u/cslevens

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Violence, The Philosophy of Violence, Rape, Torture, Organized Crime,  Deeply Uncomfortable Existentialism

 

What is Mixed Martial Arts?

Mixed Martial Arts (abbreviated as MMA) is, currently, one of the most popular sports, lifestyles, and fandoms in the entire world. Which is interesting, because if you think about it, it is technically not its own independent pastime. MMA is more like a cobbled-together hodgepodge of dozens, if not hundreds, of previous cultural traditions that came before it.

Perhaps it helps to start in the beginning. At some indeterminate and therefore un-citable time, the first human being (or homo-sapien ancestor species) discovered that they could hurt other human beings. Physically. We do not know what shape or form this discovery took, or what motivated it, only that it must, logically, have happened at some point. My personal guess, for the sake of convenience, is that a caveman smacked another caveman in the face out of the blue, and history was made.  

This was the invention of “Violence”.

Now, given that this predated recorded history, we can’t say through what mechanisms the pursuit of violence continued to branch out and develop. However, as we now live in the present, we can see that violence must logically have done so, as there are now many roads through which we personally pursue the ways in which better violence can enrich our lives.

This journey has traditionally taken the form Martial Arts. No matter where you live in the world, you have most likely heard of a few. Kung-Fu, Karate, Wrestling, Sumo, Jiu-Jitsu, Capoeira, Wrestling, among many, many others. A Martial Art is any codified system of either techniques, philosophies, exercises, practices, or any combination thereof, which seeks to “perfect” the practice of violence.

Universally, every Martial Art- without exception- is based on the fundamental idea that that Martial Art is capital-b Better than all others, in some unique way. After all, if a Martial Art isn’t the “best” way to practice violence……. Why do it?

This “institutional ego”, for lack of a better term, is why Martial Arts branched off into countless different directions, countless different forms, all being incredibly distinct not only from each other, but from their common roots of cavemen smacking each other in the face. There have been instances of Martial Arts interacting with other, different disciplines in the distant past, but these were very much the exception instead of the rule. For the most part, if you practiced a Martial Art, you mostly interacted with other people who did the same (or similar) Martial Arts. There was no commonly-accepted reason for Karate-users, for example, to go and fight Savate users on an institutional level.

After all, why fight someone using a different Martial Art? You already know that yours is better on a foundational level. So what would be the point?

As these styles of combat developed, some branched off into a different practice altogether, the Combat Sport. Combat Sports are Martial Arts that pursued an innately different goal. Instead of pursing better carnage, for the sake of the carnage itself, Combat Sports sought rational limits on violence, in pursuit of entertainment. While the first, millenia-old combat sports were, in fact, spectacularly violent (and sometimes fatal), this was no-longer the end goal they pursued. Rather, Combat Sports developed rules, methods of judgement, and limits, for the purpose of making their violence equal parts competitive, fun to do, and fun to watch.

For the most part, Combat Sports no-longer treated violence as an “anything goes” affair. There were now, definitively, things you were not allowed to do. There were now particular acts of violence that were encouraged over others, by the way of “points” or “victory conditions”, even if they were suboptimal, purely because they were fun.

This distinction- that between Martial Arts and Combat Sports- is important to understand, because MMA is the end product of these two philosophies crashing into each other. Martial Arts are about hurting people in a way that is “better”. Combat Sports are about hurting people in a way that is “fun”. These things are different.

The growing popularity of Combat Sports would lead the general public consciousness to a curious idea. It was already “fun” to watch individuals fight, but what if Martial Arts themselves, as individual disciplines, fought each other? Who would win? It was a fun question to think about.

Global Pop Culture in the 1970’s and the 1980’s would begin to flirt, heavily, with this idea.

While the roots of this concept are many and varied, one of the first individual flashpoints of this concept becoming reality was the “War of the Worlds”, a “Mixed-Style” fight between legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, and all-around crazy person Antonio Inoki (A Professional Wrestler, Judoka, and Catch wrestler). While this is arguably the first fight of its kind, the bout itself was disappointingly lackluster, and thus the idea did not really catch on at the time. Due to last minute contract shenanigans (allegedly on the part of Ali’s management), the entire fight was Inoki falling to the ground intentionally, and kicking Ali in the shins.

But the seed of the idea was planted nonetheless.

Another commonly sourced flashpoint was the popular 1988 movie “Bloodsport”, depicting an event called the “Kumite”, a secret international tournament where fighters from different cultures and styles would meet in a no-holds barred brawl to determine supremacy. What gave this film particular mystique at the time was the fact that it was, allegedly, based on real events, namely the life-story of one Frank Dux. Of course, the entire thing was likely fictional, and Frank Dux was (allegedly) a massive fraud on a hilarious scale.

But, again, the popularity of this film just spoke to a growing global culture that was really, REALLY wanting to see different Martial Arts fight each other. Even though the “Kumite” of Bloodsport was completely fictional (and distinct from the real tradition of “Kumite”), by the time the 1990’s hit, there were a lot of people who thought it would be cool to see.

So Mixed Martial Arts, in its modern form, was born.

