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The UFC has been criticized in the past for being the No Fun Promotion, especially when compared to their Japanese counterparts at Pride Fighting Championships. Pride never hesitated to put together matches that earned the moniker ‘freakshow fight’ like Jose Canseco vs. the 7’2 Hong Man Choi. Baseball player vs. kickboxer, pro wrestler vs. boxer, nothing was too oddball to run with.
Meanwhile, the UFC couldn’t even sign WWE superstar CM Punk without a serious amount of hand wringing that ended with them putting him up against a legitimate if green opponent. Even though he ended up selling more PPVs than 95% of the roster, his future in the promotion in uncertain. In Japan, he’d be fighting the green Power Ranger by now.
But there’s a sign that the UFC is changing their policy on at least one kind of freakshow fight: the MMA vs. Boxing crossover. Conor McGregor opened the door by forcing the company to take his demands to fight Floyd Mayweather seriously. It took UFC president Dana White a few months to come around, but now he’s on board and at the forefront of negotiating that fight. And it seems like he’s already getting ready to send a second fighter off the UFC roster into the boxing ring: hard hitting UK prospect Jimi Manuwa, who is looking to fight former British heavyweight champion David Haye.
“I spoke to David Haye today (Wednesday),” Manuwa said on the latest episode of BJ Penn Radio. “I spoke to him last week when I was in Vegas with Dana, and Dana liked the numbers — what can be generated through this event. We’re planning on making it happen. David Haye is out and about walking, he’s back walking now after his injury. We’re doing everything we can to make it happen.”
Haye is recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon injury which makes it unlikely that the bout would end up on the Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather boxing undercard currently targeted for September. But the stars not aligning on that won’t kill the fight.
“We’re big enough to do our own card as well in London,” Jimi continued. “It depends when the Conor – Floyd fight happens. If it’s in September I think that would be too early for David Haye. I think he’ll be ready November or December. So a September card would be too early for him. We’ll see what happens. We’ve got options.”
Dana probably likes the numbers because it’s way more than he could ever hope to make off Manuwa on a UFC card. While Jimi is a certified destroyer that beats his opponents down spectacularly, he’s largely been relegated to small international Fight Night cards that have kept him out of the spotlight. A major boxing event in London against a huge (if over the hill) name like David Haye wouldn’t just make a boatload of money, it could help establish Manuwa as the best MMA fighter in the UK.
Until the fight went down and Haye smashed him, of course. The reason these inter-sport fights rarely happen is because the outcome is predictable: the person crossing over gets clowned. It happened when three time world boxing champion James Toney fought Randy Couture in the Octagon and got submitted 3 minutes into their fight, and it’s almost guaranteed to happen to Conor McGregor when he tries to beat Floyd Mayweather on pure ball sack alone.
David Haye may be over the hill, but he’s still so far ahead of Manuwa when it comes to the particulars of boxing that Manuwa might as well be a badminton player attempting to win a Grand Slam in tennis. The UFC knows this, which is why they’ve stopped these kinds of fights from happening for years. Former pound for pound great Anderson Silva was the original McGregor trying to get a fight with Roy Jones Jr. for years and for years the UFC refused. Because they knew it didn’t help their sport to have one of the most feared strikers in MMA picked apart and looking foolish against an aging boxer.
That attitude seems to be changing now, for better or worse. I guess we’ll know by the end of 2017 how it plays out for the UFC and the sport of mixed martial arts.
