UFC Overview

With MMA and more specifically UFC exploding like Artie Lange on Joe Buck Live, it’s time to look at the effects it is having on the mainstream media, fans, and other sports.

UFC just held their 100th pay-per-view and had the highest gate revenue for a UFC event, with a 5.1 million dollar haul. The event was sold-out before the tickets were even made available to the general public.

They also had 1.5 million pay-per-view buys around the world, which at 45 bucks a pop is a huge amount of scratch.

Look, the UFC is hotter than Hansel right now, when your girlfriend or mom knows who the fighters are, you know that sport has gone mainstream.

Hell, even the world’s most beloved child molester was a fan of the sport. Yes Michael Jackson attended a UFC event a couple years ago with a mask over his face, sitting in a wheelchair near the cage, which may be the most normal thing about his last couple of years on Earth.

(Isn’t it funny that you could pretty much make up any kind of story about Wacko Jacko, and most people would believe it; Like hey did you know Michael Jackson turned himself into a hermaphrodite at age 33… I would definitely believe that.)

We now have people walking around from coast to coast wearing Tapout gear and Affliction shirts, just dropping cash on anything that can make them seem tougher, because nothing screams badass like a fat guy in an Affliction shirt.

And you know what? It’s all good.

What’s better than getting together with a bunch of friends, busting out your favorite cold beverage and watching two guys duke it out in a cage? Nothing that’s what.




UFC has managed to tap into the uber-important 18-35 year old male demographic. This is a group that has the most available dispensary income, mainly because they usually do not have kids, or house payments, or other bills, so they spend their money on things like pay-per-views and t-shirts because they can afford to.

So in the words of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, the UFC has “this thing, and its EFFIN golden”.

Right now, the future of UFC looks great. They have a ton of matchups to tap into, starting with the next pay-per-view, UFC 101. The main event is Forrest Griffin going up against Anderson "The Spider" Silva.

Griffin is the working man’s hero, coming all the way from the Ultimate Fighter (The UFC’s reality show, in which 10 guys battle for a UFC contract) and has held the lightweight title.

Silva is the more skilled athlete who also held the lightweight title, and is generally thought of as one of the fastest and quickest fighters in the game right now.

It should be a great matchup, and if you are a fan of UFC, you will spend money to see this fight.

The UFC literally has 20 matchups like this that they can make which means the company should stay strong for at least two more years, if not longer.

But let’s take a trip down memory lane to about 10 years ago.

In 1999, pro wrestling was crazy popular. The now defunct WCW had the n.W.o., Sting and Goldberg, and the WWF had D-X, The Rock, Stone Cold and tons of other memorable wrestlers and moments.



The TV ratings were off the charts, pay-per-view buys were as strong as UFC’s are now, and you could walk down the street and see a grown man wearing a n.W.o, or Austin 3:16 t-shirt with stunning regularity.

But what happened?

Wrestlers got old and retired (Macho Man, Scott Hall, Lex Luger), got sick of the business and left it (The Rock, Goldberg, Stone Cold) or worse, started dying young (Eddie Guerrero, Big Bossman, Bam Bam Bigelow, British Bulldog, and about 20 other guys) because of steroids and/or pain killers.



We also saw pretty much every matchup you could think of and the kid’s of that generation grew up and stopped caring about it as much, if not all together.

I know as soon as I hit high school, I stopped watching wrestling, and did not come back to it until I had a DVR, because no one is making time to watch wrestling live anymore.

Even now with a DVR, I find it hard to watch wrestling after watching a UFC or MMA event. It’s just too fake, and boring compared to the UFC, and I’m saying that as a fan of pro wrestling.

So what can the UFC learn from Pro Wrestling’s mistakes?

Well for one, that fame and popularity is fleeting. Do not assume that you are infallible. Because the other shoe will drop at some point, it always does.

Luckily the UFC and MMA as a whole, has one of the strictest drug testing policy in all of pro sports. The federal government is in charge of administering and checking the tests, unlike the WWE, who doesn’t care, and probably encourages their athletes to use steroids and pain killers.

They also have to keep the 18-35 year old male demographic spending money on their pay-per-view shows and merchandise. Without that, you lose sponsors, which in turn, means less money for marketing as well as for the fighters and promoters.

And lastly, they have to keep churning out fighters that the public will want to see, and stay current with.

Look at the WWE right now (or don’t, it’s a trainwreck). Their roster is littered with boring, cookie-cutter guys, who bring nothing to the show, and mostly suck at keeping anyone’s attention over the age of 12.


