Things Regular Sport Could Learn From MMA

There's a reason the social pole is slippery. And you find out pretty early on in your school career that it's because it's been greased by the sweaty taint of sportsmen who got up there before you. But nerds are destined to inherit the earth - as technology marches onward through this information age, there will come a time when knowing how to farm experience points with maximum efficiency will be a more applicable life skill than being able to score trys or touchdowns or whatever. And I've decided to help this process along. By accelerating that precious moment when we, the doughy, weezing, Pop Tart repositories of the human race make our glorious ascent to supreme power. Which could be done pretty easily if the most influential dignitaries of the most popular sports in the western world, took a few cues from the MMA community.

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MMA stands for Mixed Martial Arts, a full contact bloodsport with a history of hilarity. I say history, but it's only really been going since 1993 when the Ultimate Fighting Championship was founded, but in that short time, the sport has racked up a record of shattered dreams and brain damage that's never been equaled. I've never even watched a complete match, being content to watch or read about the highlights of historic moments and my God there are so many. From taped-up faces to emotional breakdowns, MMA takes everything you love about regular sports, pumps it full of untested steroids and throws it in a ring with a gorilla. People like FIFA need to learn from this. Because if every sport started taking this reckless approach to the value of human faces, we nerds would be running the world within a month. 

Sportsmen have a reputation for bullying, thanks to spectacles of disappointment like Footloose and other 80s High School movies. But they're all pussies really. Cricketers run screaming for cover when it starts to rain and won't stand in the path of the ball unless they're covered from head to toe in body armour. Boxing, generally accepted by people unaware of the existence of MMA to be the most savage of legally sanctioned sports is just two professional dietitians gently slapping each other until one of them remembers when he was paid to fall down. Not to say that you don't get boring matches in MMA. Fighters run away, endlessly circle each other, throw punches with all the excitement of a bored receptionist hitting refresh on her Twitter feed, or just lie down in the ring together to have a bit of a cuddle. Except that last one is kind of meant to happen. See, MMA is, supposedly, a descendant of Pankration. The Greek martial art which combined punching with wrestling in an oily tangle of man parts.

It sounds like bullshit when you consider that it's mixed martial arts, fighters square off against people with completely different fighting styles - Jiu Jitsu, Karate, Muay Thai, but generally, the more clinically batshit insane guys (that's most of them by the way) just make up their own name for what essentially is Pankration with slightly more clothing. Slightly. 

Don't tell me you looked at that and didn't instinctively want to give them some privacy.

How many other sports can claim such distinguished Classical ancestry? Fucking Alexander the Great enjoyed a roll in the grass with an opponent from time to time. And he kicked ass at Pankration. Fine. That was pretty weak. Point is, you're not getting into that ring if you have a chronic aversion to forcible male bonding. Unless you're this guy. Thing is, most sportsmen are that guy. They're rippling sacks of emotional issues of which homophobia isn't even in the top 5. Your average boxer wouldn't step in the ring against a real mixed martial artist. It wouldn't matter how much money you offered to have his ass handed to him. He's not going to get groped by another man in front of an audience of screaming drunks 'like some kind of fag.'

So we've established that if more sports involved some Ancient Greek manhandling most jocks would defect to us. Maybe we'll let them live. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. How do we get shot of the rest of those aggravatingly sculpted athletes? Easily. That's how. All we'd have to do is throw them, one at a time, into a cage with this monster. Or this one. Or if you're feeling really sadistic, this one. MMA isn't just a competition to see which of two men is more adept at tantric massage, it's also a grand exhibition of the human form. And how quickly it can be liquefied by a kickboxer that's more cyborg than man. 

You could play full-contact Rugby for your whole life and not receive a tenth of the physical punishment some unlucky souls get during one fight. The fighters with long careers only survive them if, like Ernesto Hoost they've got a solid enough defense to not get pounded within an inch of their lives every match or, like Kazuyuki Fujita, are simply unkillable. Most of the latter breed of fighters are Polynesian, which, in MMA, is kind of like being a bulletproof road-sign in Alabama. And even these guys get smashed open like so many uncooperative walnuts by men with nuclear-powered pile drivers for limbs. That guy Fujita, managed to maintain a career with one very specific gameplan in mind: letting the dishonourable foreigner in front of him unload on his face until they got tired and fell over when he pawed at them. That's not a joke. During Fujita's fifth fight, his opponent Ken Shamrock had a heart attack because he'd been pounding on Fujita so hard. And you thought The Simpsons came up with that.

If every sport was like MMA, those people that laughed at your pathetic attempt at the sit-ups your bitch P.E. teacher forced you to do, would destroy themselves. We wouldn't even need that virus that kills anything with a BMI in the 'Good' section that we engineered while they thought we were playing World of Warcraft. 

BUT WHAT CAN THEY DO ABOUT IT NOW? NOW IS OUR TIME.