(Jamal Patterson, salesman by day, mixed martial art ass-kicker by night, via NYTimes)

If you enjoy witnessing thorough beat-downs, this is your lucky week.

This Friday night at the Meadowlands scary dudes with nicknames like The Janitor and The Silencer will be punching and kicking the daylights out of each other at a "mixed martial arts" event held by the International Fight League (IFL).

What do these fighty dudes have in common with the NBA or the U.S. Tennis Association? The same person has done PR for all of them. Joe Favorito is currently the head of communications for the IFL. To him, successful sports PR is all about the personal stories, so shifting jobs in tennis to basketball, to mixed martial arts wasn't that much of punch in the gut.

Here's a sampling of the placements leading up to the brawl:

New York Times: "The Businessman Who Finds Time to Fight"

NYPost.com video feature on the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy

CBS Sports feature on Mark Miller (Chicago, Ill.):

IFL preview in the lower Hudson Journal News

Canadian Press feature on Chris Horodecki (London, Ont.):

SI.com Q-and-A with featherweight titleholder Waggney "The Silencer" Fabiano

ESPN.com feature on trainer Martin Rooney

Yankees hats with Crips and Bloods gang symbols are still available in some Brooklyn stores and online according to a Daily News story today.

The PR ramifications of this are pretty obvious. All we can say is someone needs to hop to it and fix the problem. Most of us in the business have dealt with the extreme chain of approval within corporate marketing departments. At the bare minimum two people are are responsible: a creative with the idea, and the executive who signed off on it.

Buffalo NY-based New Era, maker of official MLB merch pled ignorance in a statement after the original story broke last August.