Only in Canada? - MMA increasingly relevant in mainstream sports media

Canadians love MMA.  That's becoming a safe assertion, along with "Canadians think Sidney Crosby is the messiah," and "Canadians would rather drink battery acid than American beer".  What is interesting is the extent to which much of the mainstream media has accepted this assertion and is increasingly engaged with covering MMA.

via images.tsn.ca

Most recently, James Cybulski, a television personality and commentator on the TSN.ca webpage, wrote an article about boxing which prominently referred to MMA in terms of a foil for boxing's ongoing struggles.  Surprisingly, unlike so many articles from "old guard" boxing fans in America, the treatment of MMA is not derogatory, but rather complementary.  Here are a couple of quotes:

What boxing fans want is Pacquiao-Mayweather.  Plain and simple.  Egos aside, politics aside, boxing needs this fight. 

As the UFC and Mixed Martial Arts properties continue to take top athletes and, even more importantly, a major chunk of the pay-per-view industry that boxing once dominated, boxing needs Floyd and Pacman to find a way to get in the ring together.

...

In the meantime, my guess is that UFC president Dana White is still laughing all the way to the bank after this past weekend's clunker in Dallas.

Interesting stuff.  Cybulski inherently praises the entertainment value of MMA, notes that top athletes are not only being drawn to MMA but also being drawn from boxing, and in a way makes the most damning observation that one can make of the semi-legitimate boxing/MMA rivalry: that MMA (specifically, the UFC) is making money while boxing is in decline.  Obviously the boxing/MMA rivalry is at least partially a fabrication by industry talking heads, but there is also some legitimacy to it.  Just as obviously, boxing remains a multi-billion dollar industry, while the UFC's earning could be considered relative chump change to the aggregate profits of boxing.  But Cybulski has hit on something that gets talked about often on websites like Bloody Elbow but is frequently overlooked in more mainstream sports reporting: MMA has not only arrived as a legitimate sport but is also now established enough that it is worthwhile to examine how much of the "sports consumption" market MMA is capturing, and who it is being captured from.

What I find particularly fascinating about this is two-fold.  First, while TSN has been covering fights and fighters for some time - and rival stations such as Sportsnet have responded wiht their own MMA shows and coverage - it is still comparatively rare for MMA to be mentioned on par with or in comparison to established, "legitimate", mainstream sports.  Until recently, MMA was covered, but it was covered in a fairly air-tight MMA box; if you didn't know about MMA, you could easily miss the coverage on their website, and fight highlights were still rare on Sportscentre.  But Cybulski made his comments above in an article titled An Open Letter to the Sport of Boxing.  No MMA in the title, no Kimbo/GSP/Dana red flag.  The mentions of MMA, the UFC, and Dana White are inserted into the article as if the author expects the reader to know who these people are and what these acronyms mean.  The second element is this: TSN is owned by a group called "CTV Specialty Television" which is the name for the partnership between CTV - a massive Canadian media conglomerate - and none other than ESPN.

via upload.wikimedia.org

It is entirely possible that the decisions on programming are being made just based on trending data of audience interest, etc., and recent increases in active and passive (like in Cybulski's article) coverage don't reflect any particular change in philosophy among the programming decision makers.  If that's the case, then mainstream media coverage of MMA is - as Luke asserted in his radio program last week, and which I agreed with - tied directly to a level of popularity that is rising, though faster in some places (Canada) than others (USA).  MMA may still be considered "ghetto" in the mainstream media, but outlets like ESPN and CTV rarely care about that beyond the implication for how many eyes they can get on advertisements.  That's good news, in a sense, because it means that there is no particular bias against covering MMA on the part of ESPN and the mainstream sports media; it's a business decision, pure and simple, and that means that we fans just need to be patient (and evangelical if patience is beyond us).  On the other hand, this could be ESPN in partnership with CTV test-driving their MMA coverage in a friendly, demand-heavy market before rolling out MMA coverage more widely south of the border; that's a far less likely scenario, but one can always hope.  Either way, MMA fans starved for more consistent mainstream coverage of the sport can at least begin looking north to find their fix.