Once viewed as an enterprise more akin to pro wrestling than boxing, mixed martial arts has assimilated into the American sports diet over the past decade. Fox, NBC and CBS all have MMA among their sports offerings, and the lines are increasingly blurring between how boxing and MMA — once diametrically opposed — are being presented and regarded.

The latest evidence of this trend is Spike TV’s deal with burgeoning boxing powerhouse promoter Al Haymon, who is spending $20 million to bring live boxing matches to NBC in prime-time this year. Haymon and his anonymous investors are also shelling out cash to other networks, including Spike, which now serves as a cable home for Haymon’s “Premier Boxing Champions” series.

The first of 12 PBC cards set for Spike this year aired on Friday, and network president Kevin Kay — a key partner to the UFC in ushering MMA out of the shadows — plans on giving boxing a treatment similar to what the network did with mixed martial arts, making it alluring to younger viewers.

“We’ve always had (a) pretty strong 18-to-34-year-old young male audience that’s been trained to watch combat sports, particularly mixed martial arts and now kickboxing,” Kay told the Herald. “And if we can transfer them over to boxing, and get them entertained by boxing, and get them invested in the stories of the fighters and build some stars, I think then boxing has a longer life.”

Spike is placing its PBC fights among a year-round “Friday Night Lights Out” rotation of live combat sports, including 12-16 cards of mixed martial arts from the Bellator organization, which is owned by Spike’s parent company, Viacom, and eight events staged by global kickboxing outfit Glory. On those weeks when there aren’t live fights, Spike will broacast “shoulder programming” designed to introduce viewers to fighters’ backstories and build momentum for grudge matches.

In this emerging model, boxing and MMA don’t merely co-exist. They will stand shoulder-to-shoulder, on a sports night they collectively could have to themselves.

“There’s very little sports competition on Friday nights,” Kay said. “Friday, to me, feels like a competitive environment that is conducive to making sure that people are not forced to make a choice between what we’re offering and somebody else.”

Digging deeper with Kay

While we had Kay’s attention, we begged a question that arises out of Bellator’s announcement of a Kimbo Slice-Ken Shamrock bout set for June 20.: Why make this fight considering that Slice is 41, Shamrock is 51, and both have had extended periods of recent inactivity?

“Kimbo wants to come back and Ken wants to come back,” Kay said. “And I think one of the things I’d say about Ken is, you look at other 40- and 50-year-old fighters, for me 50 is the new 40, in a way. You look at Randy Couture, who won a title back when I think he was 42. You look at (boxer) Bernard Hopkins; 50 doesn’t mean you’re old.

“I think it’s going to be about, is Ken going to be prepared? He seems like he’s really prepared to me, he’s working really hard in the gym, he’s taking this very seriously, he’s in great shape. Kimbo is a little bit more of a mystery. But certainly he’s got that knockout punch power. . . . So I just think it’s a very entertaining fight, and I don’t think that just because a guy is 51 — again, there’s plenty of examples in sports of people who have triumphed in their mid to late-40s and early-50s. So, you know, give the guy a shot.”

While there’s a perception that Haymon may be overly invested out of the gate for the PBC venture for to last and become profitable, Kay doesn’t buy it.

“There’s a lot of mysteries about Al Haymon, and financing, that’s his ball game. He seems to have plenty of money and deep pockets to be very invested in this,” Kay said. “This is a big opportunity, we’ve talked about this a lot, to bring the sport back and give it wider distribution on lots of platforms and expose people to it in a way it hasn’t been exposed in 20, 30 years. So I’m counting on Al, we’re all counting on Al. It’s his pockets, but I think it’s a smart plan. I’m not concerned about it.”

It would seem that Bellator could benefit from another recent business deal, UFC’s exclusive fighter uniform agreement with Reebok. That would presumably open up a bigger recruiting field for Bellator, and Kay agrees.

“I think the more I read about it and the more that I understand it — and believe me, I don’t completely understand it, I don’t know the mechanics of the deal — but it feels like there’s a lot of discontent among (UFC) fighters,” Kay said. “Some will do very well by that deal, at least the way I understand it, and others won’t, and will not be able to get the kinds of sponsorship that they’ve gotten in the past. And I think that’s an opportunity for Bellator, because we don’t have any of that restriction.

“There’s no ‘sponsor tax’ in Bellator; there’s no restrictions on sponsors, other than our standards and practices. Bellator is in a position now to allow revenue streams that fighters have counted on for a long time that maybe they’re not going to be able to get in any other organization, and I think that’s a real opportunity.”

Finally, we wondered with Spike in preliminary discussions with a pro wrestling outfit called Ring of Honor, whether the staged sport — with its predetermined outcomes — would fit the “Friday Night Lights Out” theme.

“I’m not sure there is a deal there,” he said. “We’re just kind of getting to know each other. . . . I think for Spike, the big question is, do we want to get into the professional wrestling business in any way? And I don’t have the answer to that yet.

“I don’t know that we’re going to do anything there, but if we do something, it’s probably not part of ‘Friday Night Lights Out.’ We want to keep that for real sports.