Much Harder Blows

My exposure to the UFC (and to what’s called Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA for short) began in 1995. I was visiting my friend Tim at the air force base where he was staying.

I was 19 years old. Punk wise, I was somewhere in between seeing Jawbreaker and interviewing the Misfits. My long-time girlfriend and I were happy to be there, but we were certainly fish out of water.

Here’s what I looked like during this trip, where we got to see Mt Rushmore (shown below), Devil’s Tower, and the Badlands of South Dakota:

Nevertheless, the experience staying at the air force base was merely boring most of the time. People on base amused themselves with activities and events, with everything from laid-back informal gatherings to organized sports leagues.

One day, there was a gathering of several airmen on base. They had just purchased an event on pay-per-view, which was becoming common in the mid-90s as a way for events like the WWF (now WWE) to reach specialized niche markets. Long before the internet had made specialized content available to the masses, pay-per-view TV did it for a fee.

Boxing, too, was common on pay-per-view. If HBO or ESPN wasn’t interested in covering your upcoming event, you could still earn a lot of money by charging individual households a premium (anywhere between $15 and $50 per event back then).

This wasn’t boxing or pro wrestling, but something entirely new. I was seeing something called the Ultimate Fighting Championships, and I did not like what I saw.

I walked into Tank Abbott brutally knocking out John Matua (UFC 6), and then hovering over his vanquished foe so that he could mock the injured man. Testosterone-filled airmen cheered the violence on. My stomach turned.

That might have been the end of my interest in mixed martial arts, but about two years later, right after I had started judo, I revisited the UFC with my friend Nate. We were into watching all sorts of oddball videos like Kids or Gummo, or maybe some of the early skate prank videos that eventually became the Jackass franchise. The UFC fit well enough into this niche—just something to watch that was notably different than mainstream television.

I had no idea I’d actually appreciate and enjoy what I saw, but that’s just what happened. It turns out that I had seen one particularly violent match that day, and while the early UFC matches were far from safe, there was a great deal more sportsmanship and… well, humanity than I saw on that first day.

I saw martial artists trying to prove that their art was the best, but most of all, I saw a marvelous scientific experiment unfolding. All the questions about what sorts of hand-to-hand fighting would be effective were utterly theoretical before events like this answered the question for the entire world.

As my interest in mixed martial arts deepened, my study of martial arts intensified and began to take over my life. By the late 90s, I was deep into tape-trading. Long before YouTube, if you wanted to see something that was niche, this was the only way to do it.

One video really stands out in my mind from this time. It was called Gracie Jiu Jitsu in Action, and like the name implies, it was marketing for the Gracie brand of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The silky-smooth voice of Rorion Gracie would narrate the action as his family members dismantled their competitors in bare-knuckle challenge matches, many inside the Gracie Academy itself.

Rorion would describe the techniques the Gracie Jiu Jitsu practitioner used to defeat the much larger karate or kung fu man (sometimes they really were much larger, but remember: this was first and foremost a marketing video). Rorion really sold Gracie Jiu Jitsu. By the end of these videos, you were ready to move out to Torrance, California, as my friend Dee did in 1994. Many others would follow.

Rorion’s narration was fantastic, and it became part of the fun of watching the video to try to imitate his voice. One phrase in particular has stuck in my mind, and it’s from a time in the video where Royler Gracie (Rorion’s and Royce’s brother) is slapping someone in the side of the face repeatedly. Royler has gotten to a dominant position, and his opponent simply cannot respond in any effective way.

The phrase that has stuck with me is: “Slaps replace what could be much harder blows.”

I loved that idea. It was completely evident that Royler could have turned that guy’s face into hamburger, but instead, he wanted to give the guy a chance to give up. This is precisely the martial arts aspect of MMA I came to appreciate and enjoy.

MMA and jiu jitsu were very much conflated in those early years. Because Brazilian (Gracie) Jiu Jitsu had been so dominant at the early UFCs, a (mostly) respectful culture around martial arts—not to mention the mystique that goes with a smaller person using leverage to beat a bigger opponent—was in the driver’s seat for the first decade or so.

By the time the UFC was on cable TV (Spike’s The Ultimate Fighter in 2004), everything had begun to change. There were new owners who seemed just fine with the same level of toxicity that pervaded the WWF back then, and the last quarter century has seen a steady cultural decline in MMA. Now, the drama is just as important as the show.

Slaps, in other words, are no longer replacing those much harder blows. The race to the bottom is complete, and winning the match is the only thing that matters. It’s no longer a scientific test to determine the best style, but much more a battle of loudmouthed sadists.

People sometimes ask me if I’m into MMA, or why I don’t enjoy watching the UFC any more. I want to tell this story, but most people don’t have 15 minutes to listen. Maybe I can just try to get them to read this from now on.

There’s also much more to my UFC story, like the time I met up with Charles McCarthy to roll on his hotel room floor at a UFC we both attended as fans, or how the UFC treated me as an insider for a few years, when independent media and underground tape-trading were important keys to the sport’s survival. I got to sit close to the Octagon at a time when I really cared about MMA, and some of the crazier stories are well worth telling.

I’ll tell those stories soon.