Mixed Martial Arts Amateur Events

This weekend I attended a amateur promotion in Las Vegas called Tuff 'n Uff and before I get into a rant about amateur MMA let me first talk about the event. It was amazing for a small promotion, they had good music, the ring was set up well, the fights were for the most part interesting and exciting, and they cycled through the fights as fast as possible. In all they went through 16-17 fights in the space of about 3 and a half hours. 6 of those fights were women's fights and they were all exciting good fights. I was impressed with the way things were run, the atmosphere and the way things ran as smoothly as possible. I was also impressed at how knowledgeable the standing room only crowd was in terms of the standup and cheering for takedowns. As is fairly typical of a US MMA crowd they weren't very patient or knowledgeable about the ground game but that's a staple of US crowds. All in all I was very pleased to be there and I can't wait to sponsor one of these events later!

The problem I have, and maybe it's just me, is that I don't really consider MMA a amateur sport. Wrestling, boxing, ju-jitsu, and all the other martial arts that feed into MMA have great amateur events and I like them all for what they are. But MMA is a fairly brutal amalgamation of all these amateur sports and from what I saw it doesn't incorporate headgear or anything to lessen the impact of strikes. I think with some changes it could be an amateur sport but it is going to need to set some stricter guidelines about what will qualify these fights as amateur.

The first step toward amateurization is that the refs have to be better, one of the refs was just awful, and he made mistake after mistake including raising the losers hand on more then one occasion. Second, they need to call knockouts much much faster. It's amateur, you want to protect the athletes as much as possible and prevent any possible injury or concussion. There was one fight where a girl took about 10 straight punches to the face and there was no call. She later got TKO'd but it was a round later and I just don't think an amateur should be taking too many consecutive strikes to the face. Lastly I'd really like to know what separates amateur status from professional. It seemed like the majority of the folks fighting had sponsors and logos all over their body and gear.

All in all I can't wait for the next event. I want to sponsor one. And I need to get over my hangups when it comes to calling something amateur or not.