Michael Rome over at Bloody Elbow has an excellent piece on the potential landscape for women’s mixed martial arts after the eventual fight between Gina Carano and Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos is over.
If Cyborg wins there is an obvious way to go. You have this monster as champion who always has exciting fights, and fans will want to see if anyone can dethrone her. If Gina wins, as I think will happen, then the options are limitless. You can give someone like Meisha Tate or Erin Toughill a setup fight to determine a contender. You can get Baszler back in the mix. You can get Larosa to come up in weight. And eventually, someone will beat her, which ends up providing a whole new set of options. Hell, you could even potentially have a situation where you have one dominant woman at 145 and another at 135, and fans eventually demand a super fight.
The best MMA promoting happens relatively organically. Sure promoters can and should try to get to the most marketable fight, but options tend to present themselves naturally, and the key to MMA matchmaking is taking the natural options and running with them when they pop up.
The idea that there is just one fight or one fighter people want to see is ridiculous as the fans went nuts for Cyborg in San Jose. It’s also not as if Gina came into this sport as a former American Idol contestant or as an ex-pro wrestler. She had a fighting background, had the first female fight on Showtime, and won a very exciting fight that stole the show. It didn’t take anything masterful. It’s time for this argument to go away.
Michael is spot-on in his analysis here. I’ve been reading comments from fans on various blogs and MMA communities talking about the lack of any potential for women’s MMA after Carano and Cyborg meet in August; frankly, that kind of talk is incredibly shortsighted. As Michael points out, nobody in the world saw any kind of potential for Cyborg to be any kind of draw against Carano; until the night Cyborg became a star, Carano was the lone star in a relatively new aspect of the sport.
Now there are two stars, but it certainly won’t stay that way for long. Kim Couture, despite her rookie status, already has enough name value for people to be interested in seeing her fight, and as long as other females continue to fight on Strikeforce cards and continue to put on the kind of exciting fights that put Carano and Cyborg on the map, new stars will be made. It’s just a matter of time.
