If you had bet on MMA becoming legal in the province of Ontario before New York state, most ‘in the know’ would probably have told you to kiss your money goodbye. For much of the last year or 2, government indifference and an unyielding athletic commission made it unlikely that MMA was going to start being regulated soon in Ontario. In contrast, MMA was put on the agenda by NY Governor David Patterson and regulation looked to be a near reality.
What a difference a year (or a few months!) makes. The Ontario government announced this summer that it will be moving to get a regulatory regime in place for MMA events to take place. There was talk of having UFC 124 (main evented by Georges St. Pierre vs Josh Koscheck) in Toronto. Meanwhile, the bill in NY’s state legislature has stalled. A faction on the NY State Assembly decided to pull MMA out of a budget bill- this makes it highly unlikely that MMA will get legalised in NY this year. The political climate has become more uncertain and it’s anyone’s guess as to when MMA is going to be a priority issue again in NY.
The UFC now faces a dilemma: it spent a great deal of time and money lobbying the Ontario government, and after what seems like an eternity, the strategy seems to have worked. In NY, huge amounts of time and money have also been sent, but elected officials, bureaucrats, and lobbyists have been known to drag things out to keep the money pipeline flowing. There are plenty of venues in nearby New Jersey that could accommodate major MMA events. While the symbolism of holding an event in Madison Square Garden is something that signifies ‘hitting the big time,’ the question is how much money and time is worth spending to get this done. If events are running successfully in NJ, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, maybe NY will eventually recognise the economics of the issue.
Of course, politics is one of the most fickle of mistresses, and something completely unexpected could happen in NY.
Ignoring the economics for a moment, there continue to be voices arguing about safety and other social issues- most famously, John McCain was one of the greatest detractors (he now believes that the current form of MMA is a legitimate sport that should be regulated). These issues can be resolved by looking at scientific evidence. Rule changes and regulation by athletic commissions have made the sport safer. The sport has been studied by top researchers at top universities and it holds a very strong safety record, especially when compared to striking based combat sports- the extent of repeated blows to the head in boxing or kickboxing is much higher than in MMA. MMA does pose physical risks to its participants, but most sports, even if they are not combat sports, feature some risk for injury. Numerous young people die playing football and cheerleading every year in North America (on a personal note, when I was in high school a classmate once asked a teacher why our school didn’t have a football team. The teacher’s response was that some time ago, 2 students had died of injuries suffered during a game).
Some argue that violence in sports like football and hockey is incidental to the sport while the focal point of MMA is inflicting violence on the other participant. This raises the question of whether we should ban boxing, or any martial art where there are people training for full contact competitions such as karate and jiujitsu. Perhaps we should remove boxing, judo, tae kwon do, and wrestling from the Olympics. If yes, then I suppose we should ban MMA as well. MMA is not an unsanctioned brawl (hockey fights are much closer to that, and in typical hypocritical fashion, everyone loves it when there is a fight in a hockey game), and if international bodies exist to govern all other martial arts competition, what is the problem when the arts are combined into one sport? Keeping a prohibition-style regulatory regime in place in 2 of the continent’s major jurisdictions will only drive the sport into the underground.
Good job.
Hope things are going well.
thanks for the post