Showdown Joe: Public Perception Of MMA Is A Dirty One

It’s been nearly 23 years since Mixed Martial Arts made it’s debut on North American soil, and yet still, it’s battle for mainstream appeal continues to take a five round beating.

The sport was once promoted as “no-holds-barred” and “anything goes”. Two men enter the  cage but only one man can leave. It was labeled human-cockfighting, too dangerous, needed rules, etc.

All these past misconceptions were rectified by adding rules, weight-classes and many a P.R. campaign to clean up the sports image with the masses. But alas, for every step forward MMA takes, it’s public perception is met with a brutal combination even Anderson Silva in his prime could not unleash.

UFC 200 was set to take MMA to another level. It was to be headlined by a light-heavyweight unification bout featuring (arguably) the sport's pound-for-pound king, Jon Jones.

It was also set to feature the return of one the sport’s biggest draws: Brock Lesnar.

Instead, we got half of what we all anticipated but more than we can handle with pre and post event news.

Jones didn’t even make it to the main event, after his USADA tests came back positive for hydroxy-clomiphene and letrozole. The former is generally used by men and the end of a steroid cycle, to begin boosting up the body’s natural production of testosterone. The ladder, rumoured to be used to combat gynecomastia, something steroid users could suffer from.

After the event, despite his tests being conducted on June 28th, Lesnar was informed he failed a pre-fight drug test as well. But the results came back after UFC 200, raising the conspiracy level meters to incredible heights.

I heard and read them all. I even thought of a few myself, but one could just imagine how UFC 200 would have looked like with Lesnar removed off the card as well. I have no idea how many people did not buy the event because Jon Jones was removed, but I can only imagine how massive that drop would have been if Lesnar was also removed off that card.

Leading up to the event, I had not encountered a buzz about a UFC pay per view like I did for UFC 200, in quite some time. The last time, was likely McGregor vs. Aldo. Before that, St-Pierre vs. Hendricks.

And speaking of GSP, one of the reasons he left the sport of MMA was because he was tired of the cheating in MMA. He tried to prove he and Hendricks were clean, by using V.A.D.A., but the story was spun around by some, to say Georges was sponsored by the organization and his ideals were not sincere.

Now that USADA is manning the drug testing ship, we are seeing what guys like Georges and everyone involved with the clean-up MMA crusade knew all along … it’s going to be a rough ride and would likely get worse, before it got better.

And so be it …

As many of my peers in the MMA media have been stating for nearly a decade, as well as many of the fighters and fans alike, a clean sport is a better sport. If that means it rids itself of the cheats, big-names or not, oh well … good-bye.

The sport may never have a perfect image but the one thing it has constantly dealt with over the past 5-7 years from the mainstream media and critics, is that it’s fighters are nothing but a bunch of juiced up meatheads. This is something I had to defend during my stint on a mainstream sports station in Canada for seven years. Day in and day out, tv and radio hosts always talking trash about the sport I talked about it for a living.

Today – they walk around saying “I told you so”. Their claims are validated by one of the sport’s top pound for pound fighters and one it’s biggest draws, both in violation of USADA drug tests.

Maybe these naysayers are right. Maybe they are not. But nearly everywhere I turn and I mean just about anywhere I go to; gas stations, grocery stores, banks, restaurants, etc, one topic that always comes up is that MMA has a drug problem.

I cannot defend it anymore. I now have to nod my head. For all the good guys and gals in the sport, who train hard and are clean, it is ruined by the big names now getting caught for one thing or another.

I can show them the numbers: there are far more fighters who pass their USADA tests than there are those who fail them, but it falls upon deaf ears and is viewed with rose-coloured glasses.

It’s a challenging chapter we are in right now, and hopefully, these big name failures will make some think twice about cheating the system. That’s one of the goals with USADA or any and all drug testing measures.

And if you think we’ve reached the peak of drug testing madness, believe me, we haven’t.

Cross your fingers no one ever dies in the octagon. Knock on wood that it doesn’t happen ever. Touch gold that every fighter comes out ok.

Now just imagine if a death actually does happen in the octagon, and it comes at the hands of a fighter who later tests positive for a performance enhancing drug(s).

Think about that for a second.

How does the sport recover from that one?

By Showdown Joe Ferraro