If you think MMA isn't that popular of a sport, then you're clearly mistaken. Television ratings for the sport's preeminent league, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), routinely outdraw every other sport except NFL football among men aged 18-34.

The sport has also signed a recent deal to appear on CBS in the near future. So if you're wondering if MMA has gone mainstream, stop wondering, it's already there.

But the sport still has a ton of detractors, and quite frankly, this isn't going to help.

The sport is apparently becoming wildly popular among racist skinheads and other young extremists. Many white supremacist online forums have recently established discussion groups devoted specifically to MMA; skinhead gangs across the country are raising money by hosting illegal backyard tournaments; and retired white supremacist cage fighter Mike Buell runs a major MMA training school in Arizona whose logo is a Celtic cross (often used as a white supremacist symbol) and the phrase "Hail Victory" (the German equivalent is "sieg heil").

It also doesn't help that Melvin Costa, who we've written about here before for his questionable tattoos, is the first openly white nationalist MMA fighter to become a Top Ten-ranked competitor in the sanctioned organization King of the Cage, which was once a proving ground for up-and-coming fighters, some of whom went on to fame and fortune in the UFC.

The question, naturally, is what is MMA going to do about this? It's more than apparent that having any skinhead fanbase is not exactly what a mainstream sport wants - or needs. Of course, there are plenty of soccer teams out there that have equally bad minor fanbases, but I'm sure MMA would like to avoid that.

I'm not sure what the sport will do, but if they hope to expand their audience and reach, they're obviously going to have to do something about this.


White Nationalists, Skinheads Flock to Cage Fighting, Mixed Martial Arts [Alternet]