The Top MMA Stories of the Decade: The Fall of PRIDE

Is this sarcasm? The Fertittas are/were Las Vegas casino owners! It seems well within the real of possibility that organized crime already has a place in the Zuffa inner circle.

This is mostly baseless speculation on my part, of course, although Jonathon Snowden has a whole chapter in his book linking the Fertittas to mafia people.

Agreed, and there is no evidence to show they were somehow a health risk. People just like to assume they were because they look "brutal" to them, but there has never been any type of permanent damage done by them, just like there has never been any type of permanent damage done by anything MMA related (in the world of sanction MMA bouts, that is). Saying "but I am glad they stopped when they did. It was a throat crushing waiting to happen" as someone said above is just like saying that anything in MMA today is a "throat crushing waiting to happen". This stance is based on no evidence, it is only assumptions. Damn I miss the footstumps and soccer kicks! Bring them back Dream, come on now!

I wasn’t speaking about Zuffa fixing any fights, it would really be counterproductive for them. But I do think the sport is ripe for fight fixing. Lets face it, a lot of fighter don’t make very much and a single fighter has greater control over the outcome of a bout than any player on any major league team or any ref or judge.
Imagine we wanted to fix a fight, so we make contact with a struggling fighter like Aaron Simpson (using only as an example) and make a deal with him: we’ll pay him $40,000 to throw his next fight. Right now he’s making $9000 plus $9000 if he wins, so if he was in a Pat Barry situation (before his big win) then he might be in a pretty desperate situation. We go around and place several $200-$3000 bets on his next opponent who is a +200 underdog and end up winning $100,000 when Aaron gets caught in an armbar. Pretty easy money. Next we cautiously approach several other lower tier and struggling fighters, carefully placing occasional bets on these fights, especially when we can get several of our guys on one card, when we can start parlaying a few fights into sure bets. Now we can place a 100 bets around the country and collect a million of our $100,000 bet. It sounds complex, but for a sports-fixing scandal it would be run of the mill.
Now college survived the Boston College scandal and the NBA survived Donaghy because they were basically isolated to one team and one ref. But what would be the effect on the sport if it came out that 6 fighters took dives in 10 fights, and that wasn’t the end of it? It slowly leaked out that more fighters were involved in more fights. It wouldn’t matter that these other fighters where in the WEC or Strikeforce, people would just link everything to “Ultimate Fighting”. I think the fight is popular enough to survive such a scandal, but the image would definitely take a hit, and perhaps a fatal one with those it is trying to convert into new fans. Who wants to commit any energy to an obviously :crooked" and “fixed” sport?

As for a death: obviously a very well viewed and brutal-looking death would be of greater risk to mma then one out of sight. My nightmare scenario would be a major card or a CBS show, where a fighter is caught in a choke and doesn’t wake up, or takes a vicious beating on the ground and dies in the ring. Now this would obviously be a fluke but flukes happen. Perhaps a fighter had a undiagnosed condition or suffers a freak accident in the ring. If it was a one-in-a-million scenario, it could still be painted as a result of the brutal nature of the sport. Would it matter if he had a pre-condition if people could see the video of him being beaten to death in front of a cheering mob? How would this affect the sport? I am not sure, but I can’t imagine millions watching a man be killed in the middle of the ring is going to go over well. A lot of the hard-fought legalization and regulation battles might suddenly turn to south.
Would either of these kill the sport no? But they definitely hurt it. And god forbid is someone rolls snake-eyes and both happened. At that point we may have to worry about the future of the sport. Could it happen? Probably not, but of course, nothing is outside the realms of possibility.

You have to take cultural differences into consideration. I think that the Yakuza has a much more negative stigma in Japan than the Mafia or other organized crime has here. Kinda like marijuana, if an athlete gets caught in japan it is a major social stigma, while if one gets caught in the US the only reaction is usually “dumbass, just stop for a week.”