UFC's main-event problem: Injuries derailing blockbuster showdowns
After yet another UFC pay-per-view has been sent into a tailspin with a late injury. The organization and president Dana White are looking into making changes to how fighters train before fights.
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3 min read
It’s as simple as a Google search.
Type in a phrase like “UFC injured main events,” click enter and presto … you’ll quickly see evidence of how difficult it’s becoming to rely on the best laid octagonal plans.
More than two dozen matches on the organization’s pay-per-view and top-tier TV cards were physically compromised in one way or another in 2015, and the painful beat has already gone on in the new year with last week’s news that Rafael dos Anjos would not meet Conor McGregor on March 5.
It’s a broken foot that’ll keep the Brazilian from risking his lightweight belt in the first dual-champion match since 2009, and if not for the PPV momentum of a mouthy supernova who’s added Sports Illustrated to a burgeoning stash of media clips, the run of bad luck might have sent Dana White back to his old gig as a hotel valet.
The March 5 show was initially scheduled to pit Cain Velasquez against Fabricio Werdum in a UFC 197 heavyweight rematch in Brazil, but the former’s bad back and the latter’s bad foot ultimately led to the whole thing being scrapped in favor of a move to Las Vegas and a rebranding as UFC 196.
Fortunately for White, he still has McGregor, who’s never met a microphone he didn’t titillate.
And fortunately for McGregor, he has a willing fill-in foil in Nate Diaz -- who not only leaped at the chance to enter a cage with the Irishman on 11 days' notice but has more than held his own verbally while making sure the promotional fires remain stoked enough to draw a homestretch PPV crowd.
McGregor’s 13-second erasure of Jose Aldo in December was the 10th UFC show to do seven figures, and the reality these days is that he’d likely draw 500,000 people for a session on the heavy bag.
Opposite a similarly live wire like Diaz, though, there might be enough novelty to aim much higher.
“They asked me to fight and I said yes, from the beginning,” Diaz said at the joint press conference last week. “So whatever problems they had, I don't know. But I came ready to fight. Any weight class, it didn't matter. There was no hesitation on my part. I was ready to rock the whole time. I said it a few months ago.”
The weight limit of 170 pounds -- 15 past the number at which McGregor was to meet dos Anjos -- was agreed upon to ensure Diaz’s substitute comfort. And Randy Gordon, who hosts a twice-weekly “At the Fights” show on SiriusXM and was top man at the New York State Athletic Commission from 1988 to 1995, doesn’t think the spate of main-event shifting will leave much of a mark with the paying public.
“Somehow, I doubt it,” he said. “UFC fans are dedicated and resilient.”
Nevertheless, the aim going forward is to make sure the fighters stay that way, too.
Officials within the UFC have begun soliciting opinions from outsiders while trying to evolve past old-school thinking that gym wars are the only way to prepare for a fight. Instead, suggesting to both combatants and handlers that preparing functional muscles and saving some violence for fight night is the better way to ensure success -- and maintain health -- during a new-school training camp.
“We’ve got to start training these guys differently in the gym,” White said in 2015, via MMAFighting.com. “These guys have to start having a lot less contact when it comes to sparring. You have to have some sparring in there, but these guys are doing way too much damage to their fighters inside the gym.”
It’s a sea change that targets the bottom line, too.
After all, not only do the fighters suffer financially when they’re unable to follow through with big-money events, but the organization is forced into a behind-the-scenes scramble to find foes willing to replace injured ones, to recreate video assets that’ll help sell a re-invented fight and to redo graphics from fight posters down to social media logos.
That costs money and man-hours. Neither of which the boss is going to fritter needlessly.
“You always think that there’s going to be that day when, if we get to this level, then we can kind of cruise a little bit and kick back, (but) there’s no cruise,” White said. “There’s no kickback.”
