Does MMA help or hurt wrestling?
“My dream was to win a gold medal representing my country, but it didn’t happen,” Mark Munoz said. “I’ll always…
“My dream was to win a gold medal representing my country, but it didn’t happen,” Mark Munoz said. “I’ll always consider myself a wrestler. But these are the cards I was dealt, and my storyline is different now.”
Munoz isn’t complaining. He has found a second, more lucrative career in mixed martial arts. Munoz will fight Chris Weidman in the featured middleweight bout on the UFC on Fuel TV card at HP Pavilion on Wednesday.
Like many of MMA’s biggest stars, including Cain Velasquez, Munoz and Weidman made the jump from amateur wrestling. They are part of a trend that has resulted in a curious juxtaposition. MMA is booming while wrestling, one of the ancient Olympic competitions, has become an endangered sport in the United States.
“It’s very hard to make a living as a wrestler,” said Munoz, 34, a father of four. “I tried, and it’s tough. You end up living paycheck to paycheck each month, and you really weren’t even getting paychecks, just a stipend. But with MMA, you can make pretty good money.”
And as wrestling gets its 15 minutes of fame at the London Games, it’s an open question if MMA is siphoning away potential American medals.
“Does it hurt our Olympic team?” asked U.S. freestyle coach Zeke Jones. “Maybe you could say that we’re losing some of our best talent. But who knows if Cain Velasquez or any of those MMA fighters would have made the team if they had kept wrestling?”
In fact Jones prefers to view the MMA phenomenon as a potential recruiting tool that can help resuscitate U.S. wrestling, which has high hopes for London.
“The way I look at, we get a lot of exposure through MMA,” Jones said. “There’s no question that wrestling gave them tools to become great fighters, and everybody notices that.”
Velasquez, who was an All-American at Arizona State, points out that there’s only one high school and college sport that puts athletes on a path for MMA: wrestling.
“It really does give you a little taste of what it takes to be a mixed martial artist,” said Velasquez, 29. “You learn the value of hard work and just how hard to you can push your body. It’s the same thing in MMA.”
The bonus is being able to pay your bills.