Every time you think the sport of mixed martial arts has turned the corner, that the public has been educated to what the sport is and what it isn't, the parade of ignorance begins anew.

While it still hasn't been officially announced yet, it is an open secret that UFC is about to hook up with Home Box Office.

The latest piece to reference the nearly completed deal was seen last week on the boxing site secondsout.com, reported by the great Thomas Hauser, biographer of Muhammad Ali.

Mr. Hauser's piece was a cogent analysis of the state of the boxing game. In it, Hauser mentions that HBO is near an agreement to broadcast three UFC shows in 2007. Former HBO Sports president Seth Abraham is quoted as saying:

"I think it's ridiculous for HBO to televise UFC. When I was at HBO, we had discussions once or twice a year about professional wrestling. We all agreed that it would get good ratings and we also agreed that it would tarnish our boxing franchise. I feel the same way about UFC. Boxing has a storied history. When HBO attaches itself to boxing, it attaches itself to Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. It attaches itself to history, achievement, and glory. UFC has none of those things, and it will tarnish HBO's boxing franchise. Will UFC get good ratings? Probably. But so would naked boxing."

Where do I start with this?

Maybe the fact UFC and wrestling have nothing to do with each other?

Or how about with Leavander Johnson? Don't know the name? Johnson was a lightweight fighter brutally beaten to death in front of friends and family in his own hometown of Atlantic City on an HBO broadcast in 2005.

So a network which telecasted what amounted to a snuff film live on television will have their image tarnished if they broadcast a sport that has never to date had a death in sanctioned competition? Really?

And I don't know about naked boxing, which also has nothing to do with UFC, but a simple look at HBO networks' schedule for last Saturday on their Web site reveals such gems as "Cathouse the Series 3: Girlfriends" and "Intimate Sessions 8: Janine." Yes, how dare they sully such high-brow entertainment by associating with UFC.

Then there's the "history" argument. It gets easier and easier to debunk MMA's naysayers by the day, so nonsequitors regarding MMA's relative lack of history are popping up more often for lack of anything else to bring to the table.

True, MMA doesn't have 150 years of history behind it. But the sport already has its first generation of legends from the early days, founders like Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock.

More important, though, is that this generation's stars are producing the sorts of rivalries and competitive drama that make championships important and leave historical legacies, right before our eyes.

Look no further than the UFC welterweight title, which Matt Hughes turned into one of the biggest-money titles in combat sports. Hughes won 19 of 20 fights and avenged his only loss in that span. His title loss to Georges St. Pierre at UFC 65 was so important specifically because it ended Hughes' run of dominance. Now it is GSP's turn to build off Hughes' legacy, including the rubber match of their series. If St. Pierre becomes the sort of titleholder Hughes was, whomever is the next great welterweight will carry the legacy created by Hughes and built on by GSP.

Or the UFC light heavyweight title, which already has built a tremendous lineage from Tito Ortiz to Randy Couture to Chuck Liddell. Liddell has made the belt UFC's marquee draw with his trilogy against Couture and rivalry with Ortiz.

If MMA does supplant boxing as the lead combat sport in North America, 30 years from now fans and writers will likely look back at the Hughes-St. Pierre, Liddell-Couture, and Liddell-Ortiz rivalries the same way boxing types get misty-eyed over Ali-Frazier. If such talk offends the sensibilities of boxing fans, so be it.

There's been a profound change in media coverage of MMA out on the West Coast since the sport became sanctioned in California last year. UFC has done major shows in Anaheim, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and the San Diego area, and smaller shows have gone up elsewhere.

Major West Coast media outlets, including FOXSports.com, now simply treat MMA like just another sport. The Los Angeles Times' Web site changed their boxing page to boxing/MMA. The rest of SoCal's dailies, and the Las Vegas Journal Review, give the sport regular, straight-up coverage. Local TV affiliates show up at UFC shows and do features on local fighters when a show's in town, instead of talking about pro wrestling and naked boxing and 1,000 other things that might make for a cutesy sound bite, but have zero to do with the sport.

The good news is, the example of MMA on the West Coast shows that once people actually getting around to understanding it, the stereotypes all but vanish.

The bad news is, until this happens all around the North America (and MMA has still yet to be sanctioned in major media markets like New York, Chicago, and Toronto), the more popular MMA becomes, the more likely people who don't like MMA are going to hyperventilate about the sport. And the more apparent it becomes that MMA is here to stay, the more ridiculous and desperate those arguments will get.