By Justin Faux
GOLD COAST, Australia — When I began watching mixed martial arts as a youth there were a handful of Australians that loved this perceived barbaric sport and the ones that knew of it considered it a mindless blood sport or “human cockfighting” as Senator John McCain famously dubbed it.
Seemingly overnight that changed with a large portion today at least knowing of the existence of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and while it’s not everybody’s cup of tea most don’t turn up their nose at this sport. Over the past few years the UFC has visited Sydney on three separate occasions and has had a lot of success, filling Acer Arena on each visit and setting an all-time gate record for a free televised event in UFC history.
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Now we move interstate for the first time as the sunny Gold Coast plays host to the UFC for their sixth effort on FOX’s cable platform FX and all things had been pointing towards the UFC doing some more record business in Queensland. All the leading news sites have treated this event like a really big deal down here, while they butcher the pronunciation of most of the combatants’ names, each are treating it like the biggest sporting event of the weekend with all the top television stations in attendance for open workouts and weigh-ins.
It works largely in their favour that there are few big-time sporting events on the tubes this weekend with the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) both on hiatus. That only leaves cricket of the major three, and interest in the bat-and-ball sport seems to be dwindling in Australia in recent times.
Unfortunately though, Friday’s attendance for the official weigh-ins was less than flattering. The company only opened half of the building for fans and the spectators only packed roughly half of that with media and UFC Fight Club members filling most of the floorspace. A large reason for that though would be because Australian events cater to the North American public, so the fighters hit the scale around lunch time with most here working nine-to-five jobs so they couldn’t get to the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The Ultimate Fighter: The Smashes proved to be a smashing success with the Australian crew getting huge ovations at the weigh-ins, especially Manny Rodriguez who had his TUF dream cut short after he suffered a broken leg in his successful win over Bola Omoyelle. Despite only being televised on cable television and the large percentage of the country that don’t get FUEL TV and FX it seemed to have left a lasting impression among those that tuned in over the 12 weeks that it aired.
The issue with it only airing on cable is unlike in North America only a small percentile of fans can watch the show on the tubes and the UFC are limiting the potential eyeballs that could be on the hit Australia-versus-United-Kingdom themed edition of the series. Queensland are a market that has a small, tight-knit fight community that have kept organizations like Brace for War and Nitro MMA with their head above water over the past few years and with the UFC marketing machine behind it I suspect them to be a much bigger deal on their return to the sunshine state.
With UFC only having television coverage in the past three years it’s miraculous what they have pulled off already Down Under, but at this point, it seems that Queensland is still a work in progress.
Justin Faux is an Australia-based writer for MMAsucka.com. He is covering the UFC event in Gold Coast this week for Sportsnet.ca. Follow him on Twitter @justinfauxmma.
