in the United States, so have many of these sites once only inhabited by the men and women paving the way for the stars of today.  While I sympathize with those who believe something of theirs has been bastardized, this attitude does nothing to promote the sport so that the men and women who put their livelihoods on the line each time they enter the cage or ring; it is the "casual" or new fan that allows for fighters to be paid an equitable wage for the risk they assume.  And it is the popularizing of the sport that invites mainstream media criticism, which in turn validates the sport.  While I am certainly not saying that I am Bob Costas or Mike Lupica, but whenever they make an assertion about a sport, player, league, etc., are they asked when was the last time they took a hit from a linebacker?  I think not.  So, while I invite criticism, preferably the constructive kind, regarding my opinions and points, I respectfully ask that the "you don't fight" criticism be left out.

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