Them's fightin' words

Over the past few months, I've developed a bizarre fascination with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

I don't have the faintest idea why.

Yes, I'm a sports fan in general. But the sports most analogous to UFC are boxing, which I've never liked, and pro wrestling, which I haven't liked since I was much, much younger. So what is it about UFC?

(To digress for a moment, the sport itself is called 'mixed martial arts' or MMA. UFC is a company that puts on MMA matches. But because they're the biggest MMA company, and they try to avoid using the term MMA, a lot of people only know the sport as UFC. Since calling all MMA 'UFC' would be like calling all hockey 'NHL', I'm going to assume it makes more sense to call the sport 'MMA'. So I will.)

It might be something in the sport's roots - I didn't really get interested in it until I learned about the history. The UFC was started in 1993 as a way to answer age-old questions about who would win a fight between a boxer and a judo guy, or a sumo wrestler and a karate practitioner. The end result seemed to be that the more popular or recognizable a certain fighting style was to the public, the less effective it really was.

Over time, UFC fighters began to pick up on the more effective techniques, and the question became less 'what sort of fighting works best?' and more 'who is the best fighter?' - less of a spectacle and more of a competition. Now it's perceived as a legitimate sport - they get stories in the KW Record and other papers fairly often (there was one in today's Record which was the impetus for this post), and UFC's welterweight (max. 170-pound) champion, Georges St. Pierre, was the Canadian Press Male Athlete of the Year for 2008. So that's sosmething.

(And make no mistake, it *was* a spectacle in the early days - here's a video of a sumo wrestler losing the very first fight in UFC history - and a tooth - to a kickboxer.)

My main problem with MMA/UFC might actually be the fans. Most people who either are or admit to enjoying MMA seem to think that it's the greatest thing ever and anybody who doesn't think so doesn't know what they're talking about. It's not. A fight is just as likely to be boring as it is to be entertaining, and I can't imagine why anybody would pay $50 (I think that's the going rate for a UFC show) when there's a strong chance there won't be anything exciting on the program.

Any sport can be dull, and I can definitely see how the action-oriented UFC, even at its dullest, would appeal to the hyper-aggressive sort of person that would be bored by, say, baseball. No sport is for everybody, but most UFC fans seem to forget that.

It's also kind of weird how the UFC is so popular, and other MMA companies - many of which offer their shows on regular television - aren't. UFC has the most money, and arguably the best fighters - but aren't we just taking their word for that last part?

Regardless, I still find it entertaining. Even if I'm not quite sure why.

--Ryan