Remember when we were all like, “There’s no way that this rapidly decaying planet is making it to 2020 without full-on turning into a desolate Mad-Maxian hellscape?”
No? Just me? OK.
Well, the bad news is that I’m stuck with this brain. The good news, however, is that I was wrong. We somehow made it through 2019, impending climate chaos and despotic far-right world leaders running amok and all, and we still have some things to look forward to when it comes to the new year. Like the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, or — and I can’t stress this enough — a brand new “Bill & Ted” movie.
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More to the point of this particular piece, though, we also get more MMA.
There’s plenty that’s cool about that. In the UFC, for instance, we enter the new year with a refreshingly diverse panel of champions. Weili Zhang, Valentina Shevchenko, Amanda Nunes, Henry Cejudo, Alexander Volkanovski, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Israel Adesanya, Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic make for a mix of nationalities and backgrounds that show just how inclusive and inspiring this sport can be. Outside the UFC, people such as PFL tournament finalist Kayla Harrison and Bellator champion Ilima-Lei Macfarlane using their platforms on behalf of bigger causes reminds us of the power of speech and representation.
Call me a hopeless optimist (in what would be very much a first for me), but I do think that there are things to be celebrated.
Which is not to say, of course, that there isn’t room for improvement. In a free adaption of Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson’s words: We’re already pretty cool, but I want us to get cooler. And, conveniently enough, I happen to have some ideas about how that can happen.
In the spirit of New Year’s, I’ve gathered some of them in this somewhat delusional, but well-meaning list.
Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Tony Ferguson, finally
I guess I’ll just start with the one entirely uncontroversial item of this list.
Can I dare hope the 174th time is a charm? Shall I, once more, expose this caffeine-soaked piece of coal that lies where my heart once was? Should I risk losing this tiny little scrap of sanity that I’m barely holding on to? Do I possess the type of foolishness and naivete that it takes for one to believe that good things happen sometimes?
I frankly do not know the answer to any of these questions.
But, as wise woman Selena Gomez once said, “The heart wants what it wants.” And mine just happens to want this very specific kind of sanctioned violence — currently scheduled for UFC 249 on April 18 — between two men to take place within the confines of an octagon-shaped cage.
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That people finally learn what a split decision is
OK, let’s start by going over the basics.
A regular MMA fight in most of the big promotions consists of three five-minute rounds. In the case of a title fight or a headliner, the number of rounds can go up to five. The fights are scored by three separate judges, per individual round. At the end of each fight, unless a stoppage of any nature occurs first, the numbers from these three entirely independent scorecards are tallied up for the official decision.
It is not particularly complicated math.
And I’m saying this as a person who is still low-key puzzled by the functioning of microwaves and airplanes and still believes that basic computer programming is magic. What I’m saying is: I struggle with a lot of simple everyday concepts, and, still, this is one I can grasp without major problems.
Yet, somehow, I constantly find myself listening to sentences like, “But that fight was so close, so it should have at least been a split decision.”
Again, let’s go over this.
There are three judges who score the fight per round, individually. So — and I hate myself for even saying this out loud — when we say a fight was a split decision, what we’re saying is that two judges scored it one way, and another judge scored it another way. Yes, that often reflects a close fight, in that it was close enough that different people saw rounds going different ways.
But, as a reminder, the judges don’t talk to each other. They don’t compare notes or confer after the fight. They don’t sit there discussing whether Fighter X’s face has been so thoroughly rearranged that it must mean that Fighter Y won, or that a valiant late effort should earn Fighter Z some consideration despite the merciless beating he’d taken in the previous rounds. Overall visual damage doesn’t (or isn’t supposed to) count. The fighter’s nationality doesn’t (or isn’t supposed to) count. Their heart/grit/resilience/ability to absorb hard punches with their nose without collapsing face-first on the canvas doesn’t (or isn’t supposed to) count.
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That. Is. Just. Not. How. It. Works.
*takes a deep breath and rubs temples*
Look, all I’m saying is: A split decision is a mathematical outcome. Saying that a close fight should have ended in a split decision, as if it’s some type of consolation prize, is the same as implying that it is somehow the result of deliberate consideration. Which is pretty much the same as admitting you don’t comprehend MMA scoring on a basic level.
Which, granted, is not as embarrassing as not knowing how microwaves work, but if I wanted to discuss my own limitations, I’d just call my therapist or any of my family members.
The end of weight-cutting
Hey, it’s my list, so I get to be as unrealistic about it as I want.
OK, then maybe I can just hope that more fighters find success in heavier weight classes?
