Jessica Kourkounis for
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Published: March 14, 2012
IT was just after midnight
in Atlantic City on a Friday night in February when a compact, chiseled fighter
named Tom DeBlass (picture a heavily tattooed bulldog) climbed inside the cage
at Lou Neglia’s Ring of Combat XXXIX, a regional mixed
martial arts tournament at the Tropicana resort. In the audience,
his friend and protégé, Thomas Ettari, a 34-year-old third-grade teacher from
Bayville, N.J., rose from his seat and started shouting.
“Go, Tom!” Mr. Ettari said as the bell rang,
signaling what was supposed to be the first of three five-minute rounds. “Drop
him!”
Forty-one
seconds later, it was over. Mr. DeBlass had grabbed his opponent’s foot,
dropped to the mat and used his elbow to apply pressure to the knee, forcing
his opponent to surrender. The crowd of 2,000 fans — about 75 percent male,
nearly all under 40 — erupted.
For Mr.
DeBlass, the significance of the win was simple: he took the Ring of Combat
heavyweight crown and moved one step closer to a professional-level bout.
But in
the faces of Mr. Ettari and the 16 friends with whom he had traveled to
Atlantic City — including his identical twin, Anthony — one could read the
significance of M.M.A. itself. To this generation, who came of age alongside
the notorious sport, mixed martial arts has come to represent everything that
boxing once did to their fathers and grandfathers: the ultimate measure of
manhood, endurance and guts.
“Boxing
isn’t the biggest, baddest sport on the block anymore, and it hasn’t been for
years,” said Jim Genia, 41, the author of “Raw Combat, the Underground World of
Mixed Martial Arts.” Today, he said, M.M.A. is “the one sporting endeavor that
encapsulates what it means to be a warrior.”
Critics
dismiss mixed martial arts as nothing more than human cockfighting. Numerous
attempts to legalize it in New York have been thwarted by antiviolence
advocates. But to the men who have followed M.M.A. from its first days as a
no-holds-barred blood sport, who grew up playing “Street Fighter 2” and arguing
whether Jean-Claude Van Damme could beat up Steven Seagal, it is the fairest
(and coolest) possible fight.
The idea
behind mixed martial arts is to create a space where a fighter can use any style
of combat — jujitsu, karate, boxing, wrestling — to subdue an opponent.
Fighters wear minimally padded gloves, and matches are held in cages so no one
can fall out. The result is an often bloody, bone-breaking affair that,
according to fans, leaves no question of who is the better combatant.
“I would
say that if boxing is the sweet science, then M.M.A. is the complete science,”
said Chris Jones, a 19-year-old student at Pasco-Hernando Community College in,
Fla. “It’s all aspects of the fight. It’s a full fight. It’s a real fight.”
For many
parents, their young sons’ near-obsessive attraction to mixed martial arts is
puzzling, to say the least. Some pinpoint its origins to the David Fincher film
“Fight Club,” a movie that, in the 13 years since its release, has had a
cultural resonance far beyond its modest box office numbers.
Jan
Redford of Squamish, British Columbia, said that her son, Sam, now 20, became
fixated on mixed martial arts when he was 15, partly as a result of that film
and the following it generated among his peers.
“They had
a fight club at his high school,” said Ms. Redford, who ultimately allowed her
son to train in hopes of channeling his aggression. “They’d punch each other as
hard as they could and not be able to show pain.”
Ms.
Redford, who described herself and her husband as pacifists, attributed her
son’s obsession with the sport to teenage rebellion.
“I think
it has a lot to do with shocking your parents and doing the opposite of them,”
she said. “He just kept trying to get me to watch this cage fighting on TV with
him, and it horrified me.”
Other
parents see it in less apocalyptic terms. Tim Parrott, 42, of Bedford, N.Y.,
has never discouraged his 10-year-old son, Max, from his fandom, which began
after the boy saw an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on television about
three years ago.
“These are the new
superheroes for kids,” he said of the mixed martial arts fighters. “It’s just
given them a whole new set of idols. People don’t wake up today and want to be
Sugar Ray Leonard. They want to be Georges St-Pierre.”
