Issue 083

December 2011

Two young boys grappling in a cage. Adults standing around, drinking and cheering. We all remember it some weeks ago. There was moral outrage on news channels around the world when the video hit YouTube of two junior high school aged kids, grappling in a cage, complete with ring card girls presenting them with trophies. 

It was filmed in a nightclub, in Great Britain. When television programs got hold of it, like all media stories which have obvious attention-grabbing headlines, it gathered momentum as ‘two boys cagefighting in a night club’ before there was the opportunity to explain any of the vagaries. 

I was in Denver, Colorado, at the time and was contacted by producers at Sky Sports News and Sunrise, a couple of morning television programs in the UK, followed thereafter by a clutch of radio show producers wanting to discuss the issue.

Both Sky News – the equivalent of CNN or Fox in the US – and BBC News, went for the boys fighting story as a lead in their news bulletins. The great issue in that moment was that major news channels did not have a correspondent, or writer, who regularly covers the sport. (By way of example, the BBC Sport website, for some inexplicable reason, refuses to cover the sport in the UK in spite of growing numbers of fans and exponents, and I suspect, a good degree of ‘personal’ bias based around those running it. In short, though, ignorance over what they are actually being asked to consider is likely to be close to the truth.)  

Anyway, the reports spread like bushfires, and later that day, a Canadian television network was in touch. Turning on the television in the US hours later, the story had reached across the pond. Sadly, though, the message getting out was that this was ‘cagefighting’ also known as mixed martial arts. 

There are methods within news journalism which are tried and tested. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, or ‘research, simplify and exaggerate’. They work. In this context: boys + cage + nightclub = children cagefighting. 

It spawned 10,000 opinions and debates. I want to be clear about this. There was huge irresponsibility on the part of those who organized boys grappling in a jiu-jitsu bout in a cage in a nightclub. But look at the media equation again: boys + mat + school hall = no exaggerated news story. 

What was wrong about this event, which was an exhibition bout between two boys before a small-hall MMA event, was hiring a fighting arena, and having ring card girls while children grapple. All three things, separated, have their place. That’s where the moral compass was wrong in this event. I condemn the organizer for that. Wrong place, wrong time. 

I know of another case where a boy in his mid-teens, who is committed to training in Muay Thai – and indeed is very talented at it – found himself improving inordinately by training at one of the prominent MMA gyms in the UK. However, even though ‘the boy,’ as he is classified, loves training in an MMA ‘cage’, his grandmother took exception to him taking part and took her views to a court.

The result was an injunction served against the boy being taught in the MMA facility. The case was also referred on to the Minister For Children in the UK government, as it fell under that ministry’s jurisdiction. Why? Because there is still no national governing body for the sport of MMA on British soil. It is a situation faced in many other MMA hotbeds like Australia, Japan and across Europe, unlike the United States which has government commissions overseeing MMA in each state.

In the UK, sports have governing bodies which are recognized under the umbrella of Sport England, a government quango. It begs the question of how effectively and how quickly could a UK MMA governing body be set up. It would have meant, in theory, that the promoter who staged the event in the nightclub with boys in an exhibition jiu-jitsu match was answerable to the governing body. As such, he would have had a license, and would have either been fined, punished or had his license removed.

Coaches licensed to oversee children doing the sport, guidelines on contact, age limits, weight limits and so on could all be codified under one body. It will take a lot of liaison; yet it needs to be done with alacrity. I remember thinking it was ironic at the time that I was in Denver, Colorado, covering the world’s leading MMA organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, where it all began.

The way it was marketed then, and perceived, led to the UFC being driven underground. Of course, 10 years after Zuffa LLC bought it, and nurtured it, the ‘human cock-fighting’ used by its abolitionists has all but died out. But as the case in the UK showed recently, there is still a work ahead. 

 The UFC signing a seven-year $700 million deal with the Fox television network in the United States will take the sport onto the mainstream sporting landscape. UFC 

president Dana White told me recently: “The Fox deal is a great opportunity, but me and my team have a huge amount of work ahead of us to educate the world. And that is what we are going to do.”

Gareth A Davies is the MMA and Boxing Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, London