Guess this post falls under the "other" part of NISMOSTUFF...
For the life of me I have never understood the attraction of any of the MMA events/persona/leagues, etc. I first watched MMA back in the early 1990's when the UFC was on its first few events and the only rule was that there was no eye gouging or hair pulling. Shots to the nuts were legal if I remember correctly and the fights were, for the most part, bloody, short and entertaining to me as a college kid seeing them for the first time. I quickly grew bored of them however as the participants always broke down into one of two categories--either the lean, submission using martial arts specialist or the hulking, juiced up neanderthal who would pummel you into unconciousness...great...what wonderful suspense and depth this provided...
While my (and many others) interest quickly waned, the UFC and MMA in general repackaged and reprocessed themselves into something that would be more palatable to the politicians and more marketable to the ignorant mainstream...and boy have they succeeded...
Now as a "sport" marketed towards those young, white, male adults who grew up watching the WWF now have something to "graduate" to when they tire of bad acting and scripted brawls. You see, the UFC, Tap Out and the rest of the MMA scene came along at just the right time when white, male America was hungering for a new "sport". Young white males had long ago lost a great deal of their interest in sports like basketball, boxing and football as they lost ever more ground to highly skilled and motivated African Americans. Hockey?? Canadians and Swedes (plus the U.S. remains a largely WARM country). Baseball?? Too slow for the video game age. Golf and tennis?? For the country club elite.
So where is the average to below average intellect white boy to look for his sporting heros?? Why a sport dominated by white athletic castoffs and also rans fueled by steroids and meth. Make no mistake about it, MMA is a sport rife with drugs of all kinds as its high "white trash" quotient makes sure of. Nowhere is MMA more popular than the meth lab trailer parks and prefabbed houses of white slums and welfare petitioners. And here it has bloomed.
Finally, white American males have a sport they can call home again. Sure, there are some black MMA fighters, fewer if you discount the international ones, fewer still if you count the successful ones. But one of the reasons MMA has continued to be popular in white, GED America is its high turnover rate of champions...If there is a black champion, chances are he will be defeated in a fight or two by a white fighter who will then be in turn defeated by another white fighter another fight or two later...Which brings us to another problem I have with MMA...its complete lack of skill...
In any sport, the cream of the crop will rise to the top and dominate. You see it in golf with Tiger, in tennis with Federer and Nadal, in baseball with Pujols and Bonds (steroids included, he was the BEST of his generation), in football with Brady and Tomlinson, in boxing with Jones Jr. and Ali and so on and so on. Where there is skill involved, as in evolution, the best will survive and dominate the lesser skilled. Where is this in MMA?? Nowhere. It is a revolving door at the top of the sport with no one individual dominating his sport in general or in his own weight class. When everyone has the same skill level, no one has any skill.
Dana White (ironic name, no?), the sociopath in chief of the UFC, is a lot dumber than he seems to believe...trust me...he is the perfect example of what MMA and the UFC are and have become. He is a white guy who failed at boxing and was run out of town by the Boston Southy crews and somehow lucked into managing a sport that was at the right place at the right time to take advantage of his own and white, male america in general's poor self image. He props up that image now with false bravado, barely intelligible tirades and personal threats. He's like Vince McMahon without the business sense or humor.
So why do I write this?? Well, when I saw that on 6/13/09 48 year old Ray Mercer (former heavyweight champion in boxing) knocked out former UFC heavyweight champion, 33 year old Tim Sylvia (failed football player and boxer, steroid user and all around white trash) in seven seconds. Thats right...seven seconds. The fight was emblematic the big stupid joke that the entire sport is. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise...and if they don't agree?? Just tell them to explain the picture at the top of this post which is of the three founders of the "Tapout" line of clothing---worn by white morons everywhere and hiding the large homosexual undercurrents of the entire sport that most of MMA's fans are trying to hide...
Edit to add one more...
