New MMA Online Magazine

I’m writing a monthly column for a new, online mixed martial arts magazine named MMAR Reader. My column appears at page 21-22.  Excerpts below, but go here and read the whole magazine.

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.

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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