The only guys I will get excited to watch in wrestling are Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, Chris Jericho, Triple H, and Edge. As luck would have it, three of those guys are out with injuries, which turns a two hour wrestling show into me watching fifteen actual minutes, thanks to my DVR.

The UFC has a ton of potential matchups to still promote, and they have the luxury of having these guys only fight two to three times a year, which keeps the bouts fresh.




Plus they have guys like me who are willing to have 5 or 6 friends over to throw down on a fight every month.

We make it an event that includes, drinking, grilled food, more drinking, more grilled food, and of course more beer drinking.

And like I said earlier, what’s better than that.

A Forgotten Superstar

In the Late 1990’s my brother Sammy received an autographed Mark McGwire 8x10 photo of his rookie of the year season and I received an autographed Ken Griffey Jr. 8x10 of his MVP season.


Back then, Sam would try to ruffle my feathers, and claim that his McGwire photo would be thousands of dollars, and that he definitely got the better of the two gifts.

And in 1999, he was right.

McGwire was belting home runs 500 feet, and looked like Paul Bunyan, with muscles on top of muscles bulging out of his skin-tight uniform.

When McGwire broke the single season home run record, Sammy was happier than a pig in slop. (This at the time was a pretty accurate statement of Sammy’s life by the way)

It seemed like Sam’s words were going to come true, and that his McGwire photo would end up being the more enviable and valuable item.

That was until we found out about steroids and PED's and what players were using them.

Eventually we figured out why McGwire suddenly looked like a WWF wrestler and was hitting moon rockets out of ball parks.

He was on the juice.

McGwire was accused of doing steroids and never denied the accusations, only claiming he didn’t want to talk about the past.

It’s fitting in a poetic sense that after moving two or three times, Sammy ended up losing his McGwire photo, while the Griffey photo has stayed with me through the years, and is located in my game room right now.

McGwire has been gone from baseball and the public eye since 2003, and we haven’t seen or heard from him since, except for one Congressional session when he was called to the stand, to testify about steroids.

Griffey on the other hand is still playing, and winding down what will be a first ballot Hall of Fame career.

Griffey came into the big leagues in 1989, and captivated fellow players and fans with his superb defensive skills in centerfield, as well as with in my opinion, the sweetest stroke in Major League history.


You couldn’t watch a summer SportsCenter top 10 in the 1990’s without a Griffey highlight in there at least once a week. This is a guy who had it all; speed, power, vision, grace and swagger, all mixed into one.

Spanning from 1989 to 1999, Griffey racked up 1,752 hits, 398 home runs, 1,152 RBIs, and 167 stolen bases. He led the American League in home runs four seasons (1994, 1997, 1998, and 1999), was voted the A.L. MVP in 1997, maintaining a .297 batting average throughout the decade.

He had crazy range in the outfield, tons of Web-Gem caliber diving catches, and he often dazzled fans with over-the-shoulder basket catches, Willie Mays style.



Thinking back to those days, I can still remember him robbing opposing hitters of home runs by leaping up over the wall and pulling them back, almost making it look easy. To this the day, there hasn’t been another player who robbed homer’s as often and as effortlessly as Jr. did. (Torri Hunter came close, but he didn’t do it as long Griffey did)


Griffey won 10 Gold Gloves, seven Silver Slugger awards, was the Home Run Derby champ three times and got one MVP award in the 1990’s. (Although looking back at the list of other MVP winners from 1994 and on, is like looking at a who’s who of steroid users)

Man, I would not have traded a Griffey baseball card for anything during the 5th grade. It seemed like he was a mortal lock to go down as the best player to ever play the game.

He was the coolest thing around, not just in baseball, but in all of sports.




The Kid had his own Nike shoes, which were always looking snazzy. He had his own Video Game, Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run for Super Nintendo and later Ken Griffey Baseball for Nintendo 64, both solid games that both me, my brother, and all our friends would play non-stop.



He was in a Simpson’s episode, the one where Mr. Burns “employed” Major League players at his Nuclear Power Plant, so they essentially could be ringers in a softball game. In the episode, Griffey overdoses on a nerve tonic given to him by Mr. Burns, causing him to have gigantic head.



He was the bad guy in the 1994 movie Little Big League. Well, he wasn’t really a bad guy, and he was only on screen for like 5 total minutes, but his scenes are what I can still remember of that movie.

And then the injuries came.

