Please wrap your post in spoiler tags (as I've done above) for people who haven't seen the fights yet. Thanks. But I agree.
Spoiler The Lyoto fight was OK , not as good as his war with Rua or Rashad or Thiago? another brazilian, but I guess Im expecting too much. I went to watch this at a friends , did not order this event. Next event I will purchase will be the GSP vs Hendricks and Silva Weidman 2.
What REALLY gets me about MMA is the injuries in training. Far too many fights get announced and then cancelled/changed/moved. There's almost no point following the latest news and match ups because so many fall through. Something's very wrong in the house of MMA and it needs sorting out IMHO. To be a spectator sport you need the spectacle AND the build up and back story to an event. Stop all the jumping one legged on gym balls while holding some dumbells wearing a gas mask.
Remember the UFC also brought in insurance for fighters. There's a lot of dumb practices in mma, but I think the big jump in injury pull outs mostly comes from having that insurance security now. Before if you were injured you fought through it because otherwise you didn't get paid. Now your medical bills are covered so its not as big a deal. Plus there's no fear of doing it and getting cut for ruining a card any more. I know a couple of guys who have pulled out of big fights for injuries but they've always been serious ones. The most recent being a fractured orbital for example. Some of the injuries I hear about are a bit weak though. Remember one guy pulling out for a cut he got in sparring and he put pictures up a couple weeks before the event showing it was healed. That kind of thing bugs me.
I'm sure that's part of it but you're also getting quite a few ACL, knee injuries and other more serious things that it would be hard to fight with even if you wanted to back in the day.
I tell you what makes any competition fight boring. rules, i preferred the old benn eubanks wars years ago
Yes, a lot of the injuries are knees, but not all. I think PASmith is right on about training issues. I was REALLY looking forward to Cat Zingano being a coach on TUF and then fighting Roussey, but she blew her knee out doing jus the sort of exercises PASmith alluded to. Not nearly as excited to see tate vs Roussey coaching. GSP was off for a year and a half as champion with a blown knee. There is a lot of controversy over Dominick Cruz being out over 2 years with his knee injury. It has had several setbacks and his division is sort of on hold with Barao being interim champ for awhile know. Some people think his belt should be stripped being out that long. Forrest Griffin's knee was blown I think late 2012. The Pettis/ Aldo championship match was nixed due to Pettis hurting his knee. These are the recent knee injuries I can think of just off the top of my head. Many of them champions. I know injuries are part of any sport, but when people are blowing out their knees this regualalry in training, something is wrong with that training. Training is supposed to build you up and make you stronger, not tear you down.
QUESTION. I know Bass Rutten had to retire because he had no cartilage left in his knees. Does wrestling cause the knee to wear faster? Like shooting in for a takedown? Playing american football as a youth I saw teens in my high school that played with me get knee injuries and they only get worse and more frequent with age and heightened intensity of action /impact of the sport.
i get what you're saying here. but i'm not bored by it (yet), because of exactly when you say "what works". i was personally tired of the early ufc's and mma when you had "traditional" guys still competing, because those were not fights, they were beatings. at least now we can appreciate the "confrontation"--as rorion gracie would put it--between two highly skilled athletes. to take a soccer analogy, lionel messi isn't doing anything different than other guys, he's just doing it better/faster. interestingly, before the silva/weidman fight, i had a long discussion with a family member that was telling me how she didn't like mma because it "wasn't pretty" and "brutal". throughout the day i talked to her about martial arts, what works in certain settings, etc. the theories between functional versus not. she's a former dancer (no, not a gentleman's club "dancer" but a legit modern stage dancer), so she was equating "beauty" with "effectiveness". beauty as in lines, form, that kind of thing. i worked on convincing her all day that her definition of "beauty" didn't apply here and the "beauty" of mma was its effectiveness. we watched all the fights that night. and i honestly think she got it. plus it helped me burnish my bjj cred with my family. always a good thing. i kept saying "look, he's 'mounting'", etc. etc.
Now, converting a non-believer has to be worthy of the highest accolades MAP can offer. Giovanni is hereby nominated...
I think it is a lack of specialist vs specialist fights. Like back in PRIDE and other Japanese MMA promotions. I think PRIDE is more surreal, like from a comic book. A lot of violence but also glory, and they made the fighters look like supermen. I know it is just for show but I liked those elements of it. I remember, watching UFC before they changed the intro, everytime it starts I think to myself "this sounds like something teenagers from the suburb made up." But I prefer watching Sanda and Thai boxing and K-1, I think it is more interesting.
I just went through the site I may or may not use to watch VODs of ufc fights and was actually surprised how many great fights over the last year I forgot about. Maybe we just remember the negative a lot easier?
It's also a saturated market now. There is an MMA event on pretty much every week on one channel or another, then there are the MMA news shows, TUF, The Fight Network here in Canada (which re-runs old Pancrase so no complaints there) etc.... So for any fight to "stand out" there has to either be a lot of build up or t has to be something spectacular
do you think that someday "mma" will be as big as the biggest fight promotions were? is it going to take a really charismatic person like a muhammad ali to make mma promotions as big as boxing was in the 70's? as a kid in the 80's, i was lucky to see tons of tremendous fights with leonard, hagler, hearns, etc. (we could still watch those fights on network tv) but i feel like boxing hit its peak in the 60's and early 70's with ali and all his fights.
I would argue it already is - most "man in the street" types can name 5 UFC fighters, but not many boxers (PBF aside).
