UFC & Reebok unveil Fight Kit

Today the UFC held a press event to officially unveil the Reebok Fight Night Kit that all athletes will wear into the Octagon. The event streamed live.

The meeting of the Vegas based fight world and the New York based fashion world was not seamless. The Reebok fashion experts looked to the uninitiated a little like extras from a Capitol scene in The Hunger Games. Someone busting out a Blue Steel look would have made it complete.

The UFC regularly puts on the most exciting live content on Earth. Whoever was in charge of that production, it was not the UFC. They couldn’t even start on time. And you couldn’t see the apparel.

Fighters are not models, as UFC women’s strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk pointed out. The parade of them was inadequately rehearsed, with some only partly stifling laughter, and randomly looking around at various points. The fighters are capable of extraordinary achievement, but not without a least a modicum of prep. They did however look better than models would in a fight.

This is what we have going forward:

•Performance and customization were the two points most focused on by the presenters.

•Fighters first were introduced by nation, with a different kit for each.

•There are three versions: Country (nation-specific colors), Universal (black/grey), and Champions (black with gold and red trim). Cain Velasquez was awkwardly introduced as Mexican. The UFC heavyweight is of course US born, and a US citizen; he is of course proud of his heritage, but he is not Mexican.

•Reference was made to varying shorts length, and there both loose fit and Vale Tudo fight short designs.

•The apparel features both Reebok and UFC logos, with the latter being much more prominent. Fighters’ names appear on the back vertically, something Reebok’s Corinna Werlke said was hard to do for athletes with long names. Easy for her to say.

•At one point Werlke said “Half of you guys have probably never worn a bra.” She probably didn’t realize the UG was listening.

•She also asked Joanna Jedrzejczyk what happened to her arm.

•Hoodies, jerseys, and fight specific sports bras are also available as part of the kits.

•Some of the apparel is already available at reebok.com.

•You can now order a walkout tee for any fighter in the UFC, for $95.

•If you order one of these RIGHT NOW, it may some day sell for $!,000,000 like that stamp with the upside down airplane on it:

Very many of the other shirts were not typos, but betrayed a baffling lack of familiarity with fighters in the UFC. For example, how many people even knew this is some variation of their name?

Who is this? They have no UFC Hall of Famer Matt Hughes, but they have his twin brother, who fought in the UFC once in 2000?

Mixed martial arts is the greatest sport in the world, and the UFC is the greatest league in the sport. The sport deserves better than what it got today. These uniforms may be awesome; there was no way to tell. And when there was decent lighting, the camera angle showed fighters awkwardly reading from a teleprompter. It felt like they brought in the team the team that produces the angry Wand vids.

Reebok is better than that.

Everyone is laughing at them right now, at best. The whole thing is kind of funny, but really, it’s not. Someone should get fired. And punched in the face. Or can you produce a debacle like this at Reebok with no consequences?