What are you promoting?
Come and fight in my back garden for my home made world championship belt! Bring your friends and charge them £30 per ticket!
Every e-mail I open and every text I get sent wants fighters to fill a card up!! There are more shows than Fighters; is it a fight show Gold rush, the chance to make it big because there is gold in them there hills?
Every weekend there is a fight show or 2 or 7 in one weekend either MMA, K1 kickboxing or Boxing. (Unlicensed ….then you have to licence them before you fight or they take it out of your purse or handbag).
Lads you know that can’t fight and have done little or no training apart from hitting the bag at the YMCA as hard as they can while their friends’ video it for 20secs and then upload it on Face book as if it was a UFC production.
Promoters are coming out of the woodwork to get people with little or no training to have a fight and bring their clan with them to support their warrior so they can make a pot full of money!
Ego is feeding this fire.
Everyone thinks they can fight like Kick Ass the movie be able to do great things to someone else because they have played on the UFC game on the X-box, hit the punching ball on a night out and been to Argos for the full UFC fight range and then pop to sports direct for some tap out shorts And a t-shirt. Then you have everything you need to be a fighter!
As I have said before in my blogs I am a martial artist and I teach martial artists that fight, I don’t teach fighters. The difference is fighters train when they have a fight coming up but martial artists train everyday for the sake of their art - a totally different way of looking at the fighting arts.
Boxers sometimes had long periods between fights where they would put weight on , not go to the gym or hit the pads and generally let themselves go They partied hard and most times paid for this in their private lives or eventually in the ring. Every hero I had in boxing fell into this lifestyle: Mike Tyson Sugar Ray Leonard, and even Muhammad Ali all at one time or another did things out of boxing that affected their fighting career!
Sometimes any sports man or women that is paid a lot of money and is admired and given special treatment find it sometimes goes to their head (footballers spring to mind, the overpaid arrogant ba*****ds). What gives people the right to talk down to people or be arrogant because they think they are amazing? As they say pride comes before a fall …..
This ego feeding has now trickled down to the grass roots level of fight shows were some fighters and coaches don’t talk to people or think they have special rules for them because they think they are special. Grow up and stop acting like a diva (every young girl that goes out thinks they are one)
These ego driven fighters are friends with the fight promoters that also act as matchmakers and hand pick the opponents so that they get a win (he is 5-0 but has not fought anyone that is good)
And as soon as they fight someone good they have the excuses ready at hand to justify the loss - it was the weight cut; it was the lights; it was the floor; it was because I did not train hard (ooh sorry not the last one!). This is all driven by the promoters for their special fighters and leads to self inflated egos on both parts.
I remember reading about Joe Silva (the UFC matchmaker ) before the companies global take-over of MMA ( see inflated ego section ) Joe was an amazing fight nerd , he had fight footage about fighters from every source known to man including video tape of fight shows from all over the world (as your parents about video tapes ) he was and still is a true fight fan ; his matchmaking is very good and every fighter when they finish the fight shake his hand first; he is a true fan that has made his love his work.
In the early days of fight shows (using MMA as an example) the promoters were people that trained in a martial art that wanted to get likeminded people in a place where they could fight in a safe environment to see who was the best on any given night, and as the sport grew other people got involved because:
A. They wanted to cash in on the money the first person was making!
B. They did not like the way the show was being run.
This has lead to people having lots of shows, not working together to spread them out over the months and also telling people that they can’t fight on other shows if they fight on theirs.
I don’t have a good solution for this problem because to make it better promoters would have to work together and try to do the best for the shows, fighters and the fans but I don’t think it will happen because most of them are just looking out for themselves like countless martial artists that jump on the latest craze, charge a lot for gradings and make baby black belts with 2 years training. Then they take the money and run to a sunnier climate sweeping back to take the special grading and course you must attend to grade to a higher special level black belt all singing all dancing with bells on grade. As you can see I am sick of seeing this sort of thing happen over and over again and what are these promoters and amazing masters doing to the arts I love - making them a joke.
Joke fight shows with joke belts and as for the ‘Masters’ special course and grading for only £200 per person ( you might not pass this time ...but next time...) I hope they all get what they deserve.... the karma bus comes to those who wait ...but the bus sometimes takes ages!
I am not sorry for what I have just said and I will be back on the martial arts soap box next month.
See you then
John Atkin
AFC
To find out more about The Advanced Fighting Centre visit:http://www.advancedfighting.co.uk/ or e-mail John Atkin at johnatkin24@btinternet.com
Hey John. 2 Books that're helping my inner game tremendously - Psycho-Cybernetics and The Power of Now.
ReplyDeleteAnd a phrase "There is no climb out of mediocrity, just a con game of abuse".
I've only just finished The Power of Now, and I'm onto Psycho-Cybernetics.
It's helping clear a lot up, It's hard to break the cycle of compulsive thinking, some of your students might struggle with it. I did anyway haha
But yeah, check them out! I had a guy reactively calling me a prick recently, I was knackered and missed that there was a line for the bus (oblivious to it). I stayed calm, and when he told me about the line I apologised. His anger pretty much flew right through me. I didn't reflect it back. He calmed down too. I know what they mean by being grounded now, it's like "earth" in an electrical current.
Andrew, a former (currently skint) student
On another note I'm sleeping on a traditional futon now (possibly contributing to the skintness) after looking up the benefits - I decided the floor's a little hard for the long term. Not aiming to impress, it just happens to be a Japanese thing. lol
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