Super Fight League Round Three Approaches

Super Fight League Round Three Approaches

Published on April 24, 2012 by The Sandman in Super Fight League

As The Super Fight League Prepare For Their Third Instalment

(Introducing Our Newest Contributor The Sandman)

With the inception of Super Fight League (SFL) there is now another potentially major player in the Mixed Martial Arts game in Asia.

The Indian subcontinent has a history as a big fan of combat sports and professional wrestling, therefore it wasn’t at all surprising that the  Super Fight League was born, dancing and singing in a massive blaze of publicity almost unmatched as Bollywood stylee’ came to MMA.

Just months earlier, Ring Ka King, India’s answer to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) made its debut and shattered pro wrestling records by becoming the most watched professional wrestling show ahead of WWE’s Raw.

So it made perfect sense that India’s first foray into MMA had a little sense of the WWE in it. From owners to rosters, the whole event was very theatrical. Raj Kundra partnered with Bollywood superstar Sanjay Dutt to create an MMA promotion that resembled Wrestlemania more than an MMA pay per view.

Now, I don’t see it as a bad thing. In fact, I see it as a breath of fresh air to the sport. As long as the fights remain unscripted, I’m perfectly happy. I still find DREAM entrances very entertaining and wished that PRIDE style entrances such as Anderson Silva doing the moon walk would be brought to UFC.

Sadly, Dana White is not a big fan of lavish entrances and I’ll probably never be able to see Mayhem Miller dance with Japanese school girls for the foreseeable future.

The promoters’ kicker for the event was “come for the concert, stay for the fights” which, again, made perfect sense to get an audience that do not know much about MMA interested in the card. Having posters of Bob Sapp looking like an Andre the Giant wannabe did no harm to their publicity either.

The fights SFL have put on so far have been relatively exciting. I don’t expect much from new promotions but once we know the fighters better, I’d expect better matchmaking as well, No wait we demand it.

Signing big name fighters like Todd Duffee and Bob Sapp definitely helps sell seats but it is the signing of Bobby Lashley that I think will help push SFL towards the front of Asian MMA. When SFL was announced I immediately thought of Lashley due to his WWE background.

The real work for SFL now though is to be able to put on exciting fights while also creating a spectacular event.

They need to work on better publicizing their local fighters but, they also should work on signing fighters that while they may not be huge names, are at least capable of competing in an exciting fight instead of the low level fighters that they’re throwing in the deep end right now, many are performing badly with little real skill on display.

Finding that middle ground between pro wrestling and MMA is of the utmost importance to SFL. Too much drama and the fights become pointless, too little and it loses itself as a spectacle and its appeal to WWE-loving India.

When Lashley takes on James Thompson on May 6 at SFL 3 in Chandigarh, I’ll definitely be watching hoping to see if SFL can pull off a really good event and start to build a real fanbase.

At the present time much MMA press reaction has been negative, we at MMAnewsAsia support the SFL because we want better competition to keep big boys like ONE FC honest, however they do need to make some fundamental changes.

Maybe the biggest one would be to have the ‘show’ part of the event split into two parts with the supporting artists playing before the fights and the main artists playing after and closing the doors to entrance before the fighting starts. That might help ease the embarrassment of largely empty stands while the SFL hierarchy laze like some pampered emperor on their comfy settee’s cageside waiting to be entertained, this would help to create a much needed atmosphere.

If they can relax a bit and sort out the obvious weaknesses and start to build a real sustainable MMA organisation then ONE FC might have to start looking over their shoulder at the Indian tide coming their way. Until that time, it could just be a very expensive toy for some Indian big shots.

At the moment all events are available free of charge live on-line. And although between Event 1 and Event 2 they lost some 300,000 plus viewers they still had significantly more live viewers than ONE FC who also put their last event on-line for free.