Ryan LaFlare
Right about the point in the interview when UFC welterweight Ryan LaFlare, with zero apparent irony, insisted that “the world” would soon know who he is after Saturday’s fight with Demian Maia in the main event of UFC Fight Night 62, that’s when I started to wonder whether he hadn’t maybe overestimated the reach of FOX Sports 1.
On some level I get it. Exposure is all relative, right? And when you’re a 31-year-old fighter whose UFC experience has so far consisted of four decision victories on a variety of UFC Fight Pass and FUEL TV events, with only one main card appearance on actual TV in the United States, a main event spot opposite someone like Maia probably feels like having the eyes of the world upon you.
It just probably won’t actually look that way, which tells you a little something about the challenge even UFC headliners face when trying to grab a little attention from this crowded MMA landscape.
We touched on this briefly in this week’s Twitter Mailbag, but Frankie Edgar might have put it best in a recent interview with Bleacher Report.
“There are so many fights going on now that it’s tough to remain in people’s minds for a long time,” Edgar said. “You can put on a killer performance one day, then the next weekend someone else puts on a great performance, and everyone forgets about what you did a week before that.”
Again, that’s former UFC lightweight champ Frankie Edgar saying that. That’s a dude who has almost as many UFC bonus awards (nine) as LaFlare has professional fights (11). If Edgar feels like it’s so tough to do something worthy of fans’ continued attention, what hope is there for the LaFlares of the world?
It’s not just a matter of competing with all the other fights, either. Look around at the headlines this week, and you get a sense of what an up-and-coming fighter is battling against in the war for the public’s attention.
You’ve got Conor McGregor invading Brazil. You’ve got Ronda Rousey matching up with that spirited horsewoman-slayer Bethe Correia. You’ve got the requisite Brock Lesnar teaser, this time with CM Punk’s name wedged in there for that extra little oomph.
Factor in the lingering ripples on the pond from last weekend’s championship turnover at UFC 185, and soon it starts to feel like there are too many voices talking for us to hear what any one person is trying to say.
That’s the climate LaFlare has to contend with on Saturday. In the main event of a UFC Fight Night event whose main card doesn’t even begin until 10 p.m. ET, he has to find some way to make waves on cable well after midnight. Fortunately, he has the option to attract viewers using the second-most reliable late-night TV ploy: violence.
And, I know, here’s where the fighter playbook says you should just focus on winning, since victory solves all problems and promotion is the promoter’s job. That’s fine. It also probably won’t work. Not this time.
If you’re LaFlare, you’ve got to accept the very real possibility that even a lot of the people who really, really like this sport are going to skip this one. At least, they’ll skip it live. They’ll let the magic of DVR work for them as they either go out and live a life on Saturday night or else stay home and get to sleep at a reasonable hour. Many of them will hear what happened in your fight before they decide whether it’s worth the time and effort to go back and watch it.
Just like they look at that string of decision wins on your Wikipedia record and decide that maybe you aren’t the guy they want to look up on Fight Pass when they need an action-packed fight fix, they’re going to do the same with your big night in the main event spotlight. If you want to be the noise that they zero in on amid all this static, you’ve got to do something special, something memorable. You’ve got to do something they can’t ignore, even if they try.
I realize that’s a lot to ask of any fighter, especially against an opponent the caliber of Maia. Simply going down to Brazil and coming away with a win against him ought to be achievement enough. It isn’t, though. Not in today’s UFC. Not when you have to compete with press tours and sound bites and the constant stream of events that dances before fight fans’ eyes like a set of jingling keys held out to distract an unruly infant.
Want the world to know who you are? Even just that subset of the world’s population that is already very concerned with mixed martial arts prizefighting? Victory alone won’t do it. And victories are something that, historically, guys like Maia have been very reluctant to part with.
For more on UFC Fight Night 62, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
Filed under: News, UFC
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