Scores of fighters have made the trek to Albany, N.Y., over the last several years to plead with legislators and, in some cases, the governor to lift the ban on mixed martial arts in the state.
Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC, has spent millions of dollars in its lobbying efforts to get New York to become the last state in the country to legalize MMA.
Many have spoken passionately about the topic. Fans have flooded the in-boxes of lawmakers seeking support.
Along the way, the culinary union got involved and bashed UFC fighters for what it viewed as misogyny, homophobia, crude language and all manner of other untoward behavior.
Sheldon Silver, the powerful speaker of the New York state assembly who was thought to be doing the culinary union’s bidding and blocking a vote on the MMA bill, was indicted on corruption charges and eventually jailed.
MMA supporter Carl Heastie succeeded him 13 months ago, but there still wasn’t a vote last year.
That will finally change on Tuesday. The bill to legalize MMA, which has the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.), passed the state senate in February and will be put up for a vote by the house on Tuesday.
For years, UFC executives believed they had the votes in the assembly they needed to pass the bill, but Silver continually refused to allow it to get to the floor of the house for a vote.
Finally, logic and reason seem to have prevailed and the vote will come Tuesday. It’s expected to pass easily, which will set off plenty of celebrating inside the MMA community.
It’s become a cause célèbre among high-profile fighters like New Yorkers Chris Weidman, Jon Jones and Matt Serra. Ronda Rousey is a California resident, but she traveled numerous times to New York and met with Cuomo last year to urge him to support the bill.
It’s big news, and not just because the UFC will soon after announce its first event at Madison Square Garden.
The UFC has staged events in many of the world’s largest cities, including Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Chicago, Manila, Rio de Janeiro, London and Houston.
Fighters will plead with UFC president Dana White and CEO Lorenzo Fertitta to be placed on the first card held in New York City. The card, no doubt, will be stacked with many of the company’s biggest names, and the marketing and promotion of it will be well over the top.
The vote will be historic, because it will mark full acceptance of the sport in the U.S.
Beyond that, it’s just another business deal.
The important part of this is what it will do for the many underground shows that were held, unregulated, all over New York State the entire time the law banning MMA was in effect.
The bitter pill for the sport’s supporters was that there was MMA in New York the entire time, and plenty of it. It just wasn’t legal, regulated MMA. This bill will change that.
While White and Fertitta are largely responsible for saving the sport from extinction and enhancing its popularity worldwide, they deserve more credit for the efforts they’ve made to enhance fighter health and safety.
They supported increasingly tough state athletic commission medical requirements. They instituted a strong anti-doping testing plan. They are one of the primary sponsors of a study being conducted on the impact of fighting upon the brain. They provide fighters accident insurance that helps the athlete in the event of a training camp injury.
The UFC’s embrace of regulation was key. White and Fertitta hired Marc Ratner away from the Nevada Athletic Commission in 2006 to become their vice president of regulatory affairs.
Ratner was the most respected regulator in boxing and will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in June as a result of his work in Nevada.
Upon his hiring by the UFC, Ratner set out to educate state athletic commission personnel around the country (and the world) about the sport, and to assist them in adopting regulations. A large part of that was ensuring that the states didn’t scrimp when it came to overseeing the safety aspects.
New York has had many amateur and underground pro fights in the time MMA was illegal in the state. There was, though, no requirement that an ambulance be on the scene, or that a doctor be seated at ringside. There were no pre-fight physicals to determine a fighter’s fitness to compete, or brain scans to see if there was a pre-existing condition that might make competing too risky.
Those underground shows didn’t have qualified matchmakers who put together fair fights and they didn’t have elite referees who knew when and how to stop a bout.
And there was no commission to suspend a fighter who got knocked out.
As we’ve learned from the NFL’s many issues with concussions and the brain disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), repeated hits to the head are often deadly.
One of the reasons a state athletic commission suspends a fighter for 90, 120 or 180 days following a physical match and won’t allow him or her to have any contact during the suspension is because of the risk further head trauma could pose.
All fighters in New York now will have the benefit of those protections, and more, once the state assembly passes the bill on Tuesday.
It will be a day to celebrate, and for more than just the obvious reasons.
