So I’m going to piggyback on the recent blogosphere success of The Walrus’s resident Man, Ed Keenan, by responding to his latest post, “The Manly Art, Minus the Artifice,” as well as to Frank Deford’s recent article on Sports Illustrated’s website, “Has boxing been quashed for blood sport?”^{*Subtitle: “Why we’re getting our butts kicked by ESPN.com.”} Both offer critiques of mixed martial arts, which, as mentioned a few times on the site the past few days, Jan Dutkiewicz and I have an article on in the current issue of The Walrus.

Deford’s column is straight out of the cookie cutter used by non-MMA-interested commentarians everywhere: McCain/human cockfighting reference? Check.^{*Yes, I am aware that Jan’s and my article mentioned human cockfighting and McCain. Meet birony’s ugly sibling, tripocrisy.} Assumption that participants and spectators are unreflective dumbasses? Check. The article is largely an elaboration of this choice quote: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the adolescence of the American public.” It’s filled with misperceptions and odd assertions that I thought about responding to, but that won’t interest anyone who’s not into the sport. What grates on me is Deford’s perspective on the motives of mixed martial arts fighters and fans.

Ed takes up the same question and arrives at a much more nuanced conclusion. He leads into MMA by raising the example in boxing of Mike Tyson, seen through the lens of an essay by Tom Callaghan. I can’t find the essay online, but the impression I get is that Callaghan cast Tyson as a beast from the streets, a cog in the money machine run by Don King and fuelled by bloodthirsty fat cats in ringside seats—a view Joyce Carol Oates’s pieces on boxing’s last truly outsized figure reveal to be a bit too easy.^{*Recipe for easy-bake critique: add Marx, stir vigorously.} Oates raises the same socioeconomic questions as Callaghan, but in her hands, Tyson comes across as a sympathetic, sensitive, and surprisingly thoughtful character who grasped his place in the cash-corrupted system and boxed for the meal ticket, yes, but also because the sport had always been for him—Tyson was an orphan—a home. His outrageousness, his apparent brutishness, were always to some degree part of an act,^{*It’s a little silly to take Tyson’s “I’m going to eat your children” stuff seriously. If he’d said he was going to make a rice pilaf out of them, using a special tibia-stock recipe he got from Jeffrey Dahmer, then maybe. But come on, every gourmand knows that child meat is stringy and unpalatable.} albeit one that increasingly blurred the line with reality as he lost his anchors (especially Cus D’Amato) over the course of his career. Would that line have been clearer to Tyson had he grown up in a nuclear family and had a decent education and better opportunities? Probably. Would he still have made a living bludgeoning people and become heavyweight champion of the world? Less certain, but very possibly.

When JCO considers what drew the crowd to Tyson, she does a lot of the “romantic windbaggery” Ed takes issue with in the section of his post on mixed martial arts, casting the public’s fascination with Tyson as being related to his role in a narrative, our search for meaning, blah blah blah.^*blah In other, more personal parts of her writing on boxing, though, she’s like Ed in being very honest that fighting, and watching fights, is above all a nod to our animal brains. It’s the thrill of being, or watching, an impala fighting to increase his harem on the Serengeti—the kind of Darwinian response that gives us intellectual types nightmares.^{*Even 6-foot-7, 250-pounders like the Bironist, who need a Rainbow Brite nightlight to sleep sometimes.} And no doubt Tyson appealed to that more than most. But I remain convinced that the motives of most fighters and fans go beyond the rush of the ring, and can’t be dismissed as windbaggery or a lack of economic avenues,^{*If there is a demographic skew among MMA participants and fans, in my experience it’s to the middle class. Though the Toronto Star’s article on Georges St.-Pierre this morning disagreed, suggesting that the sport’s popularity in Montreal relates to the size of the city’s working class. Call it the ObaMMA Corollary: working-class bitterness leads to religion, guns, and cage fighting.} either.

[Note: to read Ed's clarifications, go here.]

To tie Tyson’s motives to one I didn’t get into for MMA fighters at the end of my Barthes post, I’ll use the example of one of my best friends, who I’ll call Jay. When we were in our early twenties, before MMA had taken off, Jay tried pretty much every fight sport and martial art in existence, in an attempt to find the one that would allow him to best use his natural talent for fighting—a talent he never once indulged at 3 o’clock by the bike racks when we were teenagers. Karate, hapkido,^{*A Korean martial art that’s sort of a mix of tae kwon do, aikido, and gymnastics. The Bironist, who holds a blue belt in this discipline, will backflip the crap out of you if you make fun of it.} wrestling, boxing, capoeira, kendo… you get the idea. All of this was paired with an intellectual desire to match it with some sort of code, which led him to also do^{*Yeah, I split an infinitive. What of it? (Now that you’re all intimidated by my blue belt in hapkido, there’s going to be a lot more trash talk around these parts.)} a lot of reading on philosophies and histories of fighting—an attempt, I think, to take the animal impulse and give it some order and meaning.

Ultimately, Jay settled on karate, then eventually joined the army and, while stationed in Ottawa, glommed onto mixed martial arts. He was great at it. It was an arena that allowed him to train and test his talent at the highest level he could find, and more to the point, he found a kind of home in his team, much like Tyson (who needed it badly) did in boxing.^{*It’s worth pointing out that teams are a much bigger part of mixed martial arts than they are for boxing, in part because of the cross-disciplinary nature of the training, and in part because mixed martial artists are all sissies who can’t cross the street without forming a conga line first. Wait… you guys probably aren’t intimidated by my blue belt in hapkido, are you? I totally take that last part back.} Eventually, he went back to Edmonton and started a group of his own. Did he need to fight to have pride or dignity? Of course not. But it made sense for him to find it there to some degree.

All that being said, I do agree with Ed’s overall point: to attribute the lure of the sport to anything other than bloodlust without first acknowledging the bloodlust is BS. But when Deford implies that those who partake of MMA are no more than meatheads, he’s just being meatheaded.^{*And not that tasty adult headmeat, either.}

Next, on the Bironist: Further degeneracy. RAHR! GRRG! MKAVVVVV!!!

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Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 7:03 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.