Too Much Violence on TV?

I like watching fights on TV. I'd go so far as to say that I am a fan of televised fights, though not excessively so (for example, i don't wear Affliction shirts or Tivo boxing matches on ESPN Classic). I was pretty excited when FSN started airing Pride fights and when Spike brought out The Ultimate Fighter, but since then fighting has gone from a fringe sport to the new poker. Not counting UFC, Pride, or boxing pay-per-view, my cable system airs the following:

• Boxing on ESPN
• UFC fights on Spike
• The Ultimate Fighter on Spike
• Pride fights on Fox Sports
• The IFL
• World Extreme Cagefighting on Versus
• World Combat League on Versus
• The Tapout reality show on Versus

Except for pay-per-view and the occasional episode of TUF, i don't really tune in to any of this stuff on purpose, but i still end up seeing enough of it that I can actually distinguish Bas Rutten from Frank Trigg (which, yes, proves that i watch too much TV). The quality varies drastically, but all of the fighters are more skilled than I so I still end up watching with fascination. For students of the martial arts, it's great to be able to tune in at your leisure and see a relatively skilled grappler take on a relatively skilled stand-up fighter or some combination thereof.

This might be good for the fighters too, since it should mean more opportunities and more money. But it'll be interesting to see if this is another cyclical surge in the popularity of the martial arts (remember the ninja craze of the 80s?), or a sea-change in the world of sports media. Most of this is driven by the surprising popularity of MMA, which has essentially spurred the creation of a new industry. Like other new industries, a bunch of organizations have sprung up to follow the money, and also like other industries there will inevitably be failures and consolidation. UFC and Pride are already combined from a management standpoint, and the crossovers in WEC (also owned by Zuffa) and the IFL are obvious.

So this might be a martial arts "bubble" that will eventually burst but leave behind a fairly profitable core (as happened with the Internet), or the abundance of televised fighting could be one of those bizarre pop culture phenomena like the motorcycle-building shows that popped up everywhere a couple of years ago. MMA probably won't achieve the prominence among sports fans that boxing once had, and the current crop of fighting sports probably won't leap into the mainstream like NASCAR (although NASCAR televises a few fights also). But i'd predict that in a decade there'll still be a couple of prominent MMA organizations, and its champions will be among the elite of organized sports.