Marketing your fight issue #2 – Chael Sonnen and raising the stakes

In screenwriting one of the most important tools we can use to create interest is have high stakes. I’ll use Chael Sonnen as a real world example of how this tool can be implemented, for obvious reasons.

When building up a fight let’s ask ourselves some guiding questions:

1. Who are the fighters? (Why should we care about them?)

2. What do they want and why do they want it? (What are their goals?)

3. What happens if they succeed or fail? (What’s at stake?)

The first question will need an entire post of its own and I’ll cover it later. Right now I want to talk about 2 and 3.

When hyping a fight we need to understand their goals and why it’s important to them. For Chael his goal is to win the Middleweight championship belt. The why is because it’s the only promise he’s never kept to his father.

Once you’ve established the goal for your character/fighter you can then start raising the stakes. When determining what’s at stake just ask what happens if they succeed or fail. The higher the stakes, the more there is to gain and lose, the more interesting for the viewer.

For Chael if he wins he fulfills his promise and dream of being champion, he’ll have created a better life for himself and silenced the doubters (and even the doubt within himself).

If he loses it’ll all be a "colossal failure", he’ll lose respect and look a fool for not being able to back up his trash talk and it will likely be the last time he gets to face Anderson before he retires.

It’s important to set up the stakes early on, so that everything they say is amplified by it.

There are other things that could be at stake of course.

Other Gains: Respect from fans, the title, a title shot…

Losses: Their job (if they’ve already lost a couple in a row), their pride (if they’ve been talking shit), their title shot (if its a contenders match), their undefeated streak and so on.

Naturally I was giddy when Chael took this concept to a whole new level. When he essentailly proposed a loser leaves town match. If Anderson loses he leaves the division, if Chael loses he leaves the UFC.

It’s a tool often used in pro-wrestling story lines, but would be much more effective in MMA. People would argue it can’t be used in MMA because Dana wouldn’t cut the loser, but it’s not like the losers in pro-wrestling leave either, is it? And even if we secretly knew they wouldn’t be cut, as long as Dana left it ambiguous until after the fight it would be enough to get people amped. And enough to get the other half of fans butthurt over it being too much like pro-wrestling. Of course, this isn’t about pro-wrestling. It’s about good storytelling with high stakes. That being said, this particular example with Chael could only be used once in a blue moon.

Regardless, a huge amount of fans would love it. I would too.

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See the original on my lame blog here. It's got the first issue as well.