Combat sport catharsis | Tomek McGrath
Justin Gaethje, who had just been awarded victory by the judges, stands in the spotlight with his pot-bellied, small-town American parents Octagon. He raises a gloved fist, stretches out his tattooed pale skin, and accepts the adoration of the sold-out O2.
The young guy in the seat next to me (white tracksuit, black eye) applauds passionately, on the verge of tears.
Widely regarded as the most exciting UFC fighter of all time, Gaethje has earned the love of these humble sadists many times over. He did so again in the three five-minute rounds of the night’s co-main event. Rather, his opponent, Rafael Fiziev, a Shia blacksmith from Azerbaijan, did so on his behalf – and left the cage with a mighty face have was freshly slammed into a steering wheel.
At this point UFC 286 strikes me less as a sporting event than as a freak show catering to a special kind of traumatized pervert. Something like crash, the musical. Gaethje – whose nickname “The Human Highlight Reel” contains a strong indication of what kind of physical performance art is the apotheosis of the spectacle – is its royal freak.
A UFC event lends itself to a rare night outdoors”the longhouse‘ — the semi-mythical abstraction blamed (by the esoteric, incurably online right) for our contemporary emasculation.
More than anything else, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable over-correction of the past two generations to social norms that prioritize female needs and female methods of controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.
Call her (nodding to Lacan and Orwell) Big Mother. She was apparently all over the sport. Take English football for Exhibit A with its rainbow laces, female experts, squats, Gary Lineker…
What is uncanny (or impressive, depending on the metapolitics) is how tightly sport held the universal male mind in the midst of all the growth and change it is forcing, becoming an insidious instrument of Big Mother’s broader social betterment program.
MMA is perhaps the last mass entertainment where cancellation is all but impossible
However, the UFC appears to be a refreshingly toxic exception. Probably the blunt nature of Mixed To damagetial Arts – with its armbars, flying knees, elbows, knockouts, submissions, CET – deters any serious attempt at moral domestication.
It’s perhaps the last form of mass entertainment where cancellation is all but impossible.
That’s no exaggeration. As rising US featherweight champion Bryce Mitchell recently claimed on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Hour (the sport’s biggest platform) that mass shootings exist was Shrugging at scams orchestrated by the US government, MMA quickly agreed that a man willing to fight other men in a cage for a living has a right to his opinion.
The UFC’s position – or its role? – as a cultural outlier and exception was underscored by Covid. Within weeks of global lockdowns, CEO Dana White was actively looking for a way to “safely” resume fighting.
The world took sufficient notice of this to be unanimously appalled at such frivolity. Under direct political pressure, Disney (owner of UFC broadcast partner ESPN) urged White to back off. That was all he did: in May In 2020, the UFC hosted the first major sporting event of this still-frozen world (initial decline in slow global thaw). In 2022, it was the first to bring the crowds back into the ghost ship Arewet
Around the world, the UFC’s fan base blossomed like a black eye during the years of the new normal. When it made its first post-Covid return to the UK last year, it was enthusiastically received.
The appreciation is mutual. The British Are commonly referred to as “the best fight fan in the world” in all martial artsS” – both for our personal enthusiasm for organized violence and for our willingness to pay for a chance to get as close to the blazing flame as possible.
Having grown up in an English seaside town, I knew the national penchant for violence quite well. It wasn’t an accident, I thought, that we invented boxing. ARecently, like last summer, we packed Wembley Stadium (94,000 spectators!) to watch Heavyweight Champion Tyson Fury play with Dillian White.
For her During the last visit to London, the UFC had sold out the O2’s comparatively modestly 20,000 seats. However, demand was so high that the average ticket price was second only to the Super Bowl – with a record-breaking $9 million gate.
The Main Event was a big deal for British MMA. Last summer in Salt Lake City, Jamaican-born Brummie Leon Edwards—son of a slain gangster—conjured an unlikely win in the dying seconds of a welterweight title bout: pound for pound number one and big betting favorite Kamuru. the Nigerian Nightmare” Usman with an instantly iconic shin bolt to the skull.
Edwards – a graceful, technical, almost reserved kickboxer (his style was the complete opposite of Gaethje’s sadomasochistic gusto) – had previously been an almost pitied figure in the sport, with a long-suffering, bewitched aura.
Those two seconds in Salt Lake City had turned him into a martial arts star. He was also only the second Englishman to win a UFC World Cup. Greeting an insane hero for the rematch was inevitable.
The crowd that formed the welcoming committee was a suitably diverse cross section 21st centuryentry British machismo. From the somber London Muslims a row below me, belching great gusts of dull smoke and watermelon vapor, to the deer-Do Entities representing old school, small town and small dick energyAnd even a lavish display of sociopathic Scottish bonhomie (with vodka sheen) – you felt the need to avert your eyes firmly on the way to the urinal or the bar.
This crowd wants violence like most people want sex and food
What this crowd shares (alongside overwhelming if not entirely unanimous masculinity) is bloodlust. She wants violence – live and in real life – like most people want sex and food.
Where does it come from? Trauma breeds trauma, no doubt. Nature also has its place. But perhaps no form of entertainment since the Colosseum has so openly attempted to gratify (and exploit) such inclinations. MMA has its civilization limitations – eye gouging and head butting Are forbidden, for example – but ultimately any subjugation or knockout disruption results in nothing short of a narrowly defeated kill.
This is exactly what the crowd is impatiently demanding. This is particularly evident with the dozen or so matches leading up to the main events, where there’s a lot less drama and glamour And Ability to hide the modesty of the sport.
If those low-level fighters don’t attack for even a few seconds, the crowd will let out those weird high-pitched screams. Sounding like disdainful birdsong, it’s a resounding white feather demanding these nearly naked, frightened-looking young men and women re-enter the field of injury.
Given what she wants (concussion force…blood…unconsciousness), the crowd can be explosively grateful as advertised. It often happened that a spectator would rise to their feet in a sort of priapine outburst and stretch out their arms to roar, growl or scream with otherwise unspeakable delight.
Gaethje (a gifted athlete, notwithstanding his many loose screws) had eventually provided the O2 with almost anything it could desire and cleaned the palate for the more refined fare of the Edwards Usman rematch.
MMA is part horror show, part art form. Paradoxically, the near-absence of formal constraints (and even rules) has created a form of combat in which millennia-old combat traditions flow into a sane, hybrid form.
Additionally, the extraordinary stakes of the higher-level encounters often deliver an equivalent level of suspense and drama that doesn’t necessarily require a sadistic streak (or a lot of it) to appreciate. Watching Edwards deftly keep his distance from the terrifying but lumbering force of Usman was like watching a man walk a tightrope over a rock pit. It made you gasp.
By the end of the fight, I’m on my feet too, roaring and barking. As the judges award Edwards a deserved victory, my black-eyed neighbors and I Are bouncing up and down, arms around each other’s shoulders.
Then it was time to arm myself. The journey home – O2 out and squeezing on the hose 20,000 others – looks like leaving the world’s largest provincial nightclub. We was there, after all, violence is celebrated; Surely a defection was likely?
Maybe not. Under the constant light of the cameras, we stream through the long, large mall that surrounds the front half of the O2with Police officers positioned in glass booths around the outer ring. The crowd seems lightning-fast but merry–those cravings seem vulnerable to vicarious discharge.
We spill into the surprisingly warm midnight air. Thousands of mostly male lucky bettors briefly flock to scattered celebrations before regrouping in the long line for the subway. It occurs to me that we’re good at this have I just slept inside in the longhouse.