Was at my friend Q’s house. He likes mixed martial arts. Watches it all the time, and plays the XBox 360 version of it. I only watch when I’m at his place. All that grappling puts me to sleep inside of fifteen minutes.
Kickboxing, judo, wrestling all mashed up? Sounds good in my mind. The reality is a letdown. There’s a glut of fighters who can’t perform up to TV standards. You don’t watch TV to see someone try to do something. You want entertainment, especially when it comes to battlin’. Otherwise you might as well take a walk and look at the birds.
We saw the hype commercials for the upcoming pay-per-view, Brock Lesnar v. Frank Mir. Q got very excited. He can’t wait. A match like that might hook me. Anything that’s top shelf-quality, I’m interested or at least curious.Â
For a few years, since MMA surge in popularity has really been acknowledged by the mainstream, UFC prez Dana White’s been a rooster show. Kicking up dust in the yard and trying to bury his nearest neighbor on the pop culture spectrum.
“This was a bad day for boxing,” he said of HBO’s De La Hoya-Pacquiao production.
“What’s more violent than boxing?” he asked, when questioned whether MMA is more dangerous.
“Boxing is a game, compared to UFC,” he said in response to Floyd Mayweather’s criticisms.
White is one of those people who thinks if he says it enough, it’ll come true. Like rappers who say they’re the best to ever do it. How many times will it take, Dana? My guess is a number with six digits. He has a big mouth. He might make it.
Some of what he says is a reaction, obviously. I’m sure White gets lots of dumb questions. Floyd is an excellent boxer who doesn’t talk as well as he thinks he does. Floyd came right out and called MMA fighters “boxing rejects.”
related: Floyd vs. Conor
Boxing isn’t dead yet. Plus it’s head to take Dana White seriously. If Grimace ran out and told me the Burger King was a child molester, I wouldn’t listen. (bad example.) Because Grimace is the beneficiary when he says something like this. The term is ‘conflict of interest.’
Dana White benefits, too, when he says a competitor is crap. Not to mention he was on “Dr Phil” in May 2009, so… the respect wanes for you, buddy.
On that episode, titled “Dangerous Teen Trends”, Dr Phil took to task a couple of young men. These men were about a step above street fighting, but thought they were seriously in training. Fighters Kenny Florian and Forrest Griffin cautioned them about their method and mortality–they said the right things and seemed sincere in doing it.
Not Dana White. He decided to take one more shot at boxing. “In the almost 20 years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there’s never been a serious injury or death,” he said. “Boxing has five or six deaths a year. We take safety measures.” Those sound like famous last words to me.
These are grown men, among the most-conditioned and strongest in our population. Schooled in various ways of hurting other men. And White doesn’t think death is hanging over his sport’s shoulder? Safety measures, by definition, don’t keep tragedies from happening. They merely kind of maybe prevent them.
I don’t want to give the impression that I hate UFC. There’s no outrage on my part over the brutality–the almost anything-goes atmosphere, or so it appears to the casual eye. I was once a dedicated a boxing fan. I watched that sport for about thirty years. “The sweet science”: when I’ve watched boxing at its best, I know what that phrase really means.
White misses the point. MMA is real fighting, as he says, but is that the contest, in his mind? Boxers wear gloves. That’s not real fighting, and even an idiot could see that from jump street. White is a former boxer (don’t you wonder if he was any good?), and he ought to give boxing props on one point: from that sport, he’s certainly learned the method of filthy promoting.
MMA has a science to it, too. Q explained certain moves and counters as we watched his favorite old UFC matches. I felt a spark, a hint that I could become a fan if I really got into it. But I don’t see the same beauty as I do in boxing. It is more visceral brutality than skilled professionalism.
If UFC keeps people like White around to push the sport, they’ll never understand the basic problem with having him as its promoter: Sell it on its merits, not on the next person’s flaws.
Until then, not interested.
nm