Well, summer is in full swing now, which means that we have officially entered the most boring part of the sports calendar. It's that lull period immediately after the NBA Finals ends and we are left with nothing but two and a half months of meaningless baseball games. Now I say meaningless because the season is six months long, with 162 games. Most, if not all playoff spots are decided in the final weeks of the season in September, meaning that it's unlikely you'll see division winners lead wire to wire in a season. It's just too long and taxing a time period to actually get invested in every single game along the way. So, we can all pick up our interest again when the division races are coming to an end in September and we can start to care again in October once playoffs begin.
But what do we do with the rest of the summer?? Normally we would have NFL offseason talk and approaching training camps to talk about, as well as the NFL Preseason in August. We probably would also start getting our fantasy football leagues organized. But, not so much this year. At last check, it appears we are still about a month away from a new CBA being signed at best, which will cause a truncated free agency and offseason period. Most likely, it will also cause some of the preseason games to go away in order to let the players adequately prepare for the regular season, and in order to start the season in time. So how do we fill the void?
Mixed Martial Arts is there for you my friends. MMA is the fastest growing sport in the world (that's actual truth, not just a line that UFC Prez Dana White likes to say all the time). It's emerging in countries around the world as the premier combat sport, overtaking long time traditional combat sports such as boxing and wrestling. And there is no bigger stage than the fights put on by the Zuffa Corporation. They own the UFC and Strikeforce, the two biggest MMA promotions in the world. And the next two months are jammed with big, compelling fights that are either for world championships or will have impact on who will be future contenders for these titles. Over the next two months, these two organizations will be putting on 6 full fight cards, which is more than enough to fit the bill and get us to (hopefully) the NFL preseason.
But I hope that if you do end up ordering any of these fights, or heading your local bar to check them out that you give it a chance. This isn't the oldtime UFC with truckers wearing jean shorts brawling behind cheap chain link fences. These are serious athletes that combine multiple disciplines (boxing, kickboxing, muy thai, wrestling, Brazilian Jui Jitsu) to compete in a REAL FIGHT. I say real fight, because in MMA the fight can go anywhere. It's not just an opponents hands you have to worry about, or his kicks, or his submissions and grappling prowess, or being slammed to the ground by his wrestling, it's all of the above. You have to be a complete fighter to be a Mixed Martial Artist, and that's what you see when you watch these fights. You see well rounded skill, dedication, athleticism and power. Fighting is something every human being can relate to. Not everyone can throw a football like Peyton Manning, or throw it down like Dwight Howard, or swing a bat like Ryan Howard, but we all can throw a punch, a kick, or take somebody to the ground (or we want to).
That's what you get with MMA.
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