It started with the broken ankle while leaping into the outfield wall to rob a home run, and continued with other horrible leg (mostly hamstring) injuries.
Griffey had season-ending injuries in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Worse yet for Griffey, the cumulative effects of the injuries lowered his bat speed, resulting in less power and fewer home runs.

He missed 260 out of 486 games from 2002 through 2004, diminishing both his skills and his star reputation. Consequently, Griffey was no longer the ubiquitous presence he once was on cereal boxes, television commercials, and the All-Star Game.

Couple all these factors, with the rise of steroid use, giving players like McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds unheard of Home Run totals, and Griffey started to fade away from the forefront.

But the 2005 season saw the resurgence of a healthy Griffey. The picture perfect swing, which depends heavily on excellent lower body strength, returned to its original form.

His 35 home runs in 2005 were his highest since his first year with the Reds in 2001 as Griffey moved up the career home run list.

He would go on to have two more solid seasons in 2006 and 2007, but the Griffey that I grew up with and knew was long gone. There were no more Nike commercials, or video games or movie appearances. In his place was an aging outfielder with bad legs and a slower swing, and three kids of his own.

Yet, the memories of Ken Griffey Jr. circa 1990’s are still with me to this day, and once he retires, his numbers are going to look very impressive, considering most of his contemporaries from his days were on steroids.




I believe he will continue to gain more acknowledgements for his part in Baseball history as time wears on.

One came in August of 2007, when Griffey was selected as an all-time Gold Glove winner, a list of nine players considered the greatest defensive players in the last fifty years.

And for Sammy, he learns two more things; don’t count your chickens until they hatch and the most important one, the older Brother always wins.

I have to admit I’m starting to get the Summertime Sports Blues.

We are currently in the midst of the worst part of the year for sports on TV.

Now this is not an annual thing, because every other year we get either the Olympics or the World Cup to help pass the time from the NBA Draft, to the start of College Football, but in the odd-numbered years, we get the vortex of suck.

Last summer we had Michael “Bong” Phelps and Team USA Basketball to watch and cheer for in the Olympics. Three summers ago we had the 2006 World Cup and the sweet head butt from Zinedane Zidane in the title game.






But just like in the summer of 2007, the summer of 2009 is going to drag from now until about the end of August. That’s 6 to 7 weeks of nothing but baseball (I refuse to count the Tour de France, no one watches that), and I’m sorry it is not 1956 anymore, and people do not care about baseball like they once did.

Sure baseball is still a very popular sport, but in today’s fast-paced world, the majority of people find it hard to carve out three hours of their night to watch a baseball game. There are just too many other options out there, from other things to watch on TV, to the internet, to video games, and good ole’ fashioned outdoor activities.

There is NBA free agent chatter, but that is not something you can watch on TV, and once the big names sign, it doesn’t really matter after that.

Other than one night of UFC fights this past weekend, there has not been one must see sporting event on TV since the NBA finals.

USA-Brazil soccer was decent, and Federer vs. Roddick was good, but those are the exception to the rule, and because they are played overseas, they do not come on at a time when the majority of US sporting fans are watching TV.

So what are we to do with ourselves?

Well I for one will be picking up NCAA Football 2010 by the end of this week, and once I do, I will go into my yearly hibernation of playing the Dynasty Mode with the Florida Gators. (Dynasty mode gives you the opportunity to play a team year after year)

Around the fictitious year of 2020 I will probably announce my retirement and move on into the world of Madden 2010 Franchise mode, (which is the same as Dynasty for college football) and start a franchise with the Bucs.

My skin should look extremely white and pasty and I will probably gain at least 10 pounds in that time from eating Doritos and Charleston Chews. Basically I will look like all the South Park kids did in the world of warcraft episode.




This will all be worth it when video Tim Tebow wins his second Heisman trophy and third National Championship in my Dynasty, and then after uploading him from NCAA into Madden, Tebow will take the Bucs back to the Super Bowl.


It will be glorious.







Now I just have to figure out how to carve out all this videogame time and keep my girlfriend from smashing my Xbox into a thousand pieces.

The Mountain "Pest" Conference

Living in Utah has its advantages and disadvantages. Utah has mountains and snow, and great micro-brewed beers. The economy is not totally in the crapper, and they do have a NBA team.

There are many disadvantages though, and most of it can be chalked up to the Mormon Church and its reaches into State Government out here. Most of the gripes are related to alcohol and tobacco taxes and restrictions, as well as the whole state basically shutting down on Sunday’s.

