There are three main women’s sports whose entertainment and marketing value are undeniable. The first is volleyball, which I wrote about in Part 1. The second is Tennis, and the third is MMA – Mixed Martial Arts.Personally, I prefer women’s fighting, but for the general public, these sports have the greatest appeal in the order I have listed.
Tennis
Williams, Osaka, and Sharapova don’t exactly have the same styles of play but are all exciting and marketable. While most of the movement on a tennis court is two dimensional, their athleticism is very pronounced. Fans disparage women’s sports like basketball for not being as exciting as men’s, and I agree, but that criticism is baseless when applied to tennis.
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Okay, maybe Osaka does not put as much force into her swing as Federer, but there’s no way anyone notices. In addition, the tactics, play styles, aggression, and skill levels are equivalent across genders.
Even the highlights are essentially the same. If you dislike watching women’s tennis, you probably just dislike tennis. Tennis players are neither exceptionally tall nor do they appear stalwart. They look like regular fit people, so the builds of both male and female players are about the same.
While I am not a fan of the grunting, I do not dislike it. However, I do find it funny that they wear skirts during competition because the top female players do not have a “skirt” attitude when they are out there.
When you mix that with the grunting, it makes their dress code seem even more gratuitous. In the end, tennis is tennis, and I feel no disappointment if there are no men’s games on any given day I sit down for a tennis match.
MMA
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Before you check out women’s MMA, I will warn you; you will have to get used to watching girls get knocked out. If you are a male, it will be especially uncomfortable for you for at least a few months. So, you have been warned. It’s right here in black and white.
Gloves
I want to stress that I do not feel the following way about all women’s martial arts. It’s not that different combat sports have less able competitors, just that some sports customs suppress women’s athletic ability. Women’s boxing, for example, is trash because it’s not exciting.
The gloves are way too big, and their heads are the same size as men of similar weights. The fact that they are not as strong and their fists are smaller makes their matches even less interesting. Most boxers punch harder than MMA fighters, but women’s MMA fighters usually have more KOs on their highlight reel than boxers.
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MMA gloves have almost no padding, so KO’s occur more often. The whole point here is that female fighters have the power, and MMA gloves do not minimize the impact of the force they generate.
If you see the gloves up close, they look like a leather jacket over some hand wraps. While I could be wrong, I do not believe MMA’s women have more KOs because they punch harder. The gloves make a huge difference.
MMA Standouts
Looking at the divisions in the UFC, men typically have more grapplers, and women have more proficient strikers. One explanation for this is cultural influence. Most American grapplers start out in wrestling.
Most schools do not have girls wrestling teams, and parents don’t exactly want their teenage daughter sweating and gripping with teenage boys. So, if you like to see lots of striking, women’s MMA is a great place to focus your attention.
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Fighters like Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Valentina Shevchenko are the best the sport has to offer in terms of skill, talent, and raw violence. Joanna Jedrzejczyk is the greatest women’s fighter inside the cage today. No one eclipses Ronda Rousey’s impact on the sport as a whole, but Joanna’s violent style is something to be heralded.
The women are rarely afraid of each other in the way men seem to be. While there are rarely brawls between women, they certainly are not gun shy. You typically see fewer slams, but again, that is because their training backgrounds are different. Valentina Shevchenko is The Best Ever as far as female fighters go.
She just does not have the title reign to cement herself Greatest of All Time.
But she is top five pound-for-pound amongst all champions today, in my opinion. She should be ranked top five in the world period by next November.
If you watch her fight and think she is not better than and just as exciting as most male champions, you should stop watching the sport. Stick to pretending you are a Conor McGregor fan because you watched a few press conference highlights in 2017.