 

The Development of Modern Mixed Martial Arts

The organization most widely credited with popularizing (though not inventing) the modern MMA competition is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC.

I should clarify at this point that UFC and MMA are not synonymous, although many people use the terms as such. UFC did not, and does not, have a monopoly on MMA. Even in the 90’s and 2000’s, they had competition in other circuits and companies like Pride FC. Even today, the UFC has competition in Bellator and One FC. So even though we’re going to be talking quite a bit about MMA and UFC, please do not think these are interchangeable.

All this being said, the UFC was the first large scale organization to really launch the idea of MMA as a competitive combat sport. The concept was simple: conduct one-on-one fights between two fighters, with an incredibly open and forgiving ruleset. All disciplines and martial arts would be allowed, and the only real limits were on certain types of debilitating moves. These limits were the reasonable things one would expect: eye-poking, biting, etc. Hilariously, strikes to the genitals were actually not outlawed within UFC’s version of the MMA until a few years in, leading to this curious early fight where a competitor was punched in the junk twenty times in a row at full power, until he gave up “out of terror”. Seriously, the official result is “Submission by Terror”.

Anyway.

With this very open ruleset, early UFC marketed itself as the cross-style brawl that everyone wanted by that point. “Anything goes”. If you thought your martial art was the best, come and test it under this very open combat-sports ruleset. And indeed, that is exactly what the early UFC became.

Heck, the very first MMA fight within the UFC was something out of a videogame, with a traditional French Savate practitioner fighting a Sumo Wrestler. Like that fight, most fights in the early UFC were extremely one-sided, non-competitive affairs.

Remember, the landscape of Martial Arts at the time was not to cross compete. Consequently, many, MANY martial arts simply had not been realistically tested against other, different styles. So when these very insulated, untested martial arts were thrown into the metaphorical deep end of the pool……. They drowned.

Within just a few years, the growing popularity of MMA had all but eradicated the “mystique” and “prestige” of certain martial arts, mainly because they completely failed when tested. Most notoriously, Aikido was found to lack real effectiveness, most schools of “Ninjitsu” were found to be outright fraudulent, and “standing only” styles like traditional Boxing were found to have fundamental weaknesses that could not be overcome. Many styles of Traditional Chinese Martial Arts (Kung-Fu, Hung-Gar, etc.) were found wanting within the UFC arena, and are still highly suspect to this day. Chinese Martial Arts in particular are a culturally contentious topic on this front, so I’ll save that conversation for another day.

On the other hand, the success of UFC and MMA as a wider concept caused certain Martial Arts to rise in prestige and exposure. The undisputed biggest “winner” in this regard was Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), which before the UFC had been a niche regional practice. However, Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu would absolutely DOMINATE the early UFC for several years, most notably through the legendary Gracie family of fighters, catapulting the sport to some prominence. Several other martial arts also rose into prominence through early UFC success, mainly Kickboxing, Freestyle Wrestling, and Vale Tudo.

Quite rapidly, MMA would filter out the “weaker” styles of martial arts, leaving only single-style practitioners who specialized in the styles that “worked”. While early UFC very much resembled the “Street Fighter” games in its colorful style variety, the high-pressure, natural-selection environment of the sport would rapidly give way to extremely focused, narrow-minded competitors. The kickboxers, the wrestlers, and about a million BJJ practitioners.

However, the next stage evolution of MMA would target that single-mindedness itself. After all, even if some Martial Arts are “better” than others, every discipline has logical weaknesses. For example, BJJ is a “grappling” based art, focused primarily on scenarios where both fighters are more or less flat on the ground (“rolling”). Those who practiced only BJJ, at the time, would have difficulty with fighters who could strike at range, keeping them from closing in, and negating almost every scenario where BJJ would shine. Conversely, those same striking arts- Kickboxing et. al- would not offer any particularly strong offense in grappling scenarios.

As a result, the dominance of single-style fighters would be broken by those fighters who would truly put the “Mixed” in “Mixed Martial Arts”. By “cross-training” in multiple different (and often philosophically contradictory) martial arts, this new breed of fighters would create something altogether new. They would create the modern MMA paradigm, as a patchwork tapestry of techniques plundered from different traditions. Anything that worked, worked, and would rapidly be adopted all throughout the MMA landscape. Anything that did not work, did not work, and would be discarded.

Ironically, through the infusion of Combat Sports-based ethos and limits, Martial Arts had returned to their original purpose of being. It was no longer about the ego of any individual martial art, but about the pure and unadulterated pursuit of better, more efficient violence, once again.

By the 2010’s, this philosophy had not only come to define MMA (and the UFC), but now loomed over all martial arts and combat sports, worldwide. MMA, which itself was paradoxically not a martial art itself, had become something somehow grander. A wider road to pursue, for all who wanted to improve themselves by hurting other people.

But this set the stage for something peculiar.

You see, mixing martial arts, despite being such a popular concept, is actually EXTREMELY difficult. In addition to the physical dedication and consistency which is required of any sport, it requires a particular mindset. It requires a mind that is smart enough to adopt the “working” parts of various disciplines, yet has enough personal ego  to rebel against those same disciplines, and reject that which “does not work”.

