Where’s WAMMA?

I first learned about WAMMA last winter when I stopped by the gym Team Bison trained out of to do some fighter profiles. Head coach Mike Reilly (yeah, that’s Brett Rogers’ coach) told me there was an opportunity to rank female fighters. After a couple of phone calls and a long conversation about the female fight scene I was on WAMMA’s ranking committee.

I was really excited about the opportunity, because I’ve been frustrated about the state of women’s MMA where fighters are more likely to get inked because they’ve had photo shoots for Maxim or Playboy than because of their fighting ability. Although some of this is obviously due to marketing, I believed (and still do) that many promoters just don’t have the information they need. And how could they? The majority of female fights are not even on youtube, let alone televised. Even Sherdog can’t get their act together enough to update their site with all of the women’s fights. And sites that have attempted to list women’s fights are notoriously outdated and/or inaccurate.

While WAMMA’s male rankings were a media-only poll, there were so few experts on women’s MMA that it was an industry poll where fighters, promoters, trainers and managers could vote on a limited basis. Fighters were unable to vote for themselves or the weight class in which they most recently competed. We got a handful of men and women together to begin the ranking process. We began working out issues that immediately arose, such as how to rank women competing in more than one weight class (which is quite common) and how exactly to determine “inactivity” when it’s often quite difficult for even the best female fighters to get more than a fight a year. These kinks were slowly working themselves out as pollsters came up with voting panels of women in specific weight classes. Women that hadn’t fought since 2005 were eventually removed from the list while current fighters were added on the list. Women ranked below those they beat slowly rose up. Although the promised password-protected message forum for debating ranking-related issues never came to fruition, a public discussion occured on the fightergirls website in which several pollsters shared and explained their rankings and debate ensued. Josh Barnett, a member of the WAMMA ranking committee, was also a vocal critic. He believes that many pollsters don’t follow the sport well enough–in part because most are based in the U.S. “I think they’re too insular,” Barnett said. “In my opinion the competition (in the US) is not as stiff as their counterparts in Japan.”

In April, Mike Lynch resigned from WAMMA and Sam Caplan became interim replacement. John Morgan accepted an offer to serve as the interim chair of its fighter rankings committee. Shortly thereafter, Pat Militech and Sam Caplan left for undisclosed reasons. John Morgan soon followed suit, leaving the WAMMA women’s rankings in the hands of Dave Szady. Szady told us to send the rankings to Andrew Falzon, who sent us right back to Szady. Tim from FighterGirls stepped up to the plate, asking pollsters to send him the rankings. Szady told us that we could do this while WAMMA tries to formalize a Ranking Chairman, and said they hoped to have things settled within two weeks. While it’s only been ten days, Szady has not responded to requests for comment  and WAMMA has not even posted the latest rankings. They are, however, posted on the FighterGirls site.

I’d heard a lot of criticism of WAMMA for a long time. MMA Weekly’s Jeff Cain was one of the loudest voices speaking out against WAMMA. “Pat Miletich’s previous involvement was a conflict of interest considering he’s trained people the panel votes on and while I would never call Miletich’s character into question, the first title bout WAMMA put together was between Fedor and a Miletich trained fighter, Tim Sylvia.” Cain points out. He believes the rankings were not independent and had questionable motives, and that the voting panel was uneducated as well as biased (since most have sponsored and/or worked with fighters, some while on the panel). Cain pointed out many board members at the time of WAMMA’s conception were working for the now-defunct Elite XC. He has also called to question whether the rankings were truly independent. “I think they purposely rank fighters to coincide with who is fighting for the title instead of the other way around,” Cain says, pointing out that Arlovski was not ranked second by any independent rankings until he was lined up to fight Fedor. “The whole thing was designed, in my opinion,  to crown a champion that would rival the UFC titles and they found Fedor and ran with it,” Cain said.

As Josh Stein pointed out on these very pages, WAMMA’s belt (for male fighters) doesn’t mean very much when Affliction and UFC fighters don’t compete. But I was willing to put that criticism aside because it doesn’t hold much weight for the female fighters. The idea of legitimate women’s rankings is thrilling when female MMA world titles are notoriously absent from women’s MMA or die with the promotions they came with (such as Bodog).  Besides, how can one criticize promoters for only signing on the most popular fighters when they have such limited means of information? Cain has been quick to point out that rankings by trainers or promoters aren’t exactly independent. He also posed the question–Since when do ranking systems hand out belts? “This isn’t boxing,” Cain says.  ”There’s an agenda.”

Whatever the agenda for female WAMMA rankings may or may not have been, it appears to have all but fizzled and died. Perhaps the rankings will rise from the ash… but seeing as they haven’t even been posted on the WAMMA website, I’m not holding my breath.