Tag: Anderson Silva

For all intents and purposes, mixed martial arts didn’t truly pivot into the 2010s until forced by an unfortunate series of events in late 2013. 

Sure, the sport’s biggest promotion, the UFC, made a game-changing move to network television in late 2011, which played a major role in marking MMA as something closer to a mainstream sports property than the Wild West enterprise it had so long been.

Through the first several years of the decade, things continued much as they had over the second half of the aughts. The FOX deal was basically the old Spike deal scaled up. Reliable drawing cards anchored the company’s flagship pay-per-view events. Top competitor promotions became takeover targets, with Strikeforce added to the mix in 2011. 

So long as the two top draws, [autotag]Georges St-Pierre[/autotag] and [autotag]Anderson Silva[/autotag], kept producing, a UFC model created in a previous era could weather any storm.

Then came a span of six weeks that caused the UFC, out of necessity, to get dragged kicking and screaming into the new decade, a few years late, which led to the company itself — if not the fighters who created the value — generating more money than anyone could have fathomed.

A burnt-out St-Pierre hinted at walking away after barely escaping with his UFC welterweight title following a split decision over Johny Hendricks at UFC 167 in November 2013. A bizarre, tense post-fight news conference didn’t help matters. Four weeks later, GSP relinquished the belt he held since 2008 and walked away from competition.

Then at UFC 168 on Dec. 28, Silva, who had lost his middleweight belt after nearly seven years to Chris Weidman at UFC 162, suffered what at the time appeared to be a career-ending compound fracture of his left leg throwing a kick in the rematch. 

With whiplash speed, the UFC lost its top two draws and faced a major crisis. The only fighter who appeared remotely close to potentially filling their shoes was the undeniably gifted light heavyweight champ, Jon Jones, but there were already signs of fan backlash as his string of misdeeds began playing out. 

Chickens were coming home to roost. There were basically no more promotions of note left to purchase, which had ensured a fresh supply of seasoned talent. A jilted Viacom, Spike’s parent company, bought Bellator and began counter-programming UFC events. Performance-enhancing drug use in the sport was spiraling out of control. Questions about the UFC’s business tactics eventually led to an antitrust lawsuit, which remains ongoing. All of this happened as FOX looked to ramp up the fight schedule to near-weekly events.

The MMA fan base had long been trained to expect the sky to fall, based on the sport nearly being blackballed out of existence in the late 1990s. The loss of Silva and GSP led to the notion maybe the MMA boom was done once and for all.

Instead, what emerged from this turbulent period brought the sport to unimaginable heights, with crossover stars capturing the mainstream’s fascination and the sale of the UFC for a mind-boggling sum of money. 

As it turned out, several other developments in that pivotal year of 2013 sowed the seeds for spectacular growth. The history-making UFC 157 that February in Anaheim was headlined by the first-ever women’s UFC fight, as [autotag]Ronda Rousey[/autotag], previously the Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champ, defended her UFC belt against Liz Carmouche. On the fateful UFC 168, she defended her crown against rival Miesha Tate to a rock star reaction from the Las Vegas crowd; it was clear something was afoot. 

Meanwhile, in April, a brash young Irishman named [autotag]Conor McGregor[/autotag] made short work of Marcus Brimage in his UFC debut in Stockholm. He immediately rubbed his fellow fighters the wrong way as he made big, bold statements on social media and in interviews. Those resentments were further fueled when the UFC gave him superstar treatment for his next fight in Boston, even though his matchup with Max Holloway was on the evening’s undercard. It didn’t take long to become clear that whether you loved “The Notorious” or hated him, you were going to tune in for his fights.

Late 2013 also saw undefeated heavyweight Daniel Cormier announce he was was going down to light heavyweight so as to avoid fighting good friend and then-heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez, putting him on a collision course with Jones. 

Rousey was the first to break big. Women’s fighting was such an overwhelming success that it soon became difficult to imagine there was ever a time without it. This was decade in which women’s athletics overall finally started receiving the respect it deserved, as the U.S. women’s soccer team’s World Cup success electrified the country. Rousey personified the rise of women’s sports like few others, a confident badass both in and out of the cage, the right combination for crossover stardom. With each successive event, Rousey’s star grew, and by 2015, as she finished one foe after another, usually with her trademark armbar, a career as a Hollywood leading lady seemed to beckon. 

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Then came the fall. Rousey wasn’t the first to fall victim to her own hype and won’t be the last, but hers was one of the most memorable. While Rouseymania peaked in 2015, the rest of the pack was catching up. A UFC record crowd of 56,214 showed up in Melbourne for Rousey’s UFC 193 title defense against Holly Holm in November. There, Rousey, who had convinced herself she could box with a former three-weight-class boxing champ, took a vicious beating before being knocked out by a Holm head kick.

Rousey then became a case study in how not to handle a major loss, disappearing for a year before losing even worse to Amanda Nunes a year later and never fighting again.

Fortunately for the UFC, while Rousey faltered, McGregor blew up into something even bigger. McGregor’s knack for calling his shots, delivering, and frustrating his haters in the process caused his popularity to swell, with a lethal left hand the answer to any and all criticism. A long-teased feud with Jose Aldo finally resolved in the monster UFC 194 just one month after Rousey’s loss to Holm, with McGregor knocking the longtime featherweight champion cold in just 13 seconds. 

Meanwhile, the UFC’s defining rivalry of the decade raged. Jones and Cormier’s fates were forever intertwined on Aug. 4, 2014, when they engaged in a press conference brawl in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas. Jones got what appeared to be the last word when he won their UFC 182 fight in January 2015 via unanimous decision.

