By Ben Miller
It’s easy to hate M-1 Global. It’s not just that they behave like gangsters or that they make unreasonable demands. It’s not that they send a dozen handlers to the ring after Fedor Emelianenko’s victories who appear far happier about the win than the champion does. It’s mainly the fact that they seem to value sport last. The perception is that they see this brilliant sportsman as an indentured servant put on this earth to further their prestige and power and pocketbooks. They may well love MMA and know the sport better than all of us lowly Internet writers, but from afar they look parasitic.
On the other side of the ethical spectrum sits WEC. It’s easy to love WEC. From top to bottom, they just feel earthy and sincere and good. Dana White: multi-millionaire promoter who makes relative peanuts promoting the most exciting fights on the planet. Frank Mir: former heavyweight titlist who mans the broadcast booth so that we can follow every move and countermove. The Fighters: world-class mixed martial artists who make a fraction of what UFC stars make because the consummation between two short people bore an athlete.
So it is. Two MMA events sit less than two weeks apart from one another on opposing ends of a variety of spectrums. From visibility (CBS to Versus) to leadership (White to Finkelchtein) to booking top challengers (Aldo to Rogers), the gap is enormous. And in each case, M-1 looks bad.
The sad part of M-1’s mess is that they’ve sullied the reputation of history’s greatest fighter. They’ve created an environment where every perceived flaw in Fedor’s game is magnified. If Arlovski out-boxes him for four minutes or Rogers reverses him to his back, it’s evidence of a declining fighter. That would never happen to Brock, they say. Brock would take Arlovski down in seconds (if he didn’t floor him with a right cinder block first). Brock would ground Rogers into hamburger meat, whether standing or grounded.
Conversely, the flaws of WEC’s stars have been glossed over. Miguel Angel Torres was the thinking man’s pound-for-pound champion until a guy with six fights took advantage of a recklessness that glared from the time he hit the national stage. Mike Brown, the promotion’s current killer, has the big punch and wrestling skill that has gotten him near the top of many pound-for-pound rankings, but his middle of the road striking technique may make him ripe for Jose Aldo.
All of this may seem like an exercise in illuminating the obvious, but there are lessons to be taken. The central lesson? Love the money by loving the sport; never the reverse.
Zuffa (and, by extension, WEC) loves the money they make. But they believe in making that money by loving the sport. They want to put on the biggest fights in a rock concert setting with top shelf television production. They may sacrifice a big fight here or there to protect their business and they may slow-play the wider reaching networks in order to preserve control over their product, but for the most part they’re always putting populism above capitalism.
M-1, on the other hand, seems to hope that the sport will follow the money. They appear to think that if they protect their marquee investment and fight for every inch of promotional leverage when he performs, people will eventually respect them as sports promoters. Unfortunately for M-1, it doesn’t work that way. For no matter what the truth is concerning their love of MMA, once fans perceive that you love the money above the sport, you’re in trouble. You may be a Don King. You may be one of the fortunate ones who maintains a begrudging audience that holds their collective nose when they buy your events, but you’ll more likely be just another money mark left behind when your meal ticket fades.
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