With weight cutting, MMA has a problem it can't regulate away

Now that weight cutting has become the prime suspect in a Brazilian fighter’s death, the MMA world seems intent on doing something about the practice.

Exactly what and how and under whose authority, those are the parts we haven’t figured out just yet.

We also haven’t figured out exactly what happened to Leandro Souza, who died prior to a weigh-in for a Shooto event in Brazil in late September, though initial reports claimed he was taking diuretics and struggling with an extreme weight cut that required him to drop 33 pounds in about a week.

Shooto promoter and Nova Uniao leader Andre Pederneiras was quick to claim that Souza’s death had nothing to do with the weight cut and “could have happened to anyone,” but to those of us who know this sport that’s a little like saying that Junior Seau’s suicide had nothing to do with professional football.

At the very least, it seems likely that Souza’s death was related to weight cutting. It also seems not terribly surprising that trying to drop approximately 20 percent of your total body weight inside of a week could have dire consequences. That’s probably why the MMA community responded to news of Souza’s death with a blend of sympathy and grim resignation. We thought this would happen eventually. But we still don’t know what to do in order to keep it from happening again.

Our first instinct is to grope for new rules. “Inside MMA” discussed one possible solution this past week, outlining a plan from the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board that would require a series of weigh-ins beginning a month before the bout, just to make sure fighters aren’t dropping pounds too suddenly. I’m not sure how that would have helped Souza, who accepted his Shooto bout on less than a month’s notice (as many fighters do). But it probably doesn’t matter anyway since the NJSACB’s Nick Lembo says it’s merely “something to consider … but we have not changed our rules yet.”

There’s also the option of weighing in fighters once on the day before their fights, then again the day of, with limits on how much weight they’re allowed to pack on in between. Again though, that probably wouldn’t help the Souzas of the fight world, since any man who tells himself that he can safely lose 33 pounds in a week will probably also tell himself that he can keep from gaining too much of it back.

And if he turns out to be wrong, what then? We scratch the fight the day of the event, all because one guy rehydrated too well, too quickly? How exactly would that result in a safer overall environment on fight night?

The problem isn’t so much the lack of rules about weight cutting as it is the lack of a practical way to enforce them. You can tell fighters what they’re allowed to do (sit in a sauna until they’re nearly blacked out, for instance) and what they aren’t (take diuretics), but since weight cutting happens in private, often with little or no supervision, it’s difficult to get too prescriptive on methods without creating a stifling and impractical weight-cutting bureaucracy.

Do we really expect the same state athletic commissions that can’t get a handle on performance-enhancing drug use to monitor the weight cuts of 24 fighters from all over the globe prior to each event? Just flipping through the program from UFC 165 in Toronto in September, you see fighters from Poland, Austria, Canada, Brazil, Sweden and the United States. Does anyone think it’s feasible to track them all down 30 days before the event to get an official read on their weight? And as long as they know when the pre-fight weigh-ins are coming, what’s to stop them from cutting weight for those, too?

If you want a rule change that might actually make a difference, ban the kind of short-notice fights that necessitate these drastic weight cuts. Of course, then you make a promoter’s job much, much harder, if not impossible. As we’ve seen, fighters get hurt. A lot. If you limit a promoter’s ability to find a late replacement, how long before “card subject to change” means “card subject to cancellation”?

Weight cuts are a part of MMA for the same reason PEDs are. In a hyper-competitive field like this one, no advantage is too small. Create more barriers and you’ll only create more innovative – and possibly more dangerous – methods of working around them. At some point, you have to put the responsibility back on the fighters and their teams.

That’s the solution we seem to like the least, however, possibly because we know these people too well. It’s as if we assume that the last person who can be trusted to look after a fighter’s health is the fighter himself, which is not altogether an unreasonable assumption in a sport where even the winner knows that he may need a lift to the hospital once it’s all over.

Instead, we want more rules, more official oversight, less personal responsibility for the people who are actually in the saunas and the salt baths. We want to tell ourselves that we did something, because we don’t trust them to do it.

I understand that impulse, but I don’t put much stock in it. We’re not going to regulate our way out of this problem, at least not without a profound change to the nature of the sport itself. At some point we have to rely on the fighters – and, more importantly, the coaches and teammates and support staff they surround themselves with – to do the right things in the right ways. If they don’t, they’re the ones who’ll suffer while the rest of us shake our heads and say we saw it coming.