Report: Anderson Silva not a big pay-per-view draw because he's black.

You know it's a slow news day when writers start climbing up on soap boxes and writing opinion pieces.

So there are two possible reasons Jonathan Snowden decided to pen this article: he genuinely believes what he's writing or he decided to take a page out of the Glenn Beck play book to get more press by forming arguments with the logic of an RIAA Board member. I hope that Mr. Snowden is part of the latter group because I refuse to believe someone who has written a book that doesn't have every 4th letter capitalized could build such a flawed argument. I really wish editors got paid more these days.

Race is the hidden boogieman in most discussions of MMA versus boxing. Mixed Martial Arts is still a sport dominated by Caucasians. One of the few professional sports in America that can still make that claim outside of golf and Nascar. At UFC 117 there is exactly one fighter on the main card of African descent: Silva. UFC 118 features one African American on the main card. Spike's next Fight Night features a grand total of zero black athletes on the main card.

An important take away from the first paragraph is how Snowden's demographical description changes from Caucasian to Black. This establishes that he's not making a Caucasian vs. non-Caucasian argument, instead it is a Caucasian versus Black argument. Gone are the non-Caucasian ethnicities that could harm his argument creating a more conducive environment for his point.

Then he differentiated the main card from the card as a whole. This implies that the UFC is not doing it's part to promote black fighters. His argument does not take into account the skill level or exposure of the fighters relative to their position on the card. We only have the race and the card position of the fighters to go off of for this claim.

Like it or not, this racial makeup is going to attract people with impure motives.

His first sentence implies that all Caucasian dominated sports attract people with impure motives. His 'logic' follows that NASCAR, Golf, Hockey, MLB, Rugby, MLS, and every other sport with greater than a 51% Caucasian participation rate attract people with impure motives. Broad sweeping statements like that make Glenn proud.

He then says:

Chuck Liddell is no racist, but there is a reason he was the most popular fighter in the world with many disaffected young white males.

Just so those reading at home know, when writing within the bounds of logic many equals > 1. It certainly sounds better than saying

Chuck Liddell is no racist, but there is a reason he was the most popular fighter in the world with more than 1 disaffected young white male.

He, of course, has no factual basis for this claim, otherwise he would tell us just how many disaffected young white males there were. Snowden is making a ludicrous claim about the number of racist Chuck Liddell fans and, with no evidence, he's reduced to using quantitative words like many.

Rashad Evans and Quinton Jackson may have finally shattered the myth that African American fighters can't draw by bringing in more than a million pay per view buys at UFC 114.

Snowden states this myth and only mentions its relevance to African American fighters. He makes the  assumption here  that the myth does not apply to non-African American fighters, specifically the article's topic, Anderson Silva. This is odd given Snowden's careful navigation of MMA fighters' racial makeup in the first paragraph.

And can somebody please show me this myth? A documented source of it? Is he making this up? Did it come from somewhere other than a box of crackerjacks?

The issue is bigger than MMA. It's bigger than sports. And it's an issue that has seen America take some enormous strides forward to confront in recent years. But racism is far from dead and I think plays no small part in Silva's failures at the marketplace.

Look, I'm willing to pass this off as a poorly thought out, poorly executed article written on a slow news day. However, claiming that race is a bigger factor in Silva's less than wonderful PPV sales than his actual performance is ignorant. Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, and even Mike Tyson all fought in more racially charged times and achieved levels of super stardom despite the societal problems at the time. The amount of people who are so close-minded that they refuse to buy a PPV because Anderson Silva has black skin are so small that the number is not  worth mentioning, and it's poor journalism to rank that as a more important factor than his ability to actually fight.