I Just Got My Affliction Promo Materials

It's January 16th, 2009, eight days prior to Affliction: Day of Reckoning.  I just got the promotional material I signed up for as soon as the site for the show was put up.  The poster looks exactly like the one on the site when I signed up, but it is torn.  Looking at the promotional material (in addition to the poster, there are 2 mini-posters that fold so they stand and a deck of cards, all with the same image), I am conflicted.  I look at the names: Fedor, Arlovski, Hieron, Nogueira, Barnett and I think about how good this card should be.  Then I think about how asinine it is to get this stuff eight days before the show!  Are these guys incompetent, assholes, or just plain stupid?

I live in New Jersey and I work in Manhattan.  You know, one of those small media markets.  I was willing, even looking forward to, putting up some of this stuff in the area around my office.  For the last show I signed up to get the promotional material and got nothing but emails trying to sell me shirts, so by now I had assumed that it just wasn't going to happen.  Now I doubt it's worth the effort.

Let me say that I loved the first show.  There were issues with the announcers (and Big John is much better at reffing than he is at interviewing), the ropes/stand ups were not handled well, and Megadeath was wrong on many levels- all mistakes that could be prevented.  I know I'm in the minority of MMA fans (see my fanpost about my opinion of elbows to the head on the ground), but I like ropes, when they are handled appropriately.  In Pride (and now in Dream), the ropes were taut, which made it more difficult for fighters to fall through.  The refs used the ropes to bounce the fighters off of them and there were officials surrounding the ring giving the ref, giving them information, such as whether a fighter is holding the ropes.  Although Affliction did about as poor of a job managing the ropes as you can imagine, the viewer had the advantage of angles impossible to get in a cage.

But this business with the promotional items bothers me.  Do they think that the east coast market is unimportant?  But then, I am reassured.  I haven't seen any advertising for this show at all, so I shouldn't take it personally.  It's not going to be the payroll that's going to kill Affliction MMA, it'll die because they're going to put on a show and no one is going to know it's happening.