Without fail, if there is something I see from my position at ringside, it is cameras. The TV cameras recording the event for broadcast or a DVD, digital cameras wielded by photographers, compact cameras fumbled with by enthusiastic fans, multifunctional phones handled by those hoping to capture a conversation starter when they return to the pub – cameras are everywhere.
With so many lenses pointed at the action, it’s easy to overlook that there are almost always even more cameras watching over things. I’m not referring to Big Brother with its security cameras and CCTV. Far less sinister than the Orwellian nightmare that is now our daily lives, I mean the cameras operated by documentary makers.
As you might imagine, we get a lot of phone calls and emails to the Fighters Only office. Last year saw an explosion of one particular type of enquiry. It would invariably start with “Hi, my name’s Tristan / Justin / Felicity (insert random choice of very middle class name here) and I’m calling from a production company. We’re interested in doing a documentary on cage fighting and thought you might be able to help”.
Now I like to consider myself a helpful soul, and love educating people about the sport, but after speaking to your seventeenth work experience researcher from production companies big and small, I tend to get a bit tired of having to explain to someone in very simple terms that yes, MMA is a proper sport, we don’t like to call it cage fighting, yes there are lots of interesting people involved in the business but no, I am not going to suggest who you should make a documentary on. I’ll offer my views for those who are deserving of help but not those who are so lazy as to ask someone else to do their work for them.
The majority of these documentary makers are working on TV projects that never go anywhere, hence me being slightly jaded about having to field queries from producers looking to get on the latest trendy thing. But my shelf at home contains more than a few feature-length documentaries.
There are two documentaries that stand out from the crowd and have entered that rare status of being synonymous with the sport of MMA. The seminal documentary about the near-mythical Rickson Gracie, Choke, is still referenced as a benchmark even now, almost ten years after it was released. Without this piece of history (it chronicles Gracie’s participation in a Vale Tudo tournament in 1995) it is wholly possible stories of Gracie’s near-inhuman abilities might be even more widespread than they already are.
2002’s The Smashing Machine was a harrowing insight into the troubled world of heavyweight Mark Kerr, yet is still held as one of the most insightful and poignant pieces of MMA ever committed to film. When we bore witness to Kerr injecting himself with morphine, articulately justifying it to the film makers as a necessity for him to be able to compete, and later wind up in hospital after a near-fatal overdose, it exposed a side to the sport that until then had been shrouded in secrecy. Whether it played a part in formulating the stringent drug tests fighters must now complete is not known, but it made a generation of aspiring fighters very aware of the dangers of crossing over to the dark side of drugs in sport.
Boxing has the iconic film When We Were Kings as it’s celluloid champ. The story of Muhammad Ali’s historic fight with George Foreman (the infamous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’) caught the hearts of fight fans around the world, but I can’t imagine Choke or The Smashing Machine having quite the same effect. Both are fantastic pieces of film making, and were groundbreaking in allowing the world to better understand the nuances of MMA, yet they don’t quite weigh-in with the same impact as ‘Kings’.
Which leads me to ask, will the MMA documentary manifest itself as a result of the work of the many filmmakers, TV producers, documentary makers and enthusiastic amateurs, or will it take something (or someone) else to come in and produce the film that manages to transcend the boundaries of fandom and grab the attention of the mainstream public?
Fiction is useful for planting seeds in people’s minds, and this last year has seen a couple of films feature or incorporate MMA into their narratives, yet nothing can quite stir the imagination like a thought-provoking look at real life. I eagerly await the day MMA’s defining documentary hits our screens.
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