http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2011/8/21/23 ... -singapore" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;MMAsian ha scritto:I have been reading Bloody Elbow regularly for almost a year but this is my first ever post. I started reading because I was interested in Martial Combat in Singapore (where I live) and this was the only website which seemed to have any news or discussion about it.
Ever since then I have been a regular visitor and enjoyed reading James Goyder’s stories when he used to post about Martial Combat and more recently Anton Tabuena’s informative and interesting pieces about One FC.
You would have to be living in Singapore to appreciate what is going on with One FC here, it is absolutely everywhere and it is impossible to be in a public place without being bombarded with images of Eduard Folayang, Ole Laursen or Mitch Chilson.
I don’t think any sporting event has ever had this level of publicity, let alone an MMA show and everyone is talking about it and a lot of people I know are planning on going. (Even if half of them still haven’t bought tickets, people in Singapore don’t do forward planning…)
I can’t claim to be a long term fan of the UFC, I guess I am what you would call a newbie, but I have been watching it regularly since early 2010 and have also been downloading all the olds shows and studying the history a little bit.
The fact is that in 2009 pretty much no-one in Singapore knew anything about MMA. There might have been a few hardcore fans around the place but they probably kept it to themselves, in much the same way as you would if you liked playing dungeons and dragons at the weekend.
Now I hear people talking about MMA all the time and speculating as to who is going to win these fights in the same way they would an English Premier League football game (The EPL is absolutely massive in Singapore).
The level of technical knowledge is still not that high and typical comments I hear are ‘Baroni is an animal he is going to smash him’ or ‘I like that Brazilian fighter, he knows submissions and stuff’ but as a fan of MMA it is really encouraging to hear other people talk about the sport I am learning to love.
The thing which most amazed me was discovering that there was a world class MMA gym right on my doorstep. I first heard about Evolve MMA when a friend told me about it but I never gave the place a lot of thought until their fighters started popping up every month on Martial Combat.
Then I heard that Rafael Dos Anjos was training there and I knew who he was from his UFC fights and I was amazed to hear that a world class athlete would actually come to Singapore to improve. People in Singapore are crazy about sports but there aren’t many famous athletes actually here in Singapore, unless you count ESPN Star Sports correspondent Steve McMahon who played for Liverpool about 30 years ago!
I wondered if bringing Dos Anjos to Singapore was a publicity stunt as I had heard that Evolve MMA was extremely successful but one day my friend persuaded me to go and do a free trial class there. It made me realize two things: firstly I am definitely too old to start learning martial arts and secondly that the facilities at Evolve MMA really are world class.
Everything was brand new and state of the art and the instructors were all qualified to the point that most of them actually had held world titles in the martial arts they were teaching. The owner is an extremely successful businessman who must have invested a huge amount of money in securing such a valuable piece of real estate and then furnishing it with absolutely no expense spared.
It was a bit of an eye opener because I had thought up until that point that the only people interested in MMA were a small minority of young to middle aged men, a bit like Dungeons and Dragons, but visiting Evolve MMA made me realize that a huge amount of people from all walks of life are MMA fans.
I asked around and although the vast majority of members are not professional fighters and probably go more for health reasons the general consensus was that it was the connection with the sport of mixed martial arts which had made Evolve MMA so successful.
Martial Combat definitely helped increase awareness of MMA in Singapore although, frankly, the format was ridiculous. Who in their right mind would decide, having never put on an MMA show in a country before, to put on two in the same venue on consecutive nights? It was madness.
I don’t think the UFC has ever tried doing 12 shows in six months in the same city (Singapore is basically a city, it’s not exactly the size of your average country) for a good reason. People might like MMA, they might even love it but they still don’t want to go and see it every night. I went to one Martial Combat show per month while it was on and it was a bit frustrating looking at the fight cards and having to pick one when I would have liked to have seen all the fights.
Fortunately One FC looks to have a more sensible schedule, although I hope for selfish reasons they put on at least four or five shows a year in Singapore. Martial Combat actually did a good job of making fighters like Mitch Chilson, Eduard Folayang and Ole Laursen fairly famous here, even people who don’t follow MMA seem to recognize their names, and that should really help One FC.
I love living in Singapore, it’s clean, it’s efficient and it’s easy to do business here. It’s also a little bit predictable and I think that’s the reason why people here have really taken to MMA. When you wake up in the morning in Singapore you pretty much know exactly what is going to happen that day, if they set the sequel to The Hangover here it would be a deeply boring movie.
MMA is completely unpredictable, when two men get locked inside that cage absolutely anything can happen and for people who are looking for an escape from a daily routine which might be a bit mundane it is the perfect spectator sport.
I think the organizers of One FC see this and that is why they have chosen to situate themselves in Singapore, even if they are planning on putting on shows all over Asia. There is a huge appetite for MMA in Singapore and One FC is in the right place at the right time to feed it.
Having a local fighter on the card will also really help with the atmosphere. Being such a small country it is difficult for Singapore to excel at any sports at an international level and if Radeem Rahman wins his fight, which I am confident he will, the roof is going to come off the Singapore Indoor Stadium and the atmosphere (which was a bit lacking at times during Martial Combat) should be electric.
If the last Martial Combat was anything to go by, when they filled the card with Evolve MMA fighters, there should be a lot of Evolve MMA students in the stadium which could make for some football fan style celebrations if/when their fighters win.
Singapore might be a long way behind the US when it comes to the development of MMA but the gap is closing rapidly. One FC is converting new people into MMA fans every single day as they see the adverts on TV, in the cinemas, on the back of taxis and playing on constant rotation on the SMRT (the Singaporean equivalent of the subway) and decide to find out for themselves what the fuss is all about.
Having followed the sport for almost two years I am probably what passes for a veteran fan in Singapore these days so I thought it was about time I wrote an article!
So there we have it, my first ever Bloody Elbow post. Please be gentle with me...
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