Sky puts MMA in the shop window at last
All-british fight tops the bill as ‘upstart’ sport goes live this weekend, writes Gareth A Davies in Connecticut
Both have star quality, great back stories and fight like their lives depend on it
Fighters and fans of mixed martial arts will celebrate a seminal moment when Sky Sports airs the visceral combat sport live for the first time from the United States this weekend.
MMA, a hybrid fighting style known as the decathlon of martial arts, has had to battle hard for mainstream acceptance in Europe, often seen as the upstart child of the sporting landscape, even arguably the scruffy cousin of boxing.
Sky Sports’ investment in showing 20 events from the Bellator MMA fight league coincides with major investment globally by television and digital streaming companies into a panoply of fight leagues, as executives see a potential audience grab due to fast-moving action and dramatic storylines.
Fittingly, the first event Sky Sports will show is headlined by the most anticipated all-british fight in the history of the sport, from here at the enormous Mohegan Sun, in Connecticut, one of the largest casino resorts in the US. The meeting of Paul Daley and Michael Page, both 170lb fighters, is a contest that has drawn comparison with the bad blood between Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn in the Nineties.
Both men, whose battling sobriquets are, respectively, “Semtex” and “Venom”, have star quality, fascinating back stories and fight as if their lives depended on it. Daley, who served in the Household Cavalry alongside Prince Harry, has promised the 33rd knockout of his 58-fight career against Page, a pirouetting, destructive freestyle kickboxer who converted to MMA after winning seven world titles in kickboxing.
MMA began as a sport in 1993, when the Gracie family, from Brazil but with Scottish roots, took their ju-jitsu fighting system – a mixture of locks, holds, wrestling and grappling – to the US in an attempt to prove it could defeat any other martial art.
Fight sports will never be favoured by all, but perception in the UK may well change with this latest move. It fell to Sky Sports News to make the announcement, allied two days earlier with Channel 5 revealing that it would show six Bellator events taking place in the UK this year in prime time on a Saturday night.
There has been a full fanfare for Daley and Page on the East Coast this week, a New York press conference before the pair moved to the lands of the Mohegan Native Americans in Connecticut.
It aped the rite of passage enjoyed in the past by fellow Britons such as Lennox Lewis, Naseem Hamed, Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and Amir Khan.
Next week, heavyweight world champion Anthony Joshua will parade in New York alongside American Jarrell Miller, ahead of their contest at Madison Square Garden on June 1.
Daley and Page told me this week that there is a touch of glamour to the event being in the US rather than the UK. Bellator MMA, owned by media conglomerate Viacom, also has a deal with DAZN, the multisport streaming service that will show Joshua’s US debut in the US. Scott Coker, Bellator’s president, signed a $140million, three-year deal with DAZN recently for seven exclusive events a year and Daley-page is part of the deal. DAZN, which plans to take over the US boxing/mma scene, is owned by British billionaire Len Blavatnik.
There was a time when Sky Sports appeared an unlikely bedfellow for MMA. It has been a long-held belief by those in MMA that given eyes on the sport, interest in it will blossom. We will find out this year.