UFC champion Tyron Woodley says building a more diverse audience can start with him

On the week marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the late Muhammad Ali’s 75^th birthday and the close of Barack Obama’s presidency, the question of widening UFC diversity was happily embraced by welterweight champion Tyron Woodley.

Woodley, who retained his belt with a majority draw in November against Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson and will meet him in a March 4 rematch at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, said during a Los Angeles meeting with reporters Wednesday that expanding his sport’s audience is mostly “on the UFC.”

In Woodley, the organization owned by Beverly Hills talent agency WME-IMG has an ideal voice — a boldly opinionated product of Ferguson, Mo., where civil unrest broke out following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown — to help accomplish the objective.

Yet, the company is still grappling with how to employ an effective formula to achieve a more diverse audience like boxing has.

Woodley serves as an occasional analyst on Fox. He’s made several public appearances pitching the appeal of mixed martial arts.

“For sure, I’m doing it myself. Certain athletes show themselves as marketable, and the UFC gets behind them, they help push them,” Woodley said. “I’m a husband, a father of four, a gym owner, an actor, an analyst, a stuntman, a Christian — every avenue you can take it, I have those layers. I grew up in Ferguson, grew up in gang-banging, was in a family of 14 in a four-bedroom house — complete dysfunction — and I made a choice to be successful.

“What is there not to market? I fight like hell. I’m built a certain way, never taken performance-enhancing drugs.”

Woodley became so bothered by the lack of a marketing push following his title victory over Robbie Lawler last year in Atlanta that he’s formed his own social-media channel.

“I can complain about it, be the victim, or [create] my own propaganda so people don’t get a filtered version,” Woodley said. “They see me for who I am, what I do, what I stand for, what my game plan is and how I want to be remembered. You have to take control over your own career. I don’t plan to lose this belt for a very long time.”

He also said in a television interview Wednesday that black dominant flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson could also afford some more UFC marketing support.

Woodley has an unmistakable grasp of the legacy left him by King and Ali.

“I always think about the freedom fighters, the people who sacrificed for us,” Woodley said at the luncheon. “At the time [King] was doing that, he didn’t think he’d be ‘Martin Luther King.’ He was doing it because it was right. We also have to think as fighters, celebrities — whatever you want to call us — that we have an obligation to point out stuff that’s just completely wrong.

“Muhammad Ali said it best when he said, ‘I might lose some money in this by sitting out some of my prime [protesting the Vietnam draft], but this is right.’ And this is why people remember him. I just made a vow to myself this year that things that are unjust, things that are untrue, things that are racially driven, I’m not going to be quiet. I’m going to speak up. In the past, I said I didn’t want to speak on certain issues because the second I said one thing about race, then ‘Tyron’s playing the race card.’ But if you really think about it, what is the race card? The race card is that the man held me down, I had unfair circumstances and I wasn’t able to be successful because I was held down.

“This is not me being vindictive. This is me making my way out of nowhere, rising above my situation. You might live in an impoverished environment. That doesn’t have to be you.”

He said that the company missed a golden opportunity to spread that message in November, when he fought Thompson at Madison Square Garden in the UFC’s debut card in New York.

“It’s the UFC’s job. If they want to take it to the next level, really capture the market, New York would’ve been the perfect opportunity — the Mecca of hip-hop — you could’ve done a little bit better, in a different way, to grab that market and bring in a completely different demographic, showing this is a different way to keep [young people] off the street, to turn the aggression into something positive,” Woodley said. “Martial arts is about respect and discipline.”

“I’m going to put a strong push on the UFC. I think that’s their job. I’m the only African American fighter on the roster who can capture that market, especially with Floyd Mayweather retired. That market is up for grabs. But you have to educate that community on what [UFC] is. Most people in the African American community, or urban or boxing community, or whatever you want to call it, think that mixed martial arts is crazy, a bunch of crazy white guys kicking the hell out of each other with a sprinkling of brothers in there.

“They don’t see it as karate, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, Tae Kwon Do, Sambo — the beautiful, affordable art you can play if you can’t afford golf or tennis.”