Article: Advertisers dream: Ultimate Fighting becomes huge hit with key demo

[Dewey's Diva]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/jon_wertheim/04/25/scorecard.daily/

Advertisers dream
Ultimate Fighting becomes huge hit with key demo
Posted: Tuesday April 25, 2006 1:25PM; Updated: Wednesday April 26, 2006 1:55PM


The male 18-34 demographic is the Yeti of sports, an elusive, amorphous beast that marketers will go to great lengths to glimpse and then capture. There was an unlikely sighting April 15 in Anaheim as a capacity crowd of 17,000 fans -- most sufficiently old to vote, but insufficiently old to run for president -- packed the Arrowhead Pond for ... an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. The card, titled UFC 59: Reality Check, had the feel of a marriage (shotgun, to be sure) between a Vegas heavyweight fight and a Lollapalooza tour stop. Suffice it to say, the tattooed outnumbered the untattooed by a significant margin. "Maybe older people haven't even heard of UFC," says 27-year-old Andrei "the Pit Bull" Arlovski, a past heavyweight champ who was upset in Anaheim, felled by a series of punches from his 6-foot-8 opponent, Tim "the Maine-iac" Sylvia. "But people my age recognize me all the time."

The tableau in Anaheim was just the latest indication that however repugnant some may find it, UFC has entered the arena as a formidable sports property. The week before the fight, Spike TV's companion reality show, The Ultimate Fighter 3, drew record ratings for the network and, among the coveted 18-34 male demo, outdelivered the TNT NBA doubleheader and the USA Masters golf coverage that aired the same night. A Feb. 4 UFC card in Las Vegas sold out the MGM Grand and featured a celebrity row that included Charles Barkley, Cindy Crawford and, inevitably, Paris Hilton. That week, "UFC results" was the second most popular topic entered in the Yahoo! Search engine. The first was Super Bowl XL. Days after he defeated Arlovski, Sylvia threw out the first pitch at a Dodgers-Giants game. "It's a combination of the sport itself and personalities," says Dana White, UFC's 36-year-old president. "Young people see it on TV and they dig it. Boxing is your dad's sport. This is something way more exciting."

UFC is perhaps singularly well-suited to Generation Y, combining the brutality of video games with a rapid-fire pacing familiar to serial channel surfers. Unlike conventional boxing matches that routinely "go the distance," only to be determined by ringside judges, UFC fights tend to be swift and decisive, sometimes spanning no more than 30 seconds. The sport makes judicious use of technology, as even the most marginal fighters have their own elaborate Web sites and Myspace.com pages. (Check out http://www.arlovski.tv/, for instance, which has drawn more than two million hits already this month.) And the obligatory reality series -- does any emerging sport not have one? -- is particularly well done.

[DeltaSigChi4]

Anyone know what birth years encompass Gen Y?? It was all explained to me once but I have sense forgotten ...

E

[Zeffryn]

I wonder why so many reporters are likening the UFC with video games all of a sudden?

Also, I would like to see Sylvia pitch a baseball. hahahahaa.

[GNP]

Overall it was a decent article and on a pretty mainstream site. But, I think that the past controversy will always prevent MMA from being on the same level as boxing.

[Alfuh]

You forgot about the 2nd page of the article :p

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/jon_wertheim/04/25/scorecard.daily/1.html

What's more, the fighters come equipped with distinct personalities and improbably rich backstories. The light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell was an accounting major at California Polytechnic State University who looks like a Hell's Angels leader. (In fact, the champions in four of the five weight classes hold college degrees.) For his part, Arlovski was a former cop in Belarus who moved to Chicago to pursue a boxing and modeling career.

UFC is not, by most conventional definitions, good, clean, wholesome fun. For the uninitiated, combatants enter a caged octagon and, wearing only minimalist attire and thinly padded gloves, attempt to beat their opponents into submission by virtually any means necessary. (Some of the few UFC rules include prohibitions on biting, hair-pulling and fingering open lacerations.) While the fighters are undeniably top-tier athletes trained in mixed martial arts, the fights often degenerate into glorified bar brawls, replete with flailing haymakers, choke holds and elbows to the face. As part of his proposed boxing legislation, Sen. John McCain memorably likened UFC to a "human cockfight."

Whether it's motivated by genuine concern for fighter safety or a knowledge that one fatality could destroy the entire enterprise, give UFC some credit for reining in some of the excesses and keeping the sport on the preferable side of that fine line between "exceptionally violent" and "indefensibly barbaric." Unlike the poorly regulated Toughman Contests that have resulted in more than a dozen deaths, under White, UFC had mandated extensive pre-testing and added timed rounds. Last month's hiring of Marc Ratner, the longtime executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission, as an executive was a major step toward credibility.

The image reupholstery seems to be working. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, no stranger to mixed martial arts, recently signed legislation making California the latest state to permit ultimate fighting and making the Anaheim card possible. (Though UFC is still banned in more than 20 states, White claims, "We're [sanctioned] everywhere we want to be.") Mainstream businesses aren't far behind, cautiously putting a foot in the ring. If UFC was once the province of fringe energy drinks and weight-gain supplements, the sponsors in Anaheim included beer companies, luxury tire manufacturers and cell-phone service providers.

While those demographically desirable UFC fans are smelling blood, Corporate America is smelling something altogether different.

[Alfuh]

The second page of the article touched on more of the typical stuff you would expect. Calling it glorified brawling, bringing up McCain, etc. Overall, its recognition on a major web page that doesn't have many negative aspects to it.