Mixed Martial Arts (or MMA, for short) is a full contact sport where two people enter a cage and fight until someone is knocked out, someone submits, the referee stops the fight or the match runs out of time. It is a sport that has it’s fair share of controversy stemming from the sport’s brutal, uncensored beginnings in the early 1990’s. Senator John McCain even went so far as to the dub the sport “human cock fighting”. Fast forward almost twenty years later, MMA is making strides in mainstream sports, overtaking both boxing and pro wrestling in popularity and pay per view sales. Yet, despite this, professional MMA fighting is banned due to “its violent nature.”
There have been seven bills to bring pro MMA to the Big Apple in the last seven years. The first six of them were shot down. Yet on February 2, the New York Senate voted in favor of legalizing the sport. The vote was 48-14 and is currently awaiting approval by the State Assembly (where the previous bills were shot down). But fans of the sport are highly optimistic since there has been growing support to legalize it here in the Big Apple. Governor Andrew Cuomo even included funding for future MMA events in his budget proposal and even remarked about the economic possibilities of legalizing the sport. The UFC is even starting to make plans to hold events at Madison Square Garden if the bill gets passed or if the new budget is approved as early as this November.
As a fan of the sport and martial arts in general, I hope that the Assembly approves to legalize the sport! And I hope that I can get to see the first UFC fight in my home state!
