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Mixed Martial Arts--- As an update to yesterday's story about the history of the UFC, more factually incorrect information has been put forth in media interviews.

In a Washington Times article, Zuffa president Dana White said that after Zuffa bought the UFC, "The first thing we knew we had to do was to get it sanctioned by all the major athletic commissions. We sat down with officials from Nevada and New Jersey in 2002, and we got that done." As pointed out many times before, and once again in the letter from the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, that is a lie.

Another lie directly from White in the same article he said that the previous owners of the UFC "refused to be sanctioned... we took the opposite approach and embraced sanctioning."

The author of the Washington Times article, Thom Loverro, also added that Zuffa "... created weight classes. It went to a rounds system [of] five-minute rounds, five rounds for championship fights... It trained referees to move in quickly and stop a bout when a fighter was defenseless. And it began drawing not barroom brawlers, but legitimate athletes, many of them, like Couture, former college wrestling champions."

Another gem from the author of the article: "[In MMA], there are no Don Kings, no promoters, no sanctioning bodies like the World Boxing Council and the various other entities that get a piece of everything... There is only Ultimate Fighting Championship, which controls all the fighters and dictates how much they get paid."

As I wrote in the editorial on Wednesday, "This particular set of deceptions and distortions, constantly repeated to mainstream media members who print them without knowing any better, is also completely unnecessary. Zuffa legitimately did a lot of great things for the sport in the aforementioned time period (and also has in the years since then), such as getting sanctioning in Nevada, unifying the rules between Nevada and the pre-existing New Jersey sanctioning, and getting back on cable PPV, so there's no need to lie about it. The truth is flattering enough. There's no valid reason for continuing to propagate these lies, and yet it keeps happening."

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), UFC News, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 1:08 PM

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