Sports: Mixed Martial Arts: Once no-rules combat sports rise to compete with top boxing events

Combat arts, or in the older terminology "mixed-martial arts" such as the public has learned from Jackie Chan movies, are on the rise. Not just in movies, gymnasiums, and underground club-arenas, but in large events with ticketed boxoffices that make comparison with major boxing events possible and inevitable.

Stateline carries an indepth analysis and an enlargeable chart making that inevitable comparison. Extreme fiting, as its sometimes called

has existed since the early 1990s but only since 1996 has it followed a set of unified rules, according to Tim Lueckenhoff, national president of the Association of Boxing Commissions (ABC) and an administrator with the Missouri Boxing Commission. “Before then, there were very few rules that protected the participants from serious injury,” he said.

Some states are harnessing the sport’s popularity to generate tax revenue, while virtually the same number have taken a "not in my backyard" stance.

Mixed martial arts is a legal, regulated sport in at least 19 states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Nevada is the premier locale for the top events.

In his July 20 article online, "Combat sport in the spotlight," author Joseph Popiolkowski supplies a host of fascinating details about the historical background and crazy-quilt of state-by-state patterns of regulation and nonregulation in the USA, but he doesn't supply our thirst for something of the cultural links between the live events and the rash of ultra-extreme no-rules combat in video-games. As extreme fiting becomes better known, it will become increasingly controversial. When its consciousn and unconscious links to the video-games industry, now exposed as wilfully subliminally suypplying video-sex scenarios under the violence and rendering the whole experience one of violent sexual pleasure, we're going to come under a barrage of examinations also of the unconscious links between sex and violence, in the sense of esoteric rape, such as we have never before contemplated. Hey, Fight Club was mere peter-pannery. - Owlb