Kurto Otto Apologizes for IFL Battlegrounds
by: DarthMolen 1 year, 9 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 18 hours, 4 minutes ago 0
Email Article Print ArticleIFL Battlegrounds, the two hour IFL series on MyNetworkTV, showed its season opener on Marth 12th. Let’s just say that it did not win friends and influence family among the MMA community.
Pro Wrestling is an epithet to most people in the MMA community. The MMA crowd purposefully tries to distance themselves from the Pro wrestling genre and establish themselves as a legitimate sport and not a bloody made-up spectacle.
With repeated references to people being taken out on stretchers, the show starting with a 9-1-1 call, and a total emphasis on the violent portions of the sport, the season opener came off more like professional wrestling than the sport of mixed martial arts. Needless to say, a flame war erupted across the Internet.
It was so chaotic that Kurt Otto, Commissioner of the IFL, came out on MMAWeekly and publicly apologized to the community for the mistake.
“I would like to apologize on behalf of the IFL and MyNetwork if we upset or disappointed anybody in the MMA world. We’re all about MMA being seen in a positive light. In this instance, we dropped the ball and we promise to make everybody proud. We realize as a group that we made a mistake with some parts of the show, but we will learn from this and grow. We want to make this the best possible platform for the sport as possible. The IFL would also like to apologize to our athletes and our coaches. We promise that it will be corrected and we as a group will learn from this.”Stay tuned next Monday to find out what are the changes that he alludes to.