But hands down the biggest downer about living out here is the college football factor.

Growing up in Florida blessed me with the opportunity to watch and attend college football games all over the southeast.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch games at the Swamp in Gainesville, at Doak Campbell in Tallahassee, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando and on one fall weekend my brother and I attended a game at Neyland Stadium in Tennessee with our Uncle.

I don’t use the word hate lightly, but I hate the Tennessee Volunteers. Yet the game day atmosphere in Knoxville is electric. The stadium holds over 100,000 people and sits right next to the Tennessee River. The campus comes alive, with scores of people "Sailgating" on boats on the river to people tailgating all over the surrounding areas of the stadium.

Neyland Stadium with the Tennessee River by it




FSU is right behind Tennessee in my personal hate club, and yet going to one of their home games is an absolute blast. I’ve been to games at Doak as both a child as well as a young adult who tried to commit alcohol poisoning on himself (almost succeeded), and had a great time both ways.

The craziness starts hours before kickoff and reaches a fervor when Chief Osceola throws his flaming spear into midfield right before the start of the game. (It’s no coincidence that Flaming and FSU go so well together)

Doak holds a fat amount of people, and in my opinion, narrowly edges UCF and the Citrus Bowl for the best looking girls at the games. Just be careful about sitting too close to the FSU wide receivers, they will either rob you or throw a chair at your face.

The Swamp in Gainesville is a beautiful stadium, located in the heart of the campus of the University of Florida. Yes I am biased to it, because I’m a huge Gators honk, but the stadium is surrounded by serene lakes, historic brick buildings and towering trees, that give it an intimate setting.

The fans are loud and passionate and have a great knowledge of the game. There are numerous places to tailgate, and the cops are not pricks, they let people enjoy themselves, which as an 18-20 year old that would drink it up, was greatly appreciated at the time.

The stadium itself is huge, with seating just over 90,000. It is called The Swamp because according to then Coach Steve Spurrier, "a swamp is where Gators live. We feel comfortable there, but we hope our opponents feel tentative. A swamp is hot and sticky and can be dangerous. Only Gators get out alive."


Truer words have never been spoken.








All of these stadiums have one common factor; 75,000+ fans that come in after tailgating for at least 4 hours, and are passionate and knowledgeable. Most of these fans expect National Championships, and they are more than vocal about it once the game starts.

But in Utah, they have one decent stadium setting at the University of Utah, and one abomination of a college football atmosphere down in BYU.

Both places have very little areas for tailgating, and in BYU, tailgating, and I use that term very loosely, consists of eating jello and drinking caffeine free soda. I wish I was making this up.

You can thank the Mormon Church out here for that one, as BYU is a no-tolerance dry campus, and they make all their students sign an honor code that states they won’t drink alcohol, smoke or basically have a normal college lifestyle during their four years there.

If you break any of those rules, you will get kicked out of school. And because most of these kids are straight up lames, they will drop a dime on you and snitch you out to school authorities. So this makes a tame crowd of 60,000 people, even more pacified compared to SEC and ACC fans.

Utah’s stadium is located at the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, which is cool. What is not cool is the lack of areas to tailgate and drink alcohol, as well as the relative puny seating capacities of roughly 50,000 or so.



Utah's Rice Eccles Stadium



Recently Utah and the Mountain West Conference have been making a fuss about being included in the BCS Bowl System. They claim that they are an equal to the SEC and ACC, which is a total farce.

If Utah had been in the SEC last year they would have been a six loss team instead of undefeated. The Ute’s narrowly beat Oregon State and TCU, and both of those games were at home.

Imagine what would happen if they had to face LSU, Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee on the road, coupled with home games against Florida, Georgia, Ole Miss and Auburn; I see at least 6 losses there easily.

Instead Utah and BYU claim that because they can beat teams like Wyoming, San Diego State and Colorado State that they are just as good as Florida or Florida State.

Please, get real Utah and BYU.

You go on the road and play these joke teams like New Mexico and UNLV, where there might be 15,000 fans and you think that is equal to Florida going into Tennessee with 100,000 or Florida State going to Virginia Tech with 70,000 screaming, passionate fans.

And I haven’t even mentioned the disparity in talent or depth. Utah is good, but not great. They may have a handful of athletes, but the Florida and Florida State walk-ons and practice team players would beat the BYU and Utah starters most years.

