Issue 046

February 2009

By Matt Benyon.

I‘d like you to imagine for a moment two scenarios. Pretend I’m a kind of off-season, half-baked character out of an MMA-based Christmas Carol. 

First, the ghost of MMA Christmas past. It’s 1999. I’m a bit of a late bloomer, but forgive me. A friend has smuggled a pirated VHS copy of UFC 2 into the Year 12 common room. We huddle around the screen chomping on Snickers bars. We sit through the whole thing once, jaws slowly dropping to the floor, chocolate hanging limp in our hands. It’s over, and we rewind it. Watch it again. Our eyes devour every single second of jittery, blurry film reel. Our ears slurp up every single layer of early nineties synthesiser music.  

Patrick Smith elbowing that ninja’s head into oblivion is watched again and again. Remco Pardoel doing the same to Orlando Weit’s bonce is rewound repeatedly. That crazy upside down submission thing Royce (with the ‘r’ pronounced, naturally) Gracie does to that kung fu dude gets multiple replays. The whole tape gets watched so many times it comes out looking like Johnny Rhodes’ sweaty old handwraps. The point is, we watched the hell out of that video, that event. Every single second of it – and we loved it!  

Fast forward to the present. It could be any of the recent MMA events. Anticipation builds as the day approaches. When it finally arrives, you, for whatever reason, don’t shell out for the pay per view. Maybe you live in another country, like me. Maybe you have no money, no credit card. Perhaps you don’t have cable TV. Whatever the case, you decide to catch it on the internet, to take your pick from the smorgasbord on offer, whether it is a streaming video site in Korea or through Bit Torrent.  

You skip the fights with fighters whose names you don’t know. The picture is often small, grainy at best. Introductions and post-fight interviews often chopped off, and there is definitely no hype before the fight. Is this how it was meant to be viewed, our beautiful game?  

There is no such thing as a free lunch. This dim sum, pick and mix form of watching MMA can easily kill any real sense of relish, of excitement and even enjoyment. I noticed that, having the entire fight from beginning to end, for free, at my fingertips, was changing the way I was watching MMA.  

If the early nineties created the MTV generation, where everything had to be chopped down to five-minute bursts of intense entertainment, then the noughties have produced the YouTube generation, where action has to be delivered in 30-second slices. We can’t wait around for anything any more, no sir. I want it downloaded to my hard drive faster than I can flick my mouse across the scroll bar to get to the good bit. We have become out-of-control Johnny-5s, mumbling “Input... Input...” and twitching with ADHD-like impatience.  

This is a serious problem. Enter the ghost of MMA Christmas future. There you sit, jacked into the Internet, a punch-junkie, fast forwarding through introductions, through stare-downs, through ring-stalking, through everything, just to get to that KO punch or submission finish. You also have processed cheese dribbling out of your mouth and you smell pretty bad. Not a nice prediction, eh?

Many a great philosopher has said, you have to take the good with the bad. If you want to really enjoy seeing BJ Penn spank Sean Sherk, or GSP demolish Matt Hughes, or Big Nog battle Frank Mir, you have to sit through the preamble. You need to listen to Joe and Mike tell you yet again that this is the single greatest night in MMA history. You have to watch a couple of no-namers paw at each other. You have to watch the tale of the tape and the stupid hangover from the nineties that tells you the fighter is ‘good at submissions’ or a ‘devastating striker’.  

If you don’t, if you just skip to the good part, that would be like ordering a hamburger sans buns. Or eating foie gras for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sure, the first couple of times it would be great but, pretty soon, it won’t satisfy you any more, and then what? You’ve just spoiled some of your favourite foods forever. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spoil any big fights for myself like that.  

This is a recommendation not to succumb to the smorgasbord of doom. Don’t sit there fast forwarding through a five-minute clip of one of the most anticipated match-ups of the year looking for that KO punch. Watch an event from beginning to end, if you can, the way it was meant to be seen. Put aside a few hours and give the fighters, and the sport, the attention they deserve.