Saturday night was the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s 73rd pay-per-view event: “Stacked.” In 2006, the UFC had more pay-per-view buys than all of boxing, and this year should be only bigger. It’s official: the belt has been passed.
About 20 years ago, some guys said, “Hey, in this globalizing age, why are all the martial arts still so fragmented? Why don’t we get top guys from each sport—boxing, muay thai, karate, jiu-jitsu—and face them off against each other to determine which style is the best?” The early UFCs were tough to watch. They’d put a Queensbury rules boxer in there with a kickboxer—who does everything the boxer does, plus kicks—and the boxer would just get destroyed. One martial art did emerge victorious: Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Royce Gracie would get his opponents to the mat, then grapple, twist, and turn until he put their arm or leg in a position to break, or their neck in a position to lose consciousness, and his opponents would “tap out,” admitting defeat.
From these beginnings came the heir to boxing.
Mixed martial arts, notably the UFC, is growing in popularity at an astounding rate. Measured by online interest, the UFC has grown 106% in the past year, and is poised to overtake hockey as America’s fifth most popular sport (it’s already ahead of golf, tennis, and Major League Soccer). And it has the kind of fan base that matters most: amateur, pro, and semi-pro imitations have sprung up around the country, the kind of grass-roots passion that launched boxing into the mainstream in the 19th century.
The UFC is not just thriving because of superior marketing, packaging, and visual appeal—although it certainly has that, mixing boxing’s hype with WWE’s colorful characters. It is a reflection of the age. Ever since Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon in 1973, (and Asian-trained soldiers coming back from WWII) American awareness of martial arts has boomed. The UFC, allowing styles from all over the world, including Israel, Brazil, China, Korea, and Japan, is a microcosm of the globalized world. Moreover, the strategies of MMA are more complex and perceptible to the casual viewer than those of boxing. Fighters are more intelligent and well-spoken, people that young, educated fans can connect with, yet are living an extreme life like snowboarders, skiers, rock climbers, base jumpers, and the host of others pushing the physical limits these days. Finally, the UFC began its life with the slogan “no holds barred,” tapping into the growing dissatisfaction with boxing’s timidity and rigid rules. In a day and age with less decorum and looser social mores, boxing doesn’t feel like a real contest of man against man anymore. MMA does, and when you get right down to it, that’s what pugilism is all about.
MMA’s roots are with Iowa farmboys, wrestlers who found a professional outlet by adding Brazilian jiu-jitsu and boxing to their repertoires. But these days it’s expanding beyond that base. The popularity of the sport has awakened the fighting desire in the suburbs and the inner cities. Because of the prohibitive cost of MMA training—beginning at $100/month on the East coast, MMA schools in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia are starting scholarship programs to develop the talent of the less-wealthy. If you look at the history of American sports, they tend to get really big a few years after they start seeing that grass-roots, cross-cultural appeal. Consider basketball’s boom once it reached the inner cities, or boxing in the ghettos of the first few decades of the 20th century, or baseball in the Negro Leagues era and its diaspora in Latin America and Japan today. It’s no coincidence that all the heavyweight boxing belts are held by Eastern Europeans—American athletes just don’t care to get into the sport. MMA is getting big now, but in five to ten years, you just watch.
One aspect of the sport that really appeals to me is that I think it has the chance for a mainstream women’s division—more women’s tennis, less WNBA. The structure of a basketball court too easily lends itself to comparison between the female and male players, as the baskets stay at 10 feet. But in one-on-one sports, woman against woman, the bar is relative. Moreover, MMA aficionados are coming to love the subtle techniques of grappling—twisting, holding, jockeying for position—and the graceful arc of a head kick. Women’s MMA can offer this at least as well as men’s, due to their greater flexibility. Some guy fans complain that they don’t want to see women pummeling each other, bloody and bruised, but women tend to have less knockout power, and the bouts are more often decided by decision or submission. Women’s MMA is in its infancy—the first female fight was broadcast on Showtime in February—but I think the response has been such that they are planning on building on it. It is helped, of course, by the existence of Gina Carano, a top muay thai kickboxer who also happens to be gorgeous.
Check out the February Showtime fight between Gina Carano and Julie Kedzie:
Pugilism is dead! Long live pugilism!