I’m a believer in allowing consenting adults to decide what’s best for their own lives and careers, which is why I didn’t join the public pile-on and mostly stayed out of what I can only describe as mass hysteria when Jose Aldo decided to move down to bantamweight. Emphasis on the words “public” and “mostly,” though, because make no mistake: I was at about 70 percent as terrified as everyone else. Because, just like everyone else, I had memories of Aldo looking every bit like a kid who’d just found the listless corpse of his pet hamster every time he stepped on the scale to make the 145-pound limit. Just like everyone else, I saw the pictures of an ever-shrinking Aldo, his belly skin sitting loosely on an apparatus of muscle and bones, and I wondered where the hell his body would find more weight to lose. As the conscious part of my brain reminded me that professionals were assisting him, that this decision hadn’t been made on a whim, that this was a high-level athlete who knew his body a lot more than I did, the other part insisted on shutting one eye and leaving just a tiny sliver of the other one open as Aldo walked toward the scale for his 135-pound debut.
It worked out for Aldo, at least for now. He made weight, seemingly without major hitches, and he put on a valiant effort against Marlon Moraes. Despite dropping a razor-thin split decision, Aldo intends to stay at bantamweight and, in the MMAiest (if that wasn’t a word before, it is now) of turns, he may get a title shot despite the loss.
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Still, if you were to ask me six months ago to choose in which division I’d like to see him, I wouldn’t let you finish the question before answering lightweight. And that’s not an Aldo-exclusive response. Ask me the same question about most UFC fighters, and I’ll probably just say whatever division is a little heavier than their current one.
I know that, despite the knowledge I’ve gathered in all those seasons of “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” I’m not a doctor (though I can yell “He’s in defib!” very convincingly). And I know that the eye test is far from a reliable testimony to one’s health. Still, it’s hard not to see those men and women miserably making their way to the scale, sometimes barely able to stand on their own two feet, and wonder about the effects of that on their bodies and brains. It’s hard not to wonder just how deep and lasting those effects can be. It’s hard not to think of cases like that of Rudson Caliocane, who’s dealing with the effects of a brain ischemia that his team believes was caused by the cut, or 21-year-old Alexandre Pereira da Silva, who was in a bathtub preparing for his pro MMA debut one minute and in a coma the next.
Circumstances change, of course, and fighters at the highest levels of the sport tend to have experienced people assisting with their cuts and better access to medical care should things go awry. But incidents like those suffered by Renan Barao back in 2014 or by Uriah Hall much more recently remind us that this is a thin line that the majority of them, from MMA newcomers to former UFC champions, are treading. A recent piece by The Athletic’s own Shaheen Al-Shatti addresses some of the effects of extreme-cutting in human bodies, but I worry that in the future, once scientific data is more conclusive, reliable and publicly available, we’ll be confronted with an even scarier picture of the type of long-term damage these athletes are looking at.
In the meantime, I’ll always be happy when fighters such as Michael Chiesa, Gilbert Burns, Maycee Barber, Thiago Santos and Ricardo Ramos decide to try their hands at higher weight classes — and even more so when they find success there, possibly inspiring peers who might be contemplating similar moves in the process. And while optimism doesn’t really suit my general disposition, as you may have noticed by approximately 90 percent of the words I’ve ever written, Al-Shatti’s piece did help give me some hope that there’s some progress being made.
No more “shoeys” on the official broadcast
We did it again, people. We took something that was fun and quirky and then mercilessly beat the life out of it with sheer repetition. Poor Tai Tuivasa is getting shoey requests in the middle of breakfast, and this was our doing.
See? This is why we can’t have nice things.
Those…might not be his shoes. 😳
Cheers? @BamBamTuivasa @CubSwanson #UFC245 pic.twitter.com/4wmIoI0YDa
— UFC (@ufc) December 15, 2019
Better fighter pay
Let’s go ahead and address the radical notion that people should be paid appropriately for their labor. Especially when said labor is risky and demanding, with a short shelf life, and it also happens to bring a whole lot of profit to a very reduced number of people.
Call me crazy (or just a filthy communist who’s working toward the collapse of society as we know it — I’ve learned not to take either as insults), but shouldn’t people who have reached what is widely considered the top of this particular career be able to, I don’t know, at least make enough to be able to dedicate themselves exclusively to it?
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Yet, as we know, that is often not the case.
Even the fortunate few who manage to make it out of the local circuit often find themselves dealing with the financial uncertainty that is to be expected from a job in which pay hinges so heavily on performance. And while you might choose to be that guy and make the argument that all jobs actually rely on performance, I ask you in how many of them the ability to perform — and I don’t even mean performing well, but just getting to perform at all — depends on so many moving, unpredictable pieces coming together? And in how many of them can a snapped ligament or a broken hand mean going a full year without pay? And in how many of them are people put through such high levels of physical and mental stress and yet have so little control over their careers, with so much hinging on the whims of both other people and their own bodies?
Of course, you can be that guy again and just say that, well, they signed the contracts, they picked this career, what do you have to do with any of it? And you’d be kind of right, in that the fighters did ultimately pick this. Hell, I’m sure a lot of them probably look at people like me, covered in cookie crumbs and insecurities, perennially haunted by deadlines and Twitter mansplainers, and think that they’ve got it pretty good.
You are, in fact, well within your right to not care at all. You are well within your right to side with those who have the money and the power, and you are well within your right to think people should just shut up and take what’s given to them. You can totally choose to disregard the experiences of others — even those whose work you directly consume and, I would assume, are entertained by.
