MAKING A CASE FOR THE STATE
Greg Jackson, right, of Jackson-Wink MMA fame, is going to great lengths to promote New Mexico.
Greg Jackson’s own New Mexico experience has not always been pleasant. As a skinny, blond-headed teenage transplant from the Midwest, living with his family in Albuquerque’s South Valley, he repeatedly had to defend himself on playgrounds and streets.
But young Jackson soon turned that apparent negative into a positive — developing a form of self-defense, Gaidojutsu, upon which his martial-arts empire has been built.
Albuquerque and New Mexico, it turns out, were good to him after all. And vice versa. Now, renowned locally, nationally and internationally as among mixed martial arts’ most successful and influential coaches, Jackson is fighting for his adopted homeland. His recently announced initiative, the New Mexico Experience, is an effort to promote the good things the state has to offer — and to combat the negative press New Mexico has and continues to receive.
Wednesday, at the UNM men’s basketball game against San Jose State at the Pit, Jackson rolled out his initiative. Mixed martial arts fighters Holly Holm, Jon Jones and Chris Brown, who train with Jackson at Albuquerque’s Jackson-Wink MMA, made appearances in support.
“I have this access to all this worldwide media, right?” Jackson said this week in an interview on 94 Rock. “So, why not kind of go out there and tell everybody how great we are, because, you know, I love New Mexico.”
Love, of course, is not what New Mexico typically gets from beyond our borders — or sometimes, even from within.
Yes, heaven knows we have our problems. But out in the world, even what’s good about
our city and our state often has been portrayed as a negative.
“Breaking Bad,” the television megahit filmed in Albuquerque from 2008-2013, has been a financial boon for the city and, overall, a gigantic plus. Then again ... In 2013, as “Breaking Bad” was coming to an end, Albuquerque native Madeleine Carey — then a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts — wrote a column for time.com. Under the headline “Albuquerque Really Is Like Breaking Bad,” Carey wrote the following:
“Breaking Bad has given me a way to explain Albuquerque without saying a word. It’s a place where we struggle with drug epidemics, extreme drought, hunger, drunk driving, gun violence (New Mexico’s gun-death rate is 40% higher than the national average), and a corrupt police force. Nearly 20% of the population lives below the poverty line, and the crime rate is 53% higher than the national average. Albuquerque is a city plagued by mediocrity — a drying river, a losing football team (the University of New Mexico Lobos), a dearth of ambition.”
Carey did go on to write, “But it also gets under your skin and into your blood, like a drug you won’t forget and can’t explain. It will always be my home, even if I am far away.” Well, Madeleine, thanks for that. (Fun fact: Carey ran track/cross country at Bosque School and ran competitively at Tufts.)
Nor has the smashing success of Jackson-Wink MMA, which Jackson founded in 2007 with Mike Winkeljohn, always worked favorably for New Mexico in the public eye.
In a 2014 profile of Jackson for mmajunkie.com, Ben Fowlkes wondered why Jackson and Winkeljohn hadn’t left Albuquerque for, say, Vegas or Los Angeles. Fair question.
But in the asking and the answering, Fowlkes did quite a number on our city.
“The violent crime rate usually hovers somewhere near twice the national average,” wrote Fowlkes, who spent three days here in pursuit of his story (and, presumably, escaped unharmed). “At any given time, more than 20 percent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line.”
In Fowlkes’ Albuquerque, all the city had to offer MMA fighters were its milehigh elevation and lack of night-life distractions.
With his New Mexico Experience, those are the images of Albuquerque and New Mexico that Jackson is trying to fight — or, at least, to bring into perspective.
“Mostly, I just want us to be known in a good light,” Jackson said on 94 Rock. “Even if the best thing that comes out of is (that) people get a positive image of New Mexico and Albuquerque, and we’re not just the place where ‘Breaking Bad’ took place.”
For those purposes Jackson is promoting in particular — without compensation, he says — Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe multimedia enterprise; Organ Mountain Outfitters, a Las Cruces outdoor apparel company; and the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.
“I’m a huge optimist,” Jackson said. “I really believe that if we just keep doing it, keep plugging away and keep showing people the good side of who we are, I think it’s gonna come back to us.”