u/Teidju

Last night was UFC Freedom 250 as some of you may well know. A UFC event held on the White House lawn with all the trappings of patriotic imagery and fighter jets and military recruitment send-your-kid-to-die-for-Israel advertisements and blah blah blah you get it. Deeply stupid, gaudy, tacky, propagandistic slop, which also just so happened to be the coolest fucking thing ever. See image.

7/7 KO/TKO finishes, huge upset in the main event, which was an absolute barn burner. All you could want from a fight card as a fan.

Naturally the Reddit subs dedicated to MMA have had a lot to say about all this though! Despairing at their noble sport brought low, what a mockery.

This is a common theme in Redditors who love MMA. They watch a bloodsport, the purpose of which is to put two roided up freaks who get hit very very hard in the head for a living in a literal cage, and have them beat the piss out of each other with as few rules as possible, then cry when some aspect of it reveals itself as otherwise politically distasteful. Usually this is low stakes in the form of a fighter being caught, scandalously, following a bad person on Instagram or something. Bad news folks. The guy we love who’s had 40 fights and talks like a spastic is a Trump guy. It’s over.

In this instance though they are very very concerned about this event. Why is the UFC playing up to this administration? Why are the fighters all going along with it? Why are all my favourite guys not telling Trump to go fuck himself? Why is our noble bloodsport subject to such propagandistic spectacle? No true MMA fan wants this!!!!

MMA has always been a deeply stupid, spectacle based sport. I’m saying this as someone who has loved it for as long as I remember and trained it for many years. It doesn’t have the credibility and dignity of boxing or wrestling because it is severed from tradition. Its whole purpose was to lose the shackles of traditional martial arts to just figure out the best way to hurt someone with your hands. One of the best gyms in the history of the sport literally trained by giving each other CTE for reps. How could it ever be anything other than stupid? This extends to the fanbase and practitioners also. I have met some truly strange, unwell people by doing MMA. You have to be a bit of a misfit or have a screw loose to be compelled to do a sport that involves elbows to the head and rapidly applied joint locks. Naturally I don’t fit into this category though I am very normal and incredibly intelligent.

The inception of this sport is equally grounded in stupid images. Gerard Gourdeau kicking a 400lb Sumo wrestler’s teeth out of his head and into the audience. A guy who looked like Guy Fieri carrying a huge cross on his walkout and gassing out before he even stepped into the ring. The Japanese playing MMA Pokémon by scouring the world to find various freakish half human hybrids with no discernible fighting ability to sacrifice to Fedor. Men in kinky boots slapping each other in Pancrase because closed fist strikes were disallowed. I could go on.

In light of all this, how was 🇺🇸UFC Freedom 250🇮🇱™️ any surprise to Redditors? It’s actually the perfect crescendo of this stupid sport. Did you really think the UFC was going to market itself to PMC coastal liberal types instead? How the fuck would that work? Quit being such a fuckin big brain loser over cage fighting and enjoy the cool show.