Twitter Mailbag: On possibly fixed fights, WSOF's changing identity, and more

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, how concerned should we be at reports that there might have been an attempt to fix a UFC fight in South Korea? Plus, who ought to be the preferred next opponent for the UFC light heavyweight champ? And will WSOF really accomplish anything by changing its name and format?

All that and more in the TMB. To ask a question of your own, tweet to @BenFowlkesMMA.

The fact that this sort of serious allegation followed by an actual investigation is so rare tells us that it’s something of an aberration, but that doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen again.

Combat sports are, by their nature, extremely vulnerable to fixes. For starters, there’s the low pay. Imagine how much money you’d have to give an NBA player to make it worth it for him to risk his high salary and prestige in order to throw a game. Fighters are often just barely scraping by, so a chance to get paid is much harder to resist.

Then there’s the individual nature of the sport. If you want to ensure that a basketball team loses, you’ve probably got to pay off a few different people. If you want to fix a fight, you really only need to buy one guy – the one who loses. It’s cheaper, and it keeps the circle of potential conspirators a lot smaller, which makes it easier to conceal.

One thing working against you if you’re trying to fix a fight is that it’s tough to fake violence and make it look real. Submissions come in handy, since that way the loser doesn’t have to get his face smashed to collect his money, but even then you risk making it look too obvious. It’s not like tennis, where a player could be convinced to throw a match without having to put his health on the line to do it.

We’ll probably never eliminate the risk of a fix from this sport. We’ll also probably never stop shouting about fixes in totally legitimate fights, because that’s just how we are. But if promoters want to at least decrease their chances of unwittingly putting on a fake fight, they ought to consider paying fighters enough to at least make it hard on the crooks out there.

Rebranding WSOF isn’t a terrible idea. But when I saw the email explaining that it was moving to the super innovative league format, that’s when I started to wonder if there were any students of MMA history in the offices of the newly minted Professional Fighters League.

Remember the IFL? I do, mostly because I worked in its New York office from 2006-2008. I remember watching the IFL struggle to gain traction with fans as it insisted on pushing a team-based league format in a sport that was in every way resistant to being corralled into that structure. That company burned through money as fans remained adamantly indifferent to the league standings.

Still, partly for the reasons you alluded to in your question, it’s not like WSOF stands to lose a lot by ditching its old name and image. It had become synonymous with low-rent MMA, a distant third-place promotion with no real upward momentum. Why not try something new? Even if it’s really something old.

I was at AMC Pankration in Kirkland, Wash., last summer to write this story. They’ve got themselves a nice gym in maybe the nicest neighborhood in all of professional MMA. But trust me when I tell you that there are plenty of people on the mats there whom you’ve never heard of, just as there are at most major fight gyms.

Matt Hume has done great work with Demetrious Johnson. The two of them seem to have a special relationship that goes back to the early days of Johnson’s career. At the same time, let’s not make the mistake of assuming Hume is a miracle-worker. He has this one amazing fighter who’s done amazing things. Would Johnson have failed to thrive at Jackson-Wink MMA or American Top Team? I doubt it.

That’s not to say Hume doesn’t deserve credit for his work with Johnson. He definitely does, and “Mighty Mouse” will be the first one to tell you that. But if I’m a fighter looking for a home base, I don’t just look for one incredible standout. I look for a culture and a history of excellence, one that would hopefully rub off on me.

If I’m Daniel Cormier, right now my best-case scenario is Jon Jones returning from suspension to fight me right away at the end of July. It gives me the biggest fight possible, and at the best possible time to increase my odds of winning. We all saw what Jones looked like against Ovince Saint Preux the last time he returned from a layoff, right? I’m not saying Cormier absolutely beats that version of Jones, but it’s the best shot he’s got.

Then, if Cormier managed to hold onto his title after a second meeting with Jones, he could renew his lukewarm Twitter beef with Jimi Manuwa in time to sell a few pay-per-views, right before booking the rubber match with Jones in the MMA equivalent of a TV poker scene in which one guy uses both arms to rake in all the chips at once, grinning all the way.

Feels like we’ve been asking this question for years, but somehow promoters keep finding warm bodies for Cristiane Justino to beat up on. I expect it would be the same if she took the UFC women’s featherweight title from Germaine de Randamie. There will always be someone who can be lured into cashing the check and risking the beating at the hands of “Cyborg.”

The big question is whether or not fans will keep watching. A part of me is surprised that the appeal of seeing Justino smash outmatched opponents has held up as well as it has. For whatever reason, people like watching “Cyborg” destroy something beautiful. Maybe it doesn’t matter who she fights, as long as the spectacle aspect of these squash matches remains intact.

I don’t know if it harms the sport, but it does help shape it in a certain image. Fighters can look at “Mighty Mouse” and Conor McGregor and see that the difference in skill does not line up with the difference in paychecks. If they’re trying to craft a lucrative future for themselves, you can see what conclusions they might be tempted to draw.

Is that bad for the sport? I don’t know. But if it is, we have ourselves to blame, since it’s our attention and our money that fuels the disparity. If we the viewing public love skill and martial artistry so much, we should express it in ways that would lead to big paydays for fighters like Johnson.

But if it turns out that we’d much rather hear a guy talk ridiculous amounts of trash and throw one-punch bombs, and if it turns out that that’s what we reward, how can we be surprised if that’s what we get?

I’ll say this for Robert Whittaker’s reluctance to embrace the “Bobby Knuckles” nickname: Nothing else has brought so much attention to his preferred nickname, which is “The Reaper,” which is not a great nickname.

One way to know if you have a good nickname in MMA is to ask whether or not people can effectively talk about you using only the nickname. For instance, if I tell you I’m really looking forward to “Cowboy’s” next fight, you know right away who I mean (and it ain’t Alex Oliveira). You tell me that you’ve always been a “Shogun” fan, and I don’t need to ask any follow-ups to know who you’re talking about.

“The Reaper” sounds like what you’d get if you created a fighter in a video game but forgot to select a nickname. It sounds like a group of dudes in a gym trying to come up with something that sounds scary. It sounds like the first draft of a pro wrestling gimmick.

Which isn’t to say that Whittaker can’t be “The Reaper” if he wants to be. He just might have a hard time convincing anyone else to think of him that way.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.