The Roman Coliseum proved that we as a species are a simple, easily-entertained people. Give us some good food, the company of friends and family and a little live entertainment and we’ll be content to sit and watch all day long. That is, provided the entertainment is human brutality with no explicit purpose beyond whipping the desensitized masses into a blood-lust frenzy, hungry only for more.
Now, in our much more safety-conscious world, we have adapted the ancient gladiatorial battles for a modern audience. That is to say, we’ve gotten rid of the swords. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (or UFC) and other smaller organizations such as Strikeforce and World Extreme Cagefighting have cashed in on the successes of boxing and martial arts competitions to create an, at times, disturbingly violent hybrid.
In a typical mixed martial arts match, two competitors are locked inside a 750 square foot octagon (the ring has become an icon of the UFC), and try to beat each other to a pulpy mess that, at the end, somewhat resembles a human being. While there are countless technical rules, the only hard and fast rules seem to be no punching the opponent if he’s really unconscious (though stages of limited consciousness are fair game) and no attacking the special spot right below the bellybutton and in-between the legs.
While I am doubtlessly oversimplifying the skill and finesse necessary to become a UFC champion, the fact remains that if you can’t take thirty or forty elbows to your chin over the course of a five minute round, you’re not going to make it very far in the sport. I scoured campus to ask a UFC official what they thought about my claim that UFC fighters were just adult-sized versions of the bullies who used to take my lunch money in kindergarten, but apparently Connecticut College doesn’t have an on-campus UFC liaison. Though I was indeed shocked, I refused to relinquish my journalistic integrity and found a source who was every bit as credible instead.
My neighbor, whose name will remain hidden (you can call him either ‘Jason C’ or ‘J Cordova’, either one works), is a real-life UFC fan. And by ‘fan’, I mean that his girlfriend’s brother had an extra ticket to a UFC event in Tampa and he went. When asked about the sport in general, however, he was much more knowledgeable.
Said Jason, “once you get past the punching and kicking, it’s actually a really technical game. It’s not all blood and guts; they’re actually pretty skilled athletes.”
When I pressed him on what he meant, he pointed towards the oft-ignored wrestling component of the sport. “Most of the fight is actually on the ground, submissions and holds and stuff. I mean yeah sometimes someone will slip in an elbow and knock the other guy out, but for the most part it’s about submission.”
Despite his best efforts, Jason did little to dispel my impression that the UFC and its many splinter organizations were cashing in on mayhem, blood and gore rather than legitimate athletic achievement. The post-fight brawl at an MMA event in Nashville this past week, which involved a number of people outside the fighters in the octagon needlessly pummeling each other, initially only served to confirm my feelings regarding the sport.
However, UFC President Dana White’s reaction to the fracas may have helped to win over fans on the periphery like myself. White, who has helped bring the UFC light years ahead of where they were only a few years ago, was upset not only that the post-fight melee happened, but that the event itself, which was televised nationally on CBS, garnered so much publicity. White has worked ardently to change the perception that the UFC is a devolution of boxing to the lowest common denominator as opposed to a test of athleticism and skill in a controlled setting.
The embarrassment that was Nashville’s extraneous fighting does not reflect poorly on the organization responsible (Strikeforce) or on CBS, but rather it falls unfairly on the shoulders of the UFC. This is the same UFC that has kept a relatively clean track record, brought a sport thought to be barbaric and socially unacceptable to cable television and pay-per-view records, and simultaneously given birth to a number of competing organizations. Mixed martial arts may never become one of the major sports in America, but if more people started taking a stance like Dana White’s, it at least has a much better shot.
