MMA becomes hit, miss show with fans
Posted on Saturday, August 2, 2008
Tightly muscled and heavily tattooed, 22-year-old David Lindsey of Jacksonville could pass as the face of mixed martial arts.
Like many of the fighters and most of the fans, Lindsey is a new arrival.
“I heard about it on the radio and just wanted to try it,” said Lindsey, who has been training for about four months. “It’s just a sport, really. A little more contact involved, and that’s about it.”
Lindsey will face Logan Campbell tonight in one of 17 fights scheduled at the Riverfest Amphitheatre in an MMA event dubbed “Sub Zero Fighting V: Revenge at the River.” Matt Hamilton, one of the event’s organizers, is hoping for a crowd numbering in the thousands, and it’s a good bet he’ll get his numbers.
In less than two years, MMA has sprouted from being strictly a “niche” pastime to a big-money business. Nationally, CBS has already shown a prime time MMA event, while the MMA-themed reality show Tapout continues to draw high ratings on the Versus cable network.
Here in Arkansas, MMA exhibitions big and small have sprouted rapidly, with more and more would-be fighters joining gyms and stepping into the cage or ring.
But as MMA emerges, so do questions about its safety, its reputation and whether or not it can even be considered a sport. Controlled violence
Forget the notion of MMA being a haven for dimwitted brawlers.
Bring up the issue of safety to an MMA fighter and prepare to get hit with statistics, medical evidence and a strong rhetorical defense of the punishment inflicted in the cage.
“What makes it safer than boxing is just the totality of the head trauma involved,” said Stuttgart’s Seth Kleinbeck, an eightyear veteran of MMA fighting. “A boxer’s going to be punched in the head several hundred times in a 12-round fight. In MMA, you only take a fraction of the punches.”
Kleinbeck, 35, speaks with certainty of MMA’s relative safety, as befitting of someone whose day job involves working as a family practice physician in Hazen.
Tonight’s fights will go three rounds, with amateur fights using three-minute rounds and professional fights using fiveminute rounds. Rules such as the prohibition of knees or elbows to the face in the amateur ranks help ensure the further protection of inexperienced fighters.
But the foundation of MMA’s claim to safety is the submission, or “tapout.”
A fight can end one of three ways, and while knockouts and technical knockouts happen, many fights end with one combatant simply conceding victory.
It might be a culture that reveres machismo, but every fighter will tell you that quitting is just part of the game.
“There’s no shame in tapping out if someone has you in a good joint lock,” Kleinbeck said. “You’re not a coward if you tap out.”
The medical community seems to be siding with MMA.
A 2006 study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine showed that while injuries happen in pro MMA fights at about a 40. 3 percent clip, most of the injuries were to soft tissue and not to the head.
The study also claimed that knockouts occur possibly half as often as they do in boxing, and offers the tapout as a reason for the low number of KO’s.
There’s also the argument that MMA — kicks, punches and submission holds notwithstanding — might be good for you.
Grant Lee, 27, started training at Hamilton’s Little Rock gym about a year ago with the idea of shedding weight, not fighting. After going through a fighter’s training regimen, which includes exhaustive cardio work and calisthenics, Lee claims to be down to 205, and has rockhard muscles in both his forearms and legs.
Lee is slated to fight tonight, but said the victories or losses are almost immaterial.
“I just really like to do it,” Lee said.
Safe as the pro ranks might be, the popularity of MMA has spilled into the backyards and garages of would-be fighters who lack formalized martial arts training, and fly-by-night MMA exhibitions are popping up in big cities and small towns alike.
These exhibitions, and their “come one, come all” policy toward fighting, are one of the biggest threats to safety and the sport’s legitimacy, Hamilton said.
“There are some promotions that allow anybody to fight,” said Hamilton, 34, who trains fighters at Westside Kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Little Rock. “It’s fun to watch the idiots fight every now and then, but you can’t build a show around it. I’m completely against these shows.” The Kimbo problem
In March, an MMA promotion company called Bone Krusher Entertainment paid a $ 250 deposit to Hendrix College in Conway in exchange for using the school’s Wellness and Athletics Center for an MMA event called “Caged Fury.”
On May 27, less than a month before the event, Hendrix reneged on the agreement, citing material in its advertising that included skulls, blood, hard rock music and barely dressed young women.
Hamilton can sympathize and even admits MMA could stand to scrub its public image. But it’s not that simple.
Predictably, MMA’s ascent has been fueled by a largely young male fan base, and the culture and imagery has followed suit. Tattoos, heavy music and, yes, ring card girls, are staples at most MMA events, and none of that can simply be brushed aside.
To clean up would push MMA further into the mainstream. But clean up too much, and the core of MMA feels slapped in the face.
“The pit bulls, the chains, the Affliction [a clothing brand popular in MMA ] shirt-wearing crowd, they’re definitely part of [it ],” Hamilton said. “But we market our show as an event. We hope our ring card girls are sexy, but you want the sport to do well. You’ve got to teeter [straddle the line between the tastes of hard-core fans and the general sporting public ].”
So far, there’s been a questionable job of teetering. MMA’s coming-out party to the general public was a May event shown on CBS called Elite XC: Primetime.
The event built its hype around a hulking fighter named Kevin Ferguson, better known to the fight community as Kimbo Slice, a former street brawler and bodyguard. Slice’s “main event” fight with James Thompson was a plodding three-rounder that gave Slice a victory but was roundly panned by mainstream sports media.
The local MMA community is still trying to figure out if Slice and his bad boy act has done more harm than good, and even the gregarious Hamilton initially responds with a tellingly zipped lip.
“My official party line is ‘Hooray for Kimbo,’” Hamilton said. “Good for him.”
Kleinbeck, who competes in Elite XC fighting like Ferguson, aka Slice, also treads carefully.
“I thought that was a little bit over the top,” Kleinbeck said. “We train in here [Westside ] with physical therapists, lawyers, policemen. Many athletes come in here to train. I think this sport caters to them. You don’t see many MMA fighters whose story is they grew up in the streets.”
So maybe kicks and punches aren’t what to watch for tonight. Ditto for the ring girls.
The conduct and attitude of the fighters and crowd could go a long way in helping the Arkansas public decide if the fighters are athletes or brawlers, if the fans are appreciative or just bloodthirsty, and if MMA is a sport or just brutal exhibition.
“I think they see it as just more of a brawl,” Lee said. “Like a bar fight or something.”
But perception goes a long way.
“That’s the hardest thing,” Hamilton said. “We have to decide what we want to be when we grow up.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
