I love Ultimate Fighting. There, I said it. Watching two supreme athletes enter a cage and then proceed to beat the living shit out of one another sends my heart racing like no other sport or event. I'm not exactly sure why though. Friends suggest that delighting in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is disturbingly incongruous with my otherwise peace-loving personality. They’ve got a point. I hate confrontations and avoid them, usually by suddenly shouting “Hey, what’s that over there?!” Problem solved.
Still, when it comes to brutal knockouts or sophisticated albeit excruciating submission holds, I’m as engaged as a cat hypnotically pawing at a ball of yarn. For the better part of a decade, I’ve followed this sport and spent many hours contemplating the source of my obsession. I consistently come up short, with few uncovered personal insights to justify my fascination. My wife insists that two sweaty, scantily clad men grappling with one another is undeniably homoerotic. Then again, she married me so what does that say about her? Stick that one in your pipe and smoke it Jessica!
Critics of MMA suggest that as a society we’ve evolved from the fight-to-the-death style battles that once enthralled large crowds inside the Coliseum. So apparently I’m less evolved too. Is it possible that I’m just a gay neanderthal living in the closet?
Defenders of the sport site its purity. Victory and defeat are the sole responsibility of an individual not a team. They’ll contend that way before the advent of stick and ball sports, two men would beat each other up and an audience would anxiously cheer every bloody moment. Other proponents of MMA like to remind its detractors of the skill and athleticism possessed by mixed martial artists. But while their talents are undeniable, when I see a man almost kick another man’s head off his shoulders, the last thing going through my mind is, “I wonder if that guy can run a four minute mile?”
None of these arguments nor the dozens of others posed by fellow cage fighting enthusiasts adequately elucidates my passion for watching a fight. So while I cannot pinpoint the source of my adulation, I make no apologies for it either. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in Blink, “Perhaps our perception of ourselves is a far cry from who we really are.” Certainly something worth pondering...during a fight.
