Ultimate Fighting Betting: A serious sport for proper athletes ... apparently

Other / Ralph Ellis / 17 October 2008 / Leave a Comment

It's UFC 89 at Birmingham on Saturday so Ralph Ellis has taken a look at this little-known 'sport'.

This column has cast doubts before on Ricky Hatton's training regime - or rather his regime when he's out of training.

Graham Taylor years ago discussed Paul Gascoigne's "refuelling" habits, and Hatton's liking for beers and burgers between fights can't be good for him now he's past his 30th birthday.

So it was ironic to see The Hitman pictured flying out from Manchester airport on the same page of this morning's Daily Star as their regular Ultimate Fighting column - especially when you then read the quotes of American UFC star Brandon Vera.

Vera is also past his 30th birthday - he's 31 now - and is trying to salvage his career after losing consecutive heavyweight fights to Tim Sylvia and Fabricio Werdum. He climbs back into the ring tomorrow at Birmingham's Indoor Arena for UFC 89 having switched to the light-heavyweight division and claiming a whole change of attitude.

Ultimate Fighting is one of those growing sports that we old time hacks have tended to look on as a bit of a circus, but it's reaching the stage where it deserves to be taken more seriously. My former colleague Kevin Francis has been ahead of everybody else with a regular column on the sport for the Star, and the growing audiences on Setanta justify the decision. It's not wrestling, it's a proper contest, and just like boxing demands the highest standards of fitness and dedication.

Vera started his career with eight wins on the spin, then suffered those two defeats before coming back with a lack-lustre points decision over Reese Andy.

He says that's changed his attitude: "I'd been treating this whole thing as a kind of a hobby and that was just not the way to make the grade.

"The best quote I heard was that if you treat business as a hobby, it is going to pay you like a hobby. But if you treat your business as a business, it is going to pay you like a business".

That improved training regime, and dropping down a weight, should easily help Vera to justify a price of [1.58] to beat fellow American Keith Jardine tomorrow.

If Hatton's press people get the cuttings sent out to his training base in America, he could do worse than read the UFC column on the same page.

He's claiming he feels fitter than ever, and is already benefiting from working with Floyd Mayweather Senior. But the problem will be whether he has enough time before he meets Paulie Malignaggi in Las Vegas on November 22 to work all the junk food and drink back out of his system and get to real fighting sharpness. He's [1.43] to win the fight at the moment and [1.8] to do it on points - but could he really last the full length of a fight?

Mayweather, who dubs himself the 'poet laureate' of boxing with his amusing raps, was talking a good game as they prepared to fly away. But Hatton has also been working with up and coming Manchester-based trainer Lee Beard and the 27-year-old's fitness input will be severely tested by the younger Malignaggi who has lost only one in 26 fights.

Five things you might not know about ultimate fighting

1. It's based on a Brazilian form of mixed martial arts called vale-tudo

2. Early contests in the 1990s had no weight divisions, and 12 stone Royce Gracie proved a skilled small man could beat a powerful big one by claiming three of the first four titles

3. Senator John McCain, the guy now running against Barack Obama to be US president, tried to ban the 'no holds barred' early version of the sport - and in response it was cleaned up with clearer safety rules

4. Every round is five minutes - title contests have five rounds and others have three

5. Pay-per-view revenues for the sport in the US were more than 22million dollars in 2006 - more than both boxing and wrestling