Utah’s past season of success can be attributed to Urban Meyer’s last recruiting class while he was at Utah. Almost every key contributor to the Ute’s 2008 team was a Meyer recruit. And it took them all four years to get it to come together and go undefeated against an inferior schedule.

They also caught a break playing against Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Not taking anything away from the win, because it was a great victory for Utah, but they did play a Bama team that was missing its best player in left tackle Andre Smith, who wound up being the 6th pick in this year’s NFL draft.

The Tide could have cared less to be there against Utah, because of the loss in the SEC Championship against Florida a month before.

Alabama had been undefeated all year and ranked number one for half the season, and it all slipped right through their fingers when the Gators beat them in the last game of the regular season.

So Utah, BYU and TCU, need to temper their expectations and face the reality that playing against inferior opponents in non-hostile environments and racking up a 10 win season because of it, does not make you an equal to SEC and ACC teams.

If they are stuck on getting to the BCS title games, here’s a fun suggestion. Transfer into the Pac-10 or Big 12 conferences.

Oh wait BYU had the chance to join the Pac-10 in the 1970’s, and passed because, you won’t believe it, they did not want their athletic teams playing on Sunday’s. So BYU you are not allowed to complain ever again, you made your bed, now lie in it.

Utah, I believe should try to transfer into the Big 12 conference. If Colorado can be in the conference so can Utah.

But I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon because Utah is tangled up in a bad contract with the Mountain West, and it has to with some obscure cable channel called The Mountain that maybe 38 people watch when it’s not football season.

So until then, enjoy the dominance of SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big 10 teams winning national championships, and look forward to being relevant nationally every four years or so Mountain West fans.

Sports > Movies and Music

Seeing so many people “profess” their love for Michael Jackson in the wake of his death a couple weeks ago got me thinking about how shallow and desperate people are to try and latch onto something now-a-days.

Where were all these people who loved Wacko Jacko in May? Why were their absolutely no radio stations playing any of his songs on their airwaves since the late 1990’s? Why were MTV and VH1 not airing any of his music videos?

I’ll tell you why, because he was written off as a child loving pervert that could not make money for them anymore.

But as soon as he died, guess what starts happening; People start professing their love for Michael, and start babbling about how big of a role Jackson was in their lives. Jackson video’s and tribute pieces started showing up on half of my TV channels, and I have a lot of TV Channels.

What a bunch of crock. Nobody cared about Jackson, and now that he’s dead everyone is trying to coattail him one more time. I’m so sick of false adoration for people just to get on TV or to make money.

This got me thinking about how sports are so much better than movies or music.

Nobody is going to celebrate J.R. Rider if he were to die suddenly. You’ll remember Rider as the NBA player from the mid 1990’s who won a slam dunk contest and who also kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach, which may or may not be worse than what Jackson did to little boys.

We’re not going to have tributes for Rider, or have people coming out to say how great of a performer he was in his heyday.

Sports are no-nonsense, straight to the point events. There are no real gray areas like there are in movies and music.

Because movies and music can all be graded on individual tastes and preferences, and there is no clear cut winner, we have things like Transformers movies and Ja Rule records that make a lot of money and absolutely suck.


We have 2 week tributes for Michael Jackson, even though this is a guy who had alarms outside of his bedroom to notify if someone was coming to his room and secret doorways in his closet for him to do whatever he did with young boys. He is one of the most ultimate pervs ever, and yet we are worshipping him right now.


Luckily in sports we do not do stupid things like this. We’re not celebrating the Detroit Lions and their 0-16 record. They do not get to be revered for any past accomplishments that they have done. They suck, and they catch flak for it.

That’s why I love sports. There are no sissy men around to start up tributes to people or teams that do not deserve it. We don’t have little teen age girls who buy crap music records which artificially enhance their standings on the Top 100 records.

Everything is determined on the field of battle, and because of that, we do not have to deal with the non-sense that seems to be everywhere in this day and age.

Yes I understand that Jackson was one of the biggest stars to ever live, and he came of age during a time when music videos meant more than they do today. But for anybody under the age of 25, Jackson is just that weird dude with the messed up face who talked like a girl.

In sports when we celebrate something or honor someone, it is because they have earned it by winning an event or by putting in the work and setting records. There are no false accolades or stupid tributes run over and over again on TV to make money.

So in the words of South Park’s Mr. Jefferson, “People are Ignorant”, and worshipping Michael Jackson is supremely Ignorant.

And just to show you how bad this Wacko Jacko adulation has been, enjoy this magical tribute song by the ambassador of crazy Ron Artest.