Grounds To Pound

He recovered quickly, dragging a charging Scholten to the ground. “Hit him for being cheap!” a woman yelled. Scholten gained a reversal, then both men scoured for thirty seconds for a free limb to contort or a patch of skin to punch, until at last Denis countered, stood, and gestured theatrically for his opponent to stand. The crowd bellowed its approval.

When Scholten rose, Denis stepped in with a left hook, then a knee to the head, then an uppercut to the jaw. Scholten’s legs gave out, and he made a desperate lunge for Denis’s feet. As an official with Edmonton’s fight commission looked on from a few metres away, Denis strolled away disdainfully. Scholten attempted to rise, but Denis fired a hard, spinning kick that brushed Scholten’s hair, leaving the Vancouver fighter looking deranged and scared. He gamely tossed a few wild punches, but Denis deflected them, grasping Scholten’s neck and scuttling him with two knees to the face. Scholten, crumpled on the canvas, accepted three right hands without complaint, compelling the referee to end the fight.

The scientist stalked to the centre of the cage, dropped to his knees, and thrust his fists to the air in triumph. Before him sat Scholten, punch drunk and propped up against the chain-link wall, red spilling from forehead to torso to yellow cage floor.

Caged ignorance. Human cockfighting. Ghetto-fabulous hooliganism. The list of epithets cast at mixed martial arts by those who find it animalistic and incomprehensible is a long and colourful one. Admittedly, if boxing’s formula of intricate variations on simple rules elevates it to the level of Sweet Science, mma can seem more like Interdisciplinary Imbroglio: an ungainly mess punctuated by moments of brutal clarity, whose organizing principles only its professors appear to understand. And yet it has become axiomatic in fight circles that boxing is on the wane and mixed martial arts is on the rise.

It may say everything skeptics care to know that the seminal moment in mma’s ascent wasn’t a fight on the order of a Tunney-Dempsey or a Liston-Clay, but rather the launch of a reality TV show. The Ultimate Fighter made its debut on Spike TV in January 2005, following an episode of Raw, the flagship program of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment ( wwe) juggernaut. The conceit was a spin on that of Big Brother: a houseful of aspirants stave off abuse and elimination en route to a six-figure contract with ufc.

Six seasons on, the show is averaging a respectable 1.1 percent share of viewers in its time slot, skewed heavily to the prized eighteen-to thirty-four-year-old-male demographic. “I call it the wwe–Vince McMahon theory,” says “Showdown” Joe Ferraro, host of a Toronto sports radio talk show dedicated to mma. “Every commercial, coming out of a break, you see an ad for a ufc pay-per-view. Then when you watch the pay-per-view, you see an ad for the reality show. It’s a mass-marketing machine.”

Pay-per-view revenue for ufc’s ten events in 2006 was $220 million (US), surpassing the takes of both boxing and wwe. Attendance is typically in the 15,000 to 20,000 range, and ufc is set to add Canada to its growing list of successful markets on April 19, when two-time welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre of Saint-Isidore, Quebec, headlines ufc 83 at the Bell Centre in Montreal. The event, which will take place before ufc’s largest-ever crowd, sold out in record time.

To many in this generation of TV-inspired fighters, though — and to the more informed of their fans — the rise of their syncretic sport represents not a triumph of marketing, but the fulfillment of a martial arts tradition that goes as far back as 648 BC, to pankration, a homoerotic mishmash of wrestling and boxing first staged at the xxxiii Olympiad. Pankration pitted nude, unarmed combatants against each other in no-holds-barred matches that lasted until someone submitted or was knocked out, severely injured, or killed.

Although we tend to think of fighting styles as originating in particular countries — boxing from England, karate from Japan, kick-boxing from Thailand, and so forth — in fact most began as hybrids. Karate, for instance, was systematized in Okinawa after its upper classes fused influences from elsewhere in East Asia with their own style, ti, in the late nineteenth century.

It was around the same time, on the heels of the age of imperialism, that martial arts began to cross-pollinate via the high seas. One of the first (and unlikeliest) amalgams was Bartitsu, the eponymous brainchild of Edward Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had worked in Japan. Barton-Wright devised his style as a way for London’s cheekier gentlemen to settle disputes with ruffians without having to remove their top hats. With roots in jiu-jitsu, stick fighting, and boxing, Bartitsu was popular enough for a time to turn up in the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Empty House,” in which Holmes vanquishes Moriarty using what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle erroneously describes as “baritsu.”