Why I love MMA
Tonight, as I am sure many of you are aware UFC 83, Serra vs. St. Pierre will be airing on PPV across the country.
I thought it would be rather timely to post an article about the now insanely popular sport of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts, for the uninitiated). This will be the first of a three part sports series here at CJS. Keep a lookout the rest of this week for Lee S Hart’s: Why I Love Hockey on the 21st, and E Dagger’s: Why I love Baseball on the 23rd, assuming he has managed to recover from his recent Vegas Trip by then, that is.
Honestly, the popularity of MMA is a little bit of a mixed bag of feelings for me. I remember not more than 6 years ago being one of only two regularly paying students at a BJJ and Muay Thai Kickboxing class being run out of the aerobics studio of a local independent gym. Since then, in a few short years the UFC has exploded from a sport that was in 1999 banned from PPV only kept alive by a small dedicated group of internet fans, and was nearly legislated out of existence, to a huge multi-million dollar franchise that seems to be gaining ground in popularity and mainstream acceptance by the day. I can’t help but feel a little amazed that talking about the UFC has become legitimate water-cooler conversation, when It seemed like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to people “what kind of Karate I did.”
I won’t bore anyone here with a long history of the Sport of MMA, or the UFC in general, but I’ll exemplify the brutal beginnings of the sport simply by saying that hair pulling, and nut shots (do yourself a favor and watch that whole video. The Asian gentleman in the red shorts sustaining the testicular trauma is actually the guy who played Random Task in Austin Powers) weren’t disallowed by the rules, and gloves and mouth guards added to them until somewhere around UFC 15. Since then, MMA in the United States has tamed down a bit, and focuses on being more of a sport than the spectacle of the early years. Today, one can almost use the terms UFC and MMA interchangeably, because, honestly for 99.9% of us, the UFC is MMA, which, as I’ll get into, is part of the reason MMA is such an awesome sport to watch.
Why do I love MMA? I’ll be taking the high road here and stick with the assertion that I’m not watching simply because I enjoy watching one person beat the ever loving tar out of another. But honestly, it really does come down to that. For my money there really is no more pure form of human competition than dropping two people in a cage, and given only enough rules to ensure a minimum of human safety, finding out which one can kick the other’s ass in 15 minutes or less.
It’s hard to sing the praises of the UFC, without drawing a comparison to the now pitifully unentertaining sport of boxing. In short, everything that has been wrong with boxing in the last decade is right about the UFC. Instead of a veritable alphabet soup of governing bodies and a total lack of even a single compelling fighter, we have a single dominant organization in the form of the UFC to include no shortage of excellent talent and compelling fighters in ALL weight classes and the marketing smarts to package it all in a format that people are more than willing to plunk down the serious cash to see. This all in contrast to the horrible quagmire of a professional sport, so disorganized that nobody can be bothered to follow it anymore we all know as boxing.
When it comes down to it an MMA fight is downright entertaining to watch. Which is all anybody really cares about while tossing back beer with a dozen or so of your closest casual acquaintances and cheering and jeering at the television. Whether the fight turns out to be a mismatch with a dramatic, quick finish, or a grueling battle between two evenly matched foes. The potential for a spectacular finish looms ever present during a MMA fight, and keeps us not just entertained but glued to the edge of our seats. I could go on for hours about how the sport of MMA is really a chess match, and in the end can be as much of a thinking man’s game as any sport out there, but I’m just like everyone else out there when I’m watching a fight. I just want to see who is going to win, and how. I just happen to prefer a deftly executed arm-bar to a haymaker resulting in a KO.
When it comes to the who, by the way, one can’t help but notice the quality of the fighters in the UFC, and I am in no way referring to their abilities in the ring. In a sport once branded “human cockfighting” by the media, there is no shortage of good-natured, well educated and well spoken fighters. Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture, BJ Penn, Rich Franklin, Forrest Griffin, Quinton Jackson, Matt Hughes and many more are all fighters at the top of the game who can actually complete a sentence and manage to act like adults outside of the ring. It’s so much easier to root for someone you know is a decent human being aside from being proficient at beating people up. The UFC also happens to be masterful as an organization of marketing said personalities, making every main event seem like a grudge match on par with anything Professional Wrestling has ever managed to conjure.
About 6 years ago, Current UFC Light Heavyweight champion Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, at the time fighting for the Pride organization in Japan, posted a phone number on the forums of a MMA website that I frequented, simply stating that it was a fan line, and that anyone could give it a call anytime, and as long as (in his own words) he wasn’t “fucking, fighting, or sleeping” he would answer it and chat with his fans. This, from the man best known for wearing a large chain around his neck, howling at the moon, and for picking people up and power bombing them head first into the mat. After the post, there was a long string of fans gushing about how Rampage not only answered the phone, but was downright good natured to everyone who had called. I put the number in my cell phone, and a few weeks later while completely hammered in a bar I called. Despite my level of intoxication and the din of the bar in the background. Rampage answered the phone, stating simply, “oh man, you have got to be drunk in a bar right now.” He was right. Despite my blatant intoxication and the fact that at one point I drunkenly handed the phone off to someone else while I ordered another round, Jackson never hurried me off the phone, and was more than happy to answer all of my stupid questions. When was the last time you heard about Allen Iverson doing something like that for his fans?
Lastly, and in a way maybe just as importantly, the UFC is made great by current president Dana White. A man born to head up an organization such as this one. He’s cocky, unapologetically wealthy and just slimy enough to pull off the persona of a fight promoter while somehow still managing to be likeable enough to keep people from hating him while he does it. For me, MMA has just the right mix of marketing, blood, personality and drama to be entertaining for anyone to watch, whether you’re a master of the Flying reverse Oma Plata, or don’t know a Triangle choke from a Guillotine.
19 Apr 2008 Senor Limon