It’s ironic to see the same people that told me it was a senseless bloodsport just a few years ago begging me to help them get front row tickets to the hottest show in town.
Now the ultimate question is whether this event will really turn out to be the pay-dirt that the Australian MMA scene has been waiting on for all these years. Will this one event finally turn all those boxing and wrestling fans onto the real deal, or are we just preaching to the already converted?
It would be ignorant to presume, with our population, that the sport will become as big here as it is in North America, but I see no reason that it can’t be bigger than our boxing and kickboxing industries combined.
The biggest hurdles we are facing now are the same ones the US faced all those years ago when the UFC was still in its infancy. The mainstream media just loves to grab onto that ‘bloodsport’ label and run with it like all hell — the glaringly obvious being a recently uninformed and pathetically researched article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and caused a whole swarm of backlash from the Australian fight industry. It was great to see no one take this lying down and if we all manage to answer these beat-ups in an educated and respectful way, then we are already one up on the nay-sayers.
If it’s not the blood, it's the ‘cage’, which people seem to have a really hard time accepting. Somehow, here in Victoria, we can battle it out like any other MMA fighter, but for some bizarre reason it can’t be done in a cage. One person told me it was because you can jump out of a ring if you have to — but you are ‘locked’ in a cage.
These guys have been watching too many Van Damme movies — I can just see the big rusty padlock on the cage door now, with the key hanging around the neck of a huge sumo wrestler.
Whether you believe MMA is the revolution that martial artists and fighters have been waiting for, or that its just another passing fad from the ‘Yanks’, I hope this magazine can help you understand the sport a bit more and that we can lend a hand to spread the word about our own homegrown heroes.
