What Happened to the One-Night Tournament?

Joao Zeferino sliced through Brian Foster and Jorge Patino in a combined 3 minutes and 10 seconds to advance to the finals of World Series of Fighting’s single night lightweight tournament. When he entered the cage for the finals, a fight for the right to take on reigning lightweight champion Justin Gaethje, he stood across from Foster, a fighter he’d defeated with relative ease hours earlier. Such is the nature of one-night tournaments, a relic of another era that has faded in popularity but refuses to die altogether. The premise is too simple, the promise too alluring.

The one-night tournament is the foundation of the modern incarnation of mixed martial arts. It was the dominant format of the UFC’s early years and was later adopted by Pancrase and countless smaller promotions that didn’t stand the test of time. It was conceived with a pure sporting mindset: a definitive, quick measure of determining the best fighter in a given field. It soon showed to be something less than that, leaning more toward the spectacle side of mixed martial arts. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, one-night tournaments remained a staple of the sport in its first 13 years.

In the early years, one-night tournaments were in some ways the norm, or at least not abnormal. At a time when people were trying to figure out what this thing – NHB, ultimate fighting, cage fighting, extreme fighting, freestyle fighting, etc. – was, the simple to understand format, the one popularized by the biggest promotion in the world, was attractive to promoters. Over time, the sport moved more toward single fights and tournaments became less common, and at the highest level were limited to Pride Fighting Championships’ annual Grand Prix, which culminated in a one-night four-man tournament that produced some of the largest events in company history. The Pride tournaments were still very much spectacle, but they were also hugely relevant in the world rankings and in who people looked at as the top fighter in the world.

In the years since Pride’s 2007 death, the single night tournament has disappeared from the highest level of MMA, instead showing up on occasion as a drawing gimmick for second and third-tier groups. Of course, those tournaments have not had the same effect as those that had major relevance in the world rankings. Dream’s Grand Prix attempts failed to buoy the company and Japanese MMA. BattleGrounds MMA and Shine Fights attempted to run pay-per-views with single night tournaments as the main draw, and neither ran another show afterward. Bellator added flair to its first Dynamite event with a four-man light heavyweight tournament, but the show pulled in below average ratings.

The draw of the single night tournament has never been about the tournament itself, rather the big draw has always been the meaning of the tournament and the fighters in it. The first UFC tournament was about finding the world’s best fighter or fighting style, and the next few were about finding someone to beat Royce Gracie. After that, they were about finding bigger and better fighters in a developing sport; fighters like Oleg Taktarov, Tank Abbott, Marco Ruas, Don Frye, and Mark Coleman. Later, when UFC divided its tournament by weight class and used them to find contenders for champions like Coleman and Frank Shamrock, they were less of a drawing attraction. In Pride, the tournaments featured the best fighters and biggest stars available with the goal of determining the best in the division. As a result, the tournaments were major successes.

Without top-ranked talent and top stars, one-night tournaments haven’t proven to be significantly more effective than single fights. The problem a lot of second and third-tier promotions have run into is that they have attempted to substitute their lack of top-ranked talent and big stars with a tournament. In theory, the right fighter on the right platform with the right performance can become a star in one night – as Vitor Belfort and Mark Kerr were able to do, but it’s an extreme rarity.

The one organization with the talent and stars to pull off a one-night tournament has no desire to do so. The UFC brass have never been fans of the format, because in addition to the regulatory headaches and safety concerns, injuries often take the best fighter out of the field. Plus, the promotion has had such success building single fights between those two stars, the benefit of a tournament may not be present. Would a one-night tournament with Jon Jones, Daniel Cormier, Ryan Bader, and Anthony Johnson be more viable financially than Jones facing each one individually? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

In modern mixed martial arts, single night tournaments don’t work on a major level without major talent and stars. In recent years, their allure has sunk ships at worst or had little discernable effect at best. Although they sound appealing, in most cases, single night tournaments are best left in the past.

Dan Plunkett has covered MMA for 411Mania since 2008. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @Dan_Plunkett.