We owe Jeff Blatnick so much, maybe everything
“Jeff had the foresight to see that the sport’s growth required a detailed rule set, a list of prohibited actions, and the oversight of athletic commissions in order to grow.”
There will be a number of inductees into the UFC Hall of Fame this weekend, one of them posthumously. Few know his contributions, but all of us should.
Ben Fowlkes does the story justice, beautifully. If you care about this sport, do yourself a favor – skip this brief excerpt, and click the link at the bottom.
MMA …
If it wasn’t for Blatnick, in fact, we probably wouldn’t be identifying this sport by those three little letters. That was one of his many behind-the-scenes contributions to a sport that, when he came to it in the mid ‘90s, was still struggling to crawl out of its own turbulent infancy.
One of the problems that Blatnick helped the UFC’s first owners at the Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) identify and correct was one of perception.
SEG found itself defending the sport in the media and in court, pushing back against the accusation that it was little more than human cockfighting, as Arizona Senator John McCain once branded it.
If you start going back and watching around UFC 10 or 12, he starts using the term MMA a lot, said referee John McCarthy. Because we were being called no-holds-barred. People were saying, ‘You have no rules. You’re no-holds-barred.’ We were going, ‘No, we’re not. We’re mixed martial arts.’ And I can tell you that when he first started calling it mixed martial arts, everyone hated it. They called it NHB and they liked that. But Jeff kept on it.
According to Nick Lembo, counsel for the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, which in 2001 adopted the unified rules of MMA that Blatnick had played a vital role in developing, that name change was much more than a simple rebranding.
Jeff had the foresight to see that the sport’s growth required a detailed rule set, a list of prohibited actions, and the oversight of athletic commissions in order to grow the sport,” said Lembo.
He also had a more tangible asset that he brought to the table when advocating in favor of MMA and the UFC, and that was his Olympic gold medal.
People look back now and say, ‘It was Ken Shamrock or it was Mark Coleman or it was Royce Gracie,’ but nobody knew who those people were, McCarthy said. Only the hardcore fans knew them at the time. But Jeff Blatnick had a name. Jeff Blatnick was an Olympic gold medalist, and people knew that.
The allure of Blatnick’s gold medal also got him access to politicians who otherwise wouldn’t have been willing to meet with a UFC representative, according to Lembo, and he wasn’t afraid to flex that muscle for the good of the sport, even if he never did it for ego or personal gain.
After SEG sold the UFC to Zuffa in 2001, however, Blatnick’s role began to change. He was replaced as a commentator that year – a move that absolutely crushed him, according to McCarthy – and soon found himself on the outside looking in at the sport he had helped develop. He would go on to work as a judge, but never again had the same direct influence on MMA’s growth and direction.
What’s often forgotten now is the full extent of his impact on MMA, from reshaping the name and the perception of the sport, to developing the modern rulebook, and even pushing for certain figures who would go on to have a profound effect on the future of the UFC.
I think deep down, he knew what he’d done for the sport, McCarthy said. Jeff was never the type to brag or beat his chest. He was just a winner, in whatever he did. And he won for MMA, because he helped keep it alive.