More Important: The Sport or “The Game”?

At a press conference yesterday that Nick Diaz no-showed, UFC President Dana White announced that Diaz would not be taking on welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre at UFC 137. Instead, we’ll be seeing Carlos Condit take on St. Pierre in Las Vegas.

Why? Did Diaz fail a drug test? Get in trouble with the law? No, it was none of those things. Diaz committed the most vile and disgusting of transgressions- he missed two press conferences.

See, you can do a lot of things. You can disrespect your opponents, wail on a guy who’s already unconscious or drive on the sidewalk and have pedestrians running in fear away from your SUV. What you can’t do is mess with the business side of the UFC.

“The game”, as Dana White calls it.

Are you still under the impression that White was “disgusted” with Nate Marquardt because his testosterone replacement therapy caused him to fail his medicals? No, it was more that Marquardt committed the unforgivable act of leaving White without a headliner for the UFC’s fourth show on Versus right before the fight.

Remember how pissed White was with Brock Lesnar’s actions after he beat Frank Mir at UFC 100? Do you think that was about Lesnar getting in Mir’s face after the fight or talking about having sex with his wife in the post-fight interview? No way! White was mad that Lesnar took a swipe at Bud Light, one of the UFC’s biggest sponsors.

Before you start reeling off those e-mails, allow me to say: I get it. You can’t run around talking crap about UFC sponsors. You can’t be pulling out of main events or failing medicals. You can’t be skipping out on press conferences. The UFC is a business, after all.

You won’t get an argument from me against that stuff being important. Is it more important than the sport itself, though?

Nick Diaz was deemed the top contender for Georges St. Pierre’s UFC Welterweight Championship. That means that the UFC believed he was the best fighter to challenge GSP. Why should that change simply because Diaz is avoiding his pre-fight press duties? Now, we’re supposed to buy that Carlos Condit “earned” (White’s words) the title shot he’s getting? How exactly do you earn something that wasn’t given to you in the first place and simply dropped in your lap?

Condit is a great fighter, and he wouldn’t have gotten his title shot in the future. However, to have him fighting GSP instead of Diaz is a farce.

Diaz, of course, is clearly guilty of horrible judgment. As White himself said, all Diaz had to do was “play the game” and go through with all of the interviews and press conferences, and he would have had a UFC title shot and the highest-paying fight of his life. Since he couldn’t show up to a simple press conference, his opportunity will be given to someone else. It’s a huge screw-up, to be sure.

I won’t blame anyone but Diaz himself for this problem existing in the first place. However, Diaz is not the only loser in this situation. The biggest losers (besides Diaz, of course) are the fans.

We were going to get GSP-Diaz and BJ Penn-Condit on the same night. Now, we’re getting a less interesting main event in GSP-Condit and we’re losing the awesome Penn-Condit bout, to boot. There had to be some way to address Diaz’s behavior without screwing over the fans who were excited to see this fight.

Why not just fine Diaz? He’s supposedly costing the company money by not promoting the fight, right? So take some of that money back by fining him. Of course, I’m not privy to the details of fighter contracts, and perhaps they don’t allow for such fines. There had to be something they could have done, however, rather than simply pulling him from the fight altogether when he’s perfectly healthy.

I’m perfectly familiar with the slippery slope argument; if Diaz is allowed to not do interviews and press conferences, why should anyone? However, even fighters like the incredibly-private Brock Lesnar do press conferences, because they know they can make more money by selling their fights. It’s not as if fighters are just going to stop wanting to promote themselves and their fights if Nick Diaz gets away with it.

Plus, how many people out there were going to buy or not buy this pay-per-view based upon Tuesday’s press conference? Is Diaz’s absence really any more harmful than having someone show up and be absolutely boring with their responses to questions? Couldn’t they have thrown Diaz under the bus and used this as further proof of his “bad boy” persona? And finally, at this point, aren’t people going to show up to watch St. Pierre fight, no matter what?

We all want mixed martial arts to be respected, and many of us hate the comparisons that inevitably come between MMA and professional wrestling. However, is there a better comparison when it comes to stuff like this? When the UFC President basically tells us, “If he’s not going to do press conferences, he’s worthless to us as a fighter,” how does that reconcile with MMA being more about sport and less about spectacle or drama?

In what other sport is it so important to not only win, but to entertain the fans before you win in the form of press conferences and while you win in the form of having exciting fights? There are plenty of sports where you can be fined for not making yourself available to the media, but you would never see someone like Tom Brady be suspended for the Super Bowl because he skipped Media Day.

Most of us can agree that while we are into MMA for a number of reasons, finding out who is the best fighter is one of the biggest. When all of the promoting activities actually get in the way of the fights that are supposed to be the entire focus of the sport, isn’t that a bad sign?

So, please Dana: next time, just fine the guy. Let the fans have the fights that they want, and stop letting the business aspect take center stage.

E-Mail Jon Hartley

Tags: BJ Penn, Carlos Condit, Dana White, Georges St. Pierre, Nick Diaz, UFC