Opinion: Nerdy by Nature
In the days since Ronda Rousey effortlessly face-planted Bethe Correia in Rio de Janeiro, especially with Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino announcing her latest intentions to move to 135 pounds and challenge the bantamweight queen, talk of the ballyhooed Rousey-Cyborg fight is growing louder, the drumbeat of fan demand thumping ever more clearly.
This is MMA, of course, so that “talk” hasn't been especially pragmatic or even courteous. Instead, we have polar varieties of “Ronda is scared” and “Cyborg needs to stop juicing” narratives that can't even be blamed on overzealous MMA fans on Twitter in the usual fashion, given that Rousey and Justino are the ones slinging that mud at each other publicly. These attempts to demystify why the fight hasn't happened yet are pure window dressing. In reality, Rousey will fight Cyborg if and when the UFC says and likely at whatever weight the company prescribes. How arduous it is to achieve that goal will be determined by Justino's pilot cut to 135 pounds for Invicta FC later this year.
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If Rousey and Justino fight one another, it's because the UFC is run by fight nerds. There, I said it.
In this case, I mean “nerd” as a backhanded compliment, the sorts
of fans who aren't just here for any old cage fight but who are
driven to see the best fight the best in epic clashes with history
hanging in the balance. In light of recent business decisions and
well-deserved PR nightmares, I can't say Dana White, Lorenzo
Fertitta and the rest of the Zuffa family are fans just like you
and me, but since acquiring the UFC nearly 15 years ago, this
company has been steeped in pure MMA dorkery.
Consider the ongoing aftershocks of Rousey's performance at UFC 190, a card which optimistic forecasters pegged for 500,000 to 600,000 pay-per-view buys, yet may be in the neighborhood of one million instead. This came with Rousey headlining a lackluster, cynical lineup of fights, against one of the least credible challengers in UFC history. Her swelling celebrity and Mike Tyson-esque nature led American Public Media's “Marketplace” to do a radio story on her, with trained economists explaining how the abstract quality of “excitement” surrounding Rousey is such that it induces consumers to behave in a way that's economically insane, paying large amounts of money for an event they can see in its entirety on social media within minutes, if not seconds. The Correia squash has seemingly installed her as a downright cultural institution for the moment. To be blunt, she doesn't need Cris Cyborg.
“But Jordan,” you scream, “what about her legacy?” This is precisely the kind of fight-nerd stuff I'm talking about. Like any fight fan, I desperately want to see the fight, to comprehend its mechanics, to see its victor revealed, to pontificate on its historical significance. It insults its impact to call it “the biggest women's MMA fight ever” when it would be more apt to simply call it “one of the biggest MMA fights ever.” However, if the UFC and Rousey simply pretended Cyborg didn't exist, never mentioned her again and Rousey alternated between action movies and fighting Miesha Tate once a year for the next 10 years, Rousey would still sell an awful lot of pay-per-views, tickets and Carl's Jr.
Cyborg is Rousey's most crucial foil for her fighting legacy and for MMA history, but never forget that we live in an idiotic, gullible world, where if we had a free, democratic vote to elect Rousey's next opponent, the winner would be Floyd friggin' Mayweather.
A Rousey-Cyborg fight will make more money than any other fight available for the “Rowdy” one, but how much more? If Rousey settles into a groove doing 700,000 to a cool million PPV buys like she is Georges St. Pierre, are we to believe that Cyborg somehow goes for 1.25 million buys or beyond? And if a PPV did a number like that or exceeded it, it would likely be on the back of a vigorous, international Jose Aldo-Conor McGregor sort of promotional circus, which is a multimillion dollar investment. Rousey might make more to fight the Brazilian bruiser than any other woman, but it wouldn't be a payday grossly out of step with recent ones.
So, what's the point? Why suffer all these headaches? Why not just have Rousey do choreographed action movie scene smash-ups against outmatched opposition for $60 in HD then? Like I said, it is these damn nerds.
Think about it. Zuffa takes over the UFC and it's time to crown a lightweight champion. Who do they get to fight Jens Pulver? Dennis Hallman, who has already fought for the UFC, has a rock solid record and will eventually get a shot at UFC 33? Din Thomas, who tapped Pulver just a few months prior? Nope, have get Caol Uno. He is the Shooto world champ. Shooto is legit, man. We have got to get the Shooto guy.
