Harris Interactive Ignores MMA, but That's Not So Bad

and when was the last time a sport broke through into the mainstream from being a niche?

i mean its gonna take time, look at whats been accomplished in 5 years. in another 5 years it’ll be insane to see where the sports at

plus football is my first love, i woulda had to have voted for it.

For me too. Everything else is just fodder.

but holy crap, do I feel the “niche” aspect of our sport. Case in point- As a late birthday present, my wife let me drag her to the pub to watch UFC: GSP Vs. Hardy.

It was a great card and the entire bar was loud and loving the action. Meanwhile, my wife (dead sober BTW) fell ASLEEP at our table. Later, she said MMA was too boring for her and she watched a KC Royals game instead. Because baseball is way more exciting than MMA.

Anyways, we’re getting some counselling on this now.

Last fall Esquire magazine ran a survey directed at 20 year old and 50 year old men. The goal was to determine how their attitudes towards sports, politics, etc. differed. Here is the question on sports:

11. What’s your favorite spectator sport?
Baseball 15% 20%

Football 33% 57%

Golf 4% 5%

Basketball 22% 11%

Ultimate Fighting 26% 7%

The percentage on the indicates what proportion of the 20 year olds chose that particular answer, while the number on the right is for the 50 year olds.

Here is their methodology:

“20/50: The Esquire Survey of American Men” was conducted exclusively for Esquire by Beta Research Corporation, an independent firm located in Syosset, New York. The six hundred respondents were randomly selected from a pool of Internet-connected adults and results were weighted to reflect a national sample of American men aged fifty and twenty. Margin of error on totals is +/ — 4 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence, and for a sample size of three hundred it is +/ — 6 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. The respondents completed the online survey between June 21 and June 30, 2010. Because of rounding, some percentages may not add up to 100.

http://www.esquire.com/features/facts-about-men-1010

to say that MMA is my favorite sport over baseball and football. Well I might say I enjoy it more than football, but definitely not baseball. For me it comes down to two factors that will change in our culture as time goes on. First, I grew up playing baseball and i know the game inside and out, and it holds a special place in my heart. Obviously some people have grown up doing some form of martial arts and have turned it in to a career, but it is only the current generation of kids that can really grow up and train in MMA. As the next generation of kids grow up it will be the same for them, and so on and so on. As time keeps going and children are exposed to the sport at an earlier age they will start looking up to whoever is the GSP or Anderson Silva of the sport at that time, like I looked up to Ken Griffey Jr. growing up.

That brings me to my second point of why I just can’t place MMA over baseball quite yet… history. I am a huge MMA fan and have followed it’s history pretty closely. The thing is, MMA itself only goes back to 1993. and it can be argued that in its current form it came around a few years after that. Yes we have always had fights as long as humans have been around and the martial arts are thousands of years old but that isn’t MMA. To me, baseball is magical. The place it held in American culture for so many years is astonishing and has helped it develop quite the history that contains a lot of near mythical heroes. I hear about Babe Ruth and just how good Shoeless Joe was. You hear about Ted Williams and get shivers thinking about the man who could be the greatest hitter to ever live. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier was a monumental moment in sports history. MMA doesn’t have these heroes, or these huge historical sports moments. I am sure years from now guys like Randy Couture and GSP and Anderson Silva will be talked about like some of the great baseball players, and at some point it will produce some moments that transcend the sport. For now though it doesn’t.

For those reasons it isn’t my favorite sport, but as we expose the next generation, and they expose the generation after, and so on and so on, MMA will become a lot of people’s favorite sports. I just can’t wait to tell my future grandkids one day that I saw GSP in his prime, or watched Fedor pull off some amazing comeback victories or saw Anderson Silva’s epic record winning streak, or watched as Jon Jones went from talented prospect to world champion (come on… we all know it is eventually going to happen haha). When the sport starts getting handed down from generation to generation is when we will see it truly accepted in the mainstream and respected by the media (who at this point would have grown up with it).

MMA is my favorite sport. If you knew me, you’d know I get obsessive with my sports. All of my obsessive sports behavior prior to MMA was football, and I love football. But when I started watching MMA I immediately liked it. After seeing more and more fights I was absolutely immersed, wanting to know more and more. I am a fan of learning, and a sport that had so much learning opportunity while still providing entertainment was part of what lead me to like MMA more than football. I began to dislike the way football was becoming, and certainly hated its "President," Commissioner Roger Goodell. I then saw Dana White and liked him much more than Goodell. He may be rough around the edges, but he runs the company as a fan would. What do I wanna see? I still love football, but MMA is the best sport in the world to me.