Mr. St-Pierre is the currently sidelined U.F.C. welterweight champion.
Birthday parties with
M.M.A. themes are now popular with the under-10 set. “We cut the cake with a
sword, which is always a big hit,” said Chad Weiss, an owner of Westchester
MMA-Fit a school in Mount Kisco, N.Y., which also runs an M.M.A. summer camp.
The
fascination with the sport has even seeped into the walls of academia. Robert
Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said that many
of his male students wanted to write papers about mixed martial arts. And they
are not always the students you would expect.
“People
who don’t know these sports very well think their fans must be these kind of
crazed, people-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown, violent kind of thing,” he said.
But the students he sees who are most interested in the sport “tend to have
really good grade-point averages and be really fine students,” he said. “This
is not something that smart young people look down their noses at.”
He agreed
that the impact of “Fight Club” could not be discounted; it became a manifesto
for a generation of boys who felt estranged from their masculinity. “It became
this kind of magnum opus, and it described a certain culture of this kind of
sport,” Professor Thompson said. “This was their thing, and they defined
themselves accordingly.”
Evidence
that cage fighting has replaced boxing as the combat sport of choice, at least
to some men of a certain age, has been quietly mounting for years. The annual
pay-per-view audience for Ultimate Fighting Championship matches first
surpassed boxing and professional wrestling in 2006, and has continued to rise
almost every year since. And among men ages 18 to 34, the sport is fourth in
popularity only to baseball, basketball and football, according to research by
Scarborough Sports Marketing in New York.
The sport
has also begun popping up in the mainstream. Last year, Fox Sports signed a
seven-year deal with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the dominant brand in mixed
martial arts, that includes four matches a year shown on broadcast television
in prime time.
And
earlier this year, MTV broadcast “Caged,” a reality series that followed the
lives of aspiring cage fighters in small-town Louisiana. Chuck Liddell, the
sport’s first breakout star, now retired, has made cameo appearances as himself
on “Entourage” and “Hawaii Five-O.”
But to
those over 35, mixed martial arts remains something of a mystery (it ranks
below horse racing and figure skating in terms of popularity among the general
population).
Part of
the reason is that for much of its 19-year history in this country, M.M.A was
outlawed in many states and practically absent from television because cable
networks refused to carry the graphic fights, which for years were conducted
almost entirely without rules.
“We call
those the dark years,” said Mr. Genia, the author, who lives in Woodside,
Queens. He was one of many young men who went to great lengths in his 20s to
watch matches.
“I was in
law school in D.C., and I would have to take the bus up here to the one bar in
New York that would have the satellite dish to show the U.F.C.,” he said.
Rather
than forcing the sport into obscurity, that banishment now seems to have fueled
its rise. In the 1990s, fans who could not find a bar in which to watch the
fights (or were too young to get in) often traded videotapes of them. That gave
the sport the feel of a grass-roots movement and endowed fans with a sense of
ownership.
Nate
Wilcox, a public-affairs consultant in Austin, Tex., and writer for Bloody
Elbow, one of many M.M.A. blogs, became an instant fan of the sport in 1995
when someone showed him a tape of the 1994 match between Royce Gracie and Kimo
Leopoldo from Ultimate Fighting Championship III.
“I used
to play in a punk band, and someone brought a tape to practice and was like,
‘Nate, you are going to love this,’ ” he said.
The network of tape trading
also helped link M.M.A. to the Internet, which was coming of age alongside it.
“It was through the Internet that people would
connect to pass around videotapes,” Mr. Genia said. “That’s part of the reason
that M.M.A. is such a young sport, because it’s tied to the Internet
generation.”
Today,
watching a mixed martial arts fight is as easy as setting your DVR. But it’s
hard to match the experience of a live fight.
Not since
“The Godfather” have elements of family and violence mingled so successfully as
at a regional M.M.A. event like the one at the Tropicana. (The U.F.C. holds
only about 21 fights a year across the United States, so for many fans, these
regional events are the closest they get to witnessing a live match.)