You can totally choose to have no empathy whatsoever.
If you ask me, though?
How about we just stop asking MMA fighters about matchups with pro boxers?
My colleague Ben Fowlkes has already touched on why the idea of fighting professional boxers is so appealing to MMA fighters — spoiler: it’s money — and I get it. As explained in the item above, big paydays are not that frequent in MMA, and I can’t really fault fighters for chasing more exposure and bigger paychecks.
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But here’s the thing: We’ve been at this long enough. We’ve done this little dance quite a few times. We’ve seen where the overwhelming majority of these conversations go.
And, basically:
I don’t really like using (*cue somber music*) “the media” as this monolithic villainous entity, if only because we’ve become readily available scapegoats for people who want to give easy answers to complex issues. But I kind of feel like we have to take most of the heat here. A lot of these speculations that we know damn well are pointless, after all, start with questions posed by the media. And they only gain traction because they later end up in headlines and quick social media sound bites written and pushed by — yes, you guessed it — “the media.”
I get why this happens. The MMA fighter vs. pro boxer concept is an easily digestible narrative with lots of potential for crossover and fan engagement, even if a lot of the latter is of the hate-driven kind. People buy it, so “the media” sells it (or the other way around; last I checked this debate hadn’t quite been settled yet). And I, unfortunately, don’t see that changing any time soon.
But this is my wish list, and I get to put whatever I want in it, so might as well, right?
Instead of using women’s names as insults, how about we don’t?
I just think that it’s almost 2020 and we can be a little more creative than switching men’s names to their female equivalents, alluding to feminine hygiene products or using anywhere from “princess” to “bitch” in order to attack male fighters.
Seriously, have we not gotten over this yet?
First off, here’s an objective reality: Those insults are simply not original, interesting or even remotely funny to anyone who’s moved past the Dane Cook level of middle school comedy. They’re dated and tired. So, really, a lot of my issue with it comes from a genuine place of faith in people’s ability to step up their callout games.
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But, also, here’s the thing that I think a lot of people don’t get about insults: When you use a word to describe someone and you mean it as a bad thing, what you’re really saying is that being whatever you’re using to insult the person is a bad thing. So if you’re equating men to women in order to diminish them, to doubt their strength or question their ability, what is it that you’re really saying?
I know what you’re going to say, and yes, I agree that people don’t usually make these thought processes when they’re calling people names. Most of them don’t mean to be sexist, and I’m sure a lot of them have a lot of respect for their female counterparts. A lot of it is just repetition and force of habit, the natural heritage of a lifetime of listening to these messages being repeated over and over. I get it. Contrary to what my table manners and general approach to human interaction might suggest, I was not raised by wolves. I grew up listening to the same harmful stuff as everyone else.
But the cool thing about habits is that we can break them.
While we’re at it, maybe we can just stop using words that are demeaning toward human beings in general
I mean, why use slurs when you can just, well, not use slurs? Do you know how many words there are? So. Many. In multiple languages! I arrange words into sentences for a living, and I still find myself discovering new ones all the time. It’s crazy, really.
So maybe we can actually trade words that are loaded with toxic stereotypes and historical oppression for, like, basically any of all the other words.
Have I mentioned the world is just filled with them? Overflowing, really.
If you’re out of ideas, the Merriam-Webster website offers a few glorious options of entirely out-of-the-box insults that would make a killing at press conferences. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing words like “Pettifogger” or “Snollygoster” taking over for the same old expletives in headlines.
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Basically, less of the bad stuff mentioned above and more of the cool stuff mentioned below
Flying-knee knockouts, twister submissions, fights being stopped at just the right time, Israel Adesanya’s walkouts, the Max Holloway and #MiniBlessed duo, Jorge Masvidal doing #supernecessary Jorge Masvidal things, well-timed head kicks, Michel Pereira defying logic and the general concept of gravity, champions defending titles in their own divisions, Justin Wren generally being an amazing person, Alex Volkanovski standing up for nerds and virgins, Dustin Poirier, fighter retirements that stick, Kamaru Usman’s quiet brand of courage, Amanda Nunes’ quiet brand of domination, Cris Cyborg’s not-so-quiet brand of self-confidence, extreme closeups of super gross injuries (no — just me again?), corners throwing in the towel when stuff gets scary, Ilima-Lei Macfarlane’s wholesomess, Bellator events in Hawaii, fighters standing up for themselves, Jon Jones doing actual fighting, KSW’s pyrotechnical insanity, Rizin’s insanity, ridiculously polite callouts, callouts that might not be all that polite but are original, Daniel Cormier as a whole, mid-fight hugs, post-fight respect, in-cage dancing, outside-the-cage kindness, authenticity and compassion.
Mostly, though?
Let’s just please make Nurmagomedov vs. Ferguson happen.
(Top photo of Max Holloway’s son, Rush: Josh Hedges / Zuffa)