Carlos Newton upsets Pat Miletich for the UFC welterweight title, so the UFC tries to lock up then-Shooto world champion Anderson Silva for his first title defense. The UFC has to settle for Matt Hughes, who would go on to become the second-best company employee ever, behind Chuck Liddell. When Hughes wins, does the UFC embrace its new champion wholesale and try to build him up a bit? Nope, it tries to sign Silva again, and when he balks, Zuffa gets post-car accident Hayato “Mach” Sakurai instead. Former Shooto champ, dude!
It's one thing to take cues from fans and media on matchmaking and talent acquisition when it has obvious financial upside; Zuffa bringing back Ken Shamrock and David “Tank” Abbott wasn't exactly rocket science after three years of fans chanting “We want Ken! We want Tank!” Although, Abbott's return was famously a secret White surprise, even to folks in the company. Still, consider the fact that the UFC signed Jake Shields as a major free agent foil for St. Pierre and that they headlined UFC 129 in front of over 55,000 people in Toronto. Even if Scott Coker had not done Shields dirty by releasing the then-Strikeforce middleweight champ and crippling his bargaining power, the UFC likely would have matched Strikeforce's offer. And for what? Shields gouging St. Pierre's eyes and helping to produce the most unwatchable fight of GSP's entire career, then authoring more heinously dull fights in the Octagon.
But Shields is a damn good fighter, one of the eight best welterweights ever in my books, and, funny this, a former Shooto world champion. You know the UFC just had to do it.
In late 2006 and early 2007, as Pride Fighting Championships was crumbling, the mass import of still-relevant talent made sense. It made sense to see White treating Wanderlei Silva like the Christmas present he always wanted but never got. Now it's 2015. Takanori Gomi still gets decent positioning on cards, and the UFC is negotiating with an unretired Fedor Emelianenko. Pride never die, even at Zuffa headquarters.
When “The Ultimate Fighter” first blew up and the UFC became a quantifiable success, I remember reading countless forum screeds about the promotion watering down its product with these “TUF fighters,” who were roundly perceived as illegitimate, manufactured wannabes and making money while doing so. This led to philosophically extreme conjecture, where fight-loving paranoiacs agonized over the UFC using its overwhelming market share to create a product no longer about the best fighters. Essentially, an anxious bunch wondered, “What is stopping the UFC from gifting Forrest Griffin the title, then having him fight Bill Mahood and Elvis Sinosic repeatedly when most people will be none the wiser?”
As wholesale promotional practice, of course, this would be categorically insane. However, if there was ever an instance in which such a tactic might work, Rousey is it. Her sudden status as a cultural icon is built on the very idea that she vanquishes all challengers with pathetic ease, that compared to her, these challengers are garbage and they literally do not matter. Women like Tate, Cat Zingano and Alexis Davis are fantastic, accomplished bantamweights, but for the masses, Rousey is the whole damn show when she fights and her foes are nothing more than prisms through which to study the champion a little closer. Again, the fact that “Ronda vs. Floyd?” has become an ongoing mainstream sports “discussion” is a testament to a lot of unfortunate things, chiefly how little thought most have given to Rousey's previous and potential challengers.
Yet, here we are, with Cris Cyborg on ESPN's “SportsCenter” for absolutely no reason other than Rousey wanted to call her a steroid cheat in public, with the UFC hoping and praying that this woman can make 135 pounds in the coming months so that she possibly could punch through the head of its biggest superstar. Actually, if Cyborg fails to make 135, it will be a supreme test of Zuffa's nerdy, passionate pedantry. It would be easy for the UFC and Rousey to take a firm stance on the champ staying at bantamweight, publicly pooh-pooh a 140-pound catchweight and never mention Cyborg's name again. If Zuffa ends up inking Rousey-Cyborg at 140 pounds after Justino fails to make 135, it's simply because it “has to happen.” Given the financial considerations mentioned earlier, the overwhelming effort to transform Cyborg into Rousey's rival is actually mind-boggling, albeit charming.
The UFC is about making money and there are more efficient ways to do it with Rousey than the dog and pony show to which we have been treated with her and Cyborg. If this fight happens, it is because the UFC as a company is pathologically obsessed with the concept and bent over backwards to make it happen. I know it's not about altruism and likely has more to do with White and Fertitta wanting to collect every notable mixed martial artist like human Pokemon. Still, in a moment when MMA's largest promotion is married to an antagonistic vision of dissent and disenfranchisement outside of the cage, a reminder that the UFC still remembers how it is supposed to work inside the cage can help the nausea pass.
Also, someone please check to make sure Ben Askren is listed on White and Fertitta's Pokedex.
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