Another Reason MMA is not a sport:

Let me preface this by saying i love MMA and can't watch enough of it, but deep down I don't feel it is truly a legitimate sport. It occupies a territory somewhere between specatacle, entertainment, and sport. Reading this most recent passage tends to fuel this sentiment. Randy Couture on Bubba the Love Sponge recently:

When asked if he wagers on the fights at all, Randy said he had only bet on fighting once. And that was the Phil Baroni vs. Evan Tanner fight. He said Tanner was considered an underdog at the time and he felt he would win. Since then he hasn’t bet on any fights including his own.

This isn't aimed at Randy, I'm sure he's not the only MMA fighter to ever bet on a fight. I'm sorry but in any other of the big four sports, betting on your sport would get you a nice long ban from competition. MMA is a post modern sport in may respects, and one of these areas is it's oddly symbiotic relationship with wagering and gambling. In MMA, you don't get thrown out of the league for wearing a t-shirt with a sportsbook sponsor, you get thrown out for wearing the wrong sportsbook sponsor (the whole Dana vs Lindland imbroglio). Hell, for a little while you had a sportsbook actually running a promotion, in BodogFights. Can anyone imagine a basketball or football league being run by betting interests and being taken seriously in anyway?

I know that my feelings run contrary to what you will see in most of the MMA media, but then again with out bettor advertising, would there even be a MMA media? The pre-imminent magazine in the industry, Fight Magazine, is published by gambling media stalwart Bluff Media. Most of the early blogs that popped up like UFCJUnkie.com and UFCmania.com relied heavily on sportsbook advertising for cashflow. They both had their in house touts (Performify and Desert Dog) to hype their picks and point you in the direction of the sportsbook they were getting premiums for referring. The early incarnations of those sites were as much tout sheets as news sites.