Most
audience members attend in support of a specific fighter — a friend, a brother,
a trainer, a sensei — so emotions, and testosterone, run high. There is fist
pumping, back slapping, shirtless posturing and screams for oddly specific
moves (“Get the mount!”). It’s like a boxing match crossbred with WrestleMania,
presented in the middle of an Insane Clown Posse concert.
Why mixed
martial arts over boxing?
“It’s
more realistic than boxing, because a fight in the street, you throw to the
ground, you know?” said Mr. Ettari, who admitted to never having been in a
street fight himself. “You don’t just stand up and duke it out. It’s realistic,
but it has rules.”
That was
the intention from the beginning. When mixed martial arts first came to the
United States from Brazil in 1993, it was billed as a bone-crunching,
rules-free battle royale that would finally settle the sort of “Could Mighty
Mouse beat Superman?” hypotheticals that fueled many a middle-school argument.
Indeed,
the first U.F.C. fight pitted a 415-pound sumo wrestler against a Dutch
kickboxer. (The kickboxer ended the night with a victory, and a pair of the
wrestler’s teeth embedded in his foot.)
In
another decade, M.M.A. might not have found a fan base. The failure of the XFL,
an “extreme” version of professional football, suggests that it takes more than
amped-up violence and an absence of rules to lure young fans. But the 1990s
were a confusing time for professional boxing, creating an opportunity for
another combat sport to swoop in and steal fans.
The
decade began with Mike Tyson, considered by many to be the last great
heavyweight champion, losing his title to the little-known Buster Douglas.
Seven years later, Mr. Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear in a heavyweight
champion bout — hardly a proud moment for the sport.
While
boxing was on the decline, mixed martial arts was evolving into a tamer, more
socially presentable version of itself. Today, M.M.A. is legal in nearly every
state that sanctions boxing (New York and Connecticut are among the holdouts).
“Now
there’s no way I can watch boxing,” said Yuri Salnikov, 25, of Monroe, N.J., as
he waited for the Ring of Combat event to begin. “It’s just too boring.”
When it
comes to fighting sports, perhaps the greatest measure of cultural relevance is
how often a man invokes it as a means to prove his masculinity over a rival.
Ernest Hemingway challenged George Plimpton and Hugh Casey, a relief pitcher
for the Dodgers, to a boxing match in his living room.
In
less-literary circles, Axl Rose wrote a song, “Get in the Ring,” to Bob
Guccione Jr. after Mr. Guccione gave Guns n’ Roses a bad review in Spin, which
he published.
Mixed
martial arts cannot yet claim that kind of historical gravitas. But in
February, a 24-year-old Seattle man identifying himself as DG quickly amassed 2,000
Twitter followers with an account called @ChrsBrwnChllnge. Upset over Chris
Brown’s return to the Grammy
Awards just three years after assaulting Rihanna, his girlfriend at
the time, DG is using the account to taunt the performer into facing him in a
“U.F.C.-style cage match.”
“Prove you can take a man
hand to hand,” he tweeted. “Do you accept or are you a coward? Ignoring me will
not work.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction:
March 22, 2012
An
article last Thursday about the growing popularity of mixed martial arts
misstated a portion of a cheer that some fans shout during matches and the
reason they do so. It is “Get the mount!,” not “mouth,” and it is shouted for
specific moves, not injuries. The article and a picture caption also misstated
the surname of a 19-year-old Florida student who is a fan of the sport. He is
Chris Groves, not Jones. The article also misstated the number of fights that
the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the sport’s dominant brand, has a year in
the United States. It is about 21, not 15.
And because of an editing
error, the article also referred incompletely to the U.F.C. title held by
Georges St-Pierre. While he is considered the current welterweight champion, an
interim champion was determined in a fight in February because Mr. St-Pierre
was not able to defend his title because of an injury. (The interim title was
won by Carlos Condit; they are expected to face each other in a title fight at
a date to be announced.)
A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2012, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fight Club Generation.
This is a NY Times article 3/15/12