But their feud is also interwoven with the UFC’s attempts to rein banned substance use, which by 2015 mushroomed into a full-blown PR crisis. Some older fighters found a shortcut by getting doctors to approve testosterone replacement therapy, a practice banned in 2014. A controversy over Jones’ Nevada Athletic Commission test leading up to UFC 182 was followed one month later by both Anderson Silva and Nick Diaz failing tests (the latter for marijuana metabolites) following their UFC 183 main event in Vegas. 

The UFC responded with sweeping changes, bringing the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency aboard to administer strict, year-round testing. Physiques changed immediately under threat of two-year bans for first offenses. There were hiccups along thew way. Fighters grumbling about the program’s severity eventually led to the realization the program was in fact behind the times on the topic of tainted supplements, leading to an amended, fairer process just this year, but not before several fighters lost years of their career after getting caught in a too-wide net.  

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Jones got tangled again at the worst possible time: After sitting out due to legal issues, he had returned and was going to headline the landmark UFC 200 on July 9, 2016 against Cormier, who won the light heavyweight title in his absence. Jones popped just days shy of the event, leading to Silva, who had made a remarkable comeback, stepping in and dropping a unanimous decision to Cormier. 

UFC 200 represented a clicking-on-all-cylinders high point for the company. But an even bigger bombshell than the Jones test failure was about to drop. The next day came the announcement the UFC was being sold to titanic Hollywood agency WME (now known as Endeavor). The price tag was an astonishing $4 billion for a company Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III purchased for $2 million in 2000. 

Change was coming, but in the short-term, the McGregor gravy train rolled on. McGregor’s first UFC loss, to late replacement Nate Diaz at UFC 196, led to a massive rematch at UFC 202 in August, which the Irishman won via majority decision, bringing in a then-record 1.65 million pay-per-view buys. McGregor capped his scintillating run by knocking off lightweight titleholder Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 in November 2016, the main event of the first UFC card ever at New York’s Madison Square Garden, to become the first-ever simultaneous two-division champion.

McGregor’s continued box office success masked the fact that the ownership transition was far from smooth. As often happens when new owners take over a company, the old guard’s institutional knowledge was wiped out, including the retirement of longtime matchmaker Joe Silva, who those in the know understood was the glue holding the place together.

Soon thereafter, mistakes borne of inexperience manifested. Fighters like Sage Northcutt and Paige VanZant received blatant favoritism their inexperience didn’t merit based on their perceived marketability. Fighters going after two belts went from novelty to mundane all too fast. Interim titles were handed out like Halloween candy. One too many former champions got immediate rematches, only to lose again and go into career limbo.  

Then there was the ultimate hotshot move, an unquestionable blockbuster that defined the generation and made everyone involved a lot of money. Somehow, the absurd thought of McGregor fighting boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather on the latter’s turf was willed into existence, a testament, for better or worse, on what’s possible in the age of social media.

The August 2017 fight in Las Vegas, which Mayweather won via 10th-round TKO, drew a $55 million gate at T-Mobile Arena and drew 4.3 million domestic pay-per-view buys at $99.95 a pop, making it the second-biggest PPV event of all time behind Mayweather’s fight with Manny Pacquiao.

With his cut of that type of money, McGregor, well, behaved like someone his age who felt untouchable. A string of incidents outside the cage led to the biggest one, an attack at UFC 223 media day in New York on a fighter shuttle bus containing rival Khabib Nurmagomedov, the superb competitor from Dagestan who became lightweight champion in McGregor’s absence. 

In another nod to the reality of our times, McGregor got off with the slap on the wrist our legal system gives the rich and powerful, and the UFC capitalized on an actual crime to push the eventual Nurmagomedov-McGregor fight at UFC 229 in October 2018. Nurmagomedov won via fourth-round submission in the new biggest fight in UFC history, then blew it up to worldwide headline status by sparking a near-riot at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The lesson as always in the new Guilded Age: Morality takes a backseat to money, with a new UFC record 2.4 million buying the pay-per-view.

This all went down as the UFC’s FOX deal was coming to a close, and the UFC was once again in the right place at the right time. Streaming content was television’s next frontier, as people got rid of cable TV at an alarming rate. ESPN, looking to establish the ESPN+ service, came knocking and offered it $300 million per year to jump. Just a few months into the new deal, ESPN dropped another giant sum on the UFC to become the exclusive PPV provider, meaning the UFC will receive about the same amount of money it used to for a medium-sized PPV event regardless how the show performs. 

Bellator, meanwhile, carved out its own niche as a distant-but-stable No. 2 promotion. President Scott Coker, the founder of Strikeforce, first used past-their-prime names who had life left to draw big television ratings, while building out a tremendous crop of young talent who are just now starting to come into their own. Bellator ended up on rival streaming site DAZN, ensuring a steady cash flow.

And that’s where we sit on the last day of the 2010s. The sport’s next potential existential questions: By walling so much of the product off onto streaming, is the next generation of stars being prevented from going mainstream? Or is the combination of growing streaming numbers plus social media presence enough to make old formulas moot? 

No one can claim to know the answers. But consider the reaction you would have gotten if, on the night Silva broke his leg, you told people that McGregor and Rousey would blow up huge, the UFC would sell for $4 billion, McGregor would box Mayweather, and ESPN would pay up big so that people would watch fights on their computers and phones. 

And know that one way or another, this wild and unpredictable sport will find its path forward like it always does.

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