BLOOD, SWEAT & JEERS
Dec 2
It might be unpalatable to some of you, but I love to watch people get kicked in the face, choked unconscious and have their bodies contorted into positions the human frame is not meant to achieve. Don’t worry! This isn’t some niche pain fetish, it is the sport of MMA, or Mixed Martial Arts. Now, I am not a sporty guy, never have been, unless you count jogging around the local park in a lackadaisical manner a couple of times a week, to prolong my unhealthy existence. I cannot stand football with its ninety plus minutes, of twenty-two overpaid spit factories, running up and down an enormous field with, if you’re lucky, a hat-trick of goals scored. Rugby isn’t much better with its unfathomable rule system and its public school wankery. Snooker, boring. Golf, interminable. Basketball held a little excitement for me in the late eighties, but that soon wore thin.
\My love of fighting was passed on to me by my step-father, a keen boxer in his youth, it was one of the only things we semi-bonded over. I remember sitting down with excited anticipation to watch Britain’s very own Frank Bruno fight the seemingly unstoppable Mike Tyson, on February 25, 1989, in my uncle’s dingy flat. It didn’t end well for Bruno, although he did give a good account of himself. Before, during and after the fight the tension in the room was palpable and it somehow seeped into my fourteen-year-old brain, because from that day on, fighting was the only true sport to me. It was the essence of competition, stripped down to its bare essentials. It was the true test of a man’s courage in the face of adversity, or in the words of the inimitable Joe Rogan, “High level problem solving, with dire physical consequences.”
In the early nineties, my friend and flatmate brought home a video tape (google it!) of something called The Ultimate Fighting Championships. Being kids of the eighties and watching the martial arts films of Jean Claude van Damme, Steven Segal and their ilk, it was mind-blowing to both of us. It promised no rules* contests between boxers and Tae Kwon Do practitioners, sumo wrestlers and kickboxers, jiu-jitsu black belts and karate experts and it definitely delivered. The fights were thirty minutes long with no breaks, there were no weight classes, and the contest was a knockout, meaning the winner of the championship could have to fight, four, half-hour rounds in one night. These weren’t ordinary fights either, they were brutal, bloody, and unforgiving and audiences and fighters very quickly learned which styles of fighting were effective and which were painfully inadequate. This was demonstrated by the winner and organiser of the first UFC contest, Royce Gracie, when he showcased a, then, little known strain of martial arts called BJJ or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He looked to all intents and purposes, like an average Brazilian Joe in comparison to the other fighters on the roster.
The first fight on the card pitted a four-hundred-plus-pounds, Hawaiian Sumo wrestler by the name of Teila Tuli, against a tall Dutch Savate fighter called Gerard Gordeau. The bell rings and the sumo monster rushes in to catch his opponent off-guard, but overreaches and receives a heavy uppercut to the chin, followed by a huge kick to the face as he tries to regain his footing. This kick dislodges a tooth from Tuli’s mouth and renders him briefly unconscious, signalling the end of the first fight after just twenty-six seconds.
The next fighter to enter the cage is a boxer and mixed martial arts fighter named Art Jimmerson and his opponent, the lightest man in the competition at one hundred and seventy-eight pounds (around twelve and a half stone), wearing a full Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gi, is Royce Gracie. Until then, most fighters wore pants or shorts to make it difficult for their opponents to grab and hold them, but Gracie seemed to be inviting them to get a handful of it. The fight lasts around two minutes before the boxer is tapping his hand on the ground in pain and submission. Each successive round is the same for the Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, so much so, that in every consequent bout the opposing fighters’ corner are ready to throw in the towel as soon as their man hits the floor. Grappling is an intricate art-form but from far away or to the uninformed has none of the glamour of kicks and punches and to this day it causes booing and jeering from some crowds. Anyway, it took Royce a total of four minutes and nineteen seconds to scoop the fifty-thousand-dollar prize money with expert use of holds and submissions and become one of the most influential figures in the still growing sport of MMA. The change in the sport has been incredible, in twenty-five years, athletes who practise a solo fighting style have all but disappeared from competition and been replaced by truly mixed martial arts. The most successful parts of each discipline have been identified and extracted, the punches from Boxing, kicks from Karate, Tae-Kwon-Do and Kickboxing, trips and throws from Judo and Wrestling and of course, BJJ submissions. There are now events on almost every weekend and there is a flourishing women’s division in most organisations, and although the sport has been somewhat homogenised by the adopting of all styles, it is still an exciting sport.
My friend and I were so enamoured with our new discovery, that we hunted out all the UFC video’s we could and watched each one with renewed relish. You might think that this interest would have sparked a desire to actually learn a martial art in real life but my innate laziness and fear of physical exertion in any form far surpasses any benefits I might have gained from the exercise. Instead, my friend and I plunged head first into the UFC computer game on a Dreamcast console (definitely don’t bother googling it). We played that sucker day in, day out until we were so well-versed in the moves that every match would end with our fighters locked together in a ridiculous, unbreakable grapple, rolling back and forth and making awful grunting noises until we were both crying with laughter. I still meet up with my friend nearly twenty years later and we both still enjoy watching some people punch other people in the face as much as we ever did.
*There were two rules: no biting and no eye-gouging.
