UFC Makes Australian Event Official

Today the UFC officially announced that they are headed to Sydney, Australia for UFC 110 and for the record can we please stop saying "the UFC is heading down under" or "the UFC just put another shrimp on the barbie" and all other Australian puns?

While MMA fans may be celebrating another UFC invasion of a sovereign country Zuffa will definitely have their work cut out when it comes to convincing the Aussies that their product is legit. Take this article from the Sydney Morning Herald,

Cage fighting entrepreneur Dana White believes the debut Ultimate Fighting Championship show to be held in Sydney in February will prompt a wave of local athletes to abandon traditional sports in pursuit of the millions on offer in the bloodsport.

Alright, we have the words "cage fighting" and "bloodsport" so we are about five seconds away from the Herald calling Dana White Aunty Entity and the UFC being referred to as Thunderdome. 

The mixed martial arts franchise is the fastest growing sports organisation in the world, and White last year knocked back an offer of $US1.2 billion ($1.3m) for the rights.

Now he is heading to town intent on stealing talented athletes who would have otherwise turned to football and boxing. ''It's like coming in and setting off a bomb, like a virus, this thing will spread, and you're going to see a lot of good athletes coming out of there,'' White told the Herald." Because the reality is you can make millions of dollars doing this, millions of dollars. How many sports in Australia can you say people are playing, where if you're good enough, you can earn millions and millions of dollars?''

WKR is going to go out on a limb here and say that a bomb or a virus or a virobomb is not the best metaphor to use when describing MMA especially when the Australian media is calling MMA "bloodsport."

WKR understands that their is a certain infectious infatuation that often spawns from attending a UFC event but that doesn't mean we should call it "fight crack" or use language that makes one think of "dirty bombs". While this may be a thin-skinned response by WKR it doesn't change the fact that Australia MMA detractors will latch onto anything in order to promote their moral indignation. So here is a bit of advice for the UFC PR people. Craft some very carefully worded press releases and pretty please do interview prep with Dana.