A Case for Mixed Martial Arts

I’ m writing a monthly column for MMAR Reader, the online Mixed Martial Arts magazine for MMARecruiter.com.  (You can read the debut issue here.)  While MMA doesn’t occupy a lot of bandwith here at DuelingBarstools, I hope you enjoy last months’ column.

Talking Points: Making A Case for Mixed Martial Arts

Thankfully the days of war hero-Senators castigating mixed martial arts as human cockfighting are over.  This article by Donald F. Walter provides a thorough explanation as to why.  MMA is tracking upward on an explosive growth curve, yet mainstream acceptability eludes the sport of MMA and individual mixed martial artists.  For instance, while former college and NFL stars turned public officials, such as Peter Boulware and Heath Shuler, proudly list their football careers on their respective government biographies, Matt Lindland’s opponent for the Oregon State House stereotyped Lindland as a pit-fighting brute because of his participation in MMA.  Perhaps in hopes of avoiding similar – and unfounded – smear tactics Oregon State House hopeful Chael Sonnen, who is known to freely share his mind, has kept his elite status as a top UFC middleweight contender out of the political conversation.  Clearly a significant portion of the populace negatively perceives MMA and its brightest stars.  (The Big Island of Hawai’i, whose mayor recently proclaimed October 27 as “BJ Penn Day,” is a notable exception to this rule.)

I have no quibble with individuals who lack interest in MMA or more generally contact sports.  They aren’t for everyone.  I take issue, however, with individuals who denounce MMA as barbaric while heartily cheering for other similarly violent sports.  Indeed, America’s most popular sport, American Football, which may one day replace Baseball as the national pastime, is at least as violent as MMA.

Football is a brutal and increasingly violent game in which career threatening bodily injuries are routine, several positions encourage morbid obesity, and life threatening spinal, and cognitive injuries are an acceptable risk to players and fans alike.  A read through this message board discussing a proposed NFL rule change (eliminating the three point stance) designed to increase quarterback player safety reveals increased safety measures are often unpopular for fear such measures will reduce the level of carnage tarnish the purity of the game.

Malcom Gladwell asserts that football fans are at fault for popularizing such a violent game.  In response, a blogger accuses Gladwell of “judgment and inquiry for [anti-football] propaganda” and denying that players are capable of understanding and rationalizing football’s inherent risks.  An alternative explanation of football’s enduring popularity (see pages 71-74) may be that during the late nineteenth century football’s inherent violence, as well as the discipline necessary to play such a rule driven and organized game, played an important role in developing boys into men of strength and character.

I know of no human culture that didn’t develop similar contests, or reward physical acts of bravery, strength, and courage, in order to develop its youth.  To do so is human, arguably necessary, and today optional.  In any case, and either in spite or because of football’s violent nature, 138 million Americans, including 58 million women, self describe as NFL fans.  If the violence, injury, and risk-reward inherent in football, hockey, boxing, and martial arts, is itself barbaric then those sports’ fans are barbarians.

Few would admit to barbarianism, however, and as a result a popular view is to draw a distinction between MMA violence and sport, including football and boxing.  Several commentators, see here and here, have factually debunked the idea that the Unified Rules governing sanctioned mixed martial arts lacks sufficient restrictions and penalties for excessive acts of force as compared to other contact sports. Or that MMA’s small gloves increase brain trauma as compared to boxing gloves. And that mixed martial artists face either a higher rate of injury or are prone to more catastrophic injuries than other mainstream contact sports, especially football.

What repulses the average non-MMA-but-football-loving-fan is the lack of a helmet, facemask, or bulbous glove, which is ignorantly perceived as protection rather than tools to enhance violence.  MMA forces viewers to observe in one theater the beautiful, but at times brutal, reality of contact sport performed by skilled martial artists who combine any number of disciplines into a single, unique human weapon.  There is glory, blood, victory, and defeat.  MMA is acutely human because you see it.  It is honest, and I believe it is good.  It reflects humanity’s past, present, and future.  And if MMA is not good, it is not good because it is human, not because you see it.

Football fans see only glimpses of their game’s humanity, for it is muted by facemasks, helmets, and piles of bodies, the fact that twenty-two players occupy the field, and relatively distant cameras.  I find it a peculiar worldview that cherishes a game whose most poignant moment is a stretcher carting a limp player off the field, typically with helmet on, while refusing to tolerate the humanity mixed martial arts reveals.  To each his own.  I enjoy football as well as MMA, but the latter more because there is no filter, and no off-season to the sport’s development, intrigue, and sporting action.

MMA, Socio-Political