This new era, where the different parts of MMA were blending into each other in a way that was increasingly difficult to quantify, was begging for someone with this type of mind. It was a kingdom with no ruler.  A lock, looking for that one key- that one all time great- who had the dedication to say yes, the ego to say no, and the body to endure it all. A person with this singular mindset, so singular that it probably could not come from anywhere but natural talent, would find their empty throne, waiting and eager.

It was a shame that that person happened to be a complete asshole.

 

Intermission 1- April 9, 2002

My parents received a call from my middle school. I wasn’t there when they got the call, but I know what it said.

“Charlie has been in a fight. It was quite bad.”

This would likely have been a shock to them. As a child, I was extremely overweight, academics- obsessed, and non-expressive in general. Docile, even. I was a stickler for following rules, even those that no-one else cared about. The stereotypical “good boy”, taken to an unhealthy extreme.

“Socially Stunted”, in some people’s view. Including my own, now that I’m over two decades divorced from the time period.

They would go to the school, and have a private talk with one of the school’s guidance counsellors. They were assured that I was in no trouble, because I was in no way an instigator.

To the contrary, “SK”, a known bully with a long disciplinary record, had gathered a few of his friends and “jumped” me, in the middle of the schoolyard. They had surrounded me, yelled insults about my weight, and then a (coincidentally fatter) boy shoulder-checked me into the ground, where they proceeded to hit and stomp on me further.

There were dozens and dozens of witnesses, young and old, who were loudly (and insistently) verifying this to the school staff. Coincidentally and amazingly, county administrators had visited the building when this occurred, and they saw it as well. And perhaps this is why, despite “zero tolerance” policies being in vogue, I was not to be disciplined in anyway. You see, SK was the son of the local high school’s guidance counsellor, and his previous infractions hadn’t been particularly “witnessed”.

This one was. This one was EXTREMELY witnessed, by all the wrong people. So SK would finally see some severe punishment, after years of being protected,  while I was treated as the victim I was.

But the staff all told my parents one curious thing- that I was to be commended for, of all things, my “compassion”.

You see, I had been crying ever since the incident. And while a fair amount of that was from the bruises and cuts, as far as they could tell, I was never crying harder than when they said that SK would be punished.

“Even as a victim”, they told my parents, “He cares so much, clearly so deeply, for the people who were hurting him. He truly is a nice young man.”

This was such a bizarre moral stance to take. Truly. To this day, I cannot understand how they would come to this conclusion.

Mainly because they were thoroughly mistaken.

 

Who is Conor McGregor?

Conor McGregor was born in Ireland. If you couldn’t tell that from his name, or from looking at him, or from hearing his extremely thick Irish accent, you would likely find out anyway, because he would tell you. Repeatedly.

McGregor is a man who clearly prefers to live his life as a “character” as opposed to as a person, and this manifests itself most obviously in his national pride. The man carries an Irish flag to the ring, wears the stereotypical Irish green in all of his fight outfits, and loudly and repeatedly heaps praise on his fellow Irish fighters and sportsmen. But McGregor’s national pride is only emblematic of the type of person he is, which is to say, a man controlled almost entirely by his manic passions.

If Conor McGregor likes something, by god, he’ll throw his entire soul and being into doing that thing, and lord help you if you try to stop him.

(For anyone who remembers the title of this writeup, you are correct in recognizing that sentence as a horrible omen).

McGregor discovered early on in his life that he loved sports, and combat sports in particular. He had always vocally idolized famous fighters and martial artists, and given that he grew up right when MMA was beginning to solidify, he took to it like a fish takes to water.

McGregor started in Professional MMA at, most likely, the literal earliest he could have legally done so. At the age of 18, he had his first billed fight against Ciaren Campbell, which he would win by TKO. But already, even though he was barely into proper adulthood, he would display the genius-level fight IQ that would define his titanic success in MMA.

In this first fight alone, he is already pulling techniques from no less than 6 different and distinct martial arts. As the purest of amateurs, I was able to spot him bouncing between Boxing and Karate stances, displaying footwork and parries from Jeet Kune Do, throws from either Freestyle Wrestling or Judo (I couldn’t quite tell which), standing high kicks from Tae Kwon Do, and standing low kicks from Muay Thai.

And this was not even his final form.

More so than any fighter than had ever come before him, Conor McGregor embraced the ethos of MMA, displaying an almost supernatural talent for incorporating disparate techniques and philosophies into a single, functional combat style.

This is a fighter who, in addition to performing kicks out of Muay Thai, Kickboxing, and Tae Kwon Do, also seamlessly integrates Capoeira, aka Brazilian Dance-Fighting.

This is a fighter who once bloodied another man by hitting that man’s face with his shoulder at short range, which…… is that even from any martial art at all? I’ve seen no stylistic attribution, and if there wasn’t footage I wouldn’t be sure that it was possible.

This is a fighter who, despite taking elements from every standing and striking art imaginable, still was able to force fighters to submit through Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. In fairness, this happened extremely rarely, but the fact that he was able to do it at all was staggering.

The point is, McGregor was exactly the talent that MMA (and UFC in particular) was calling out for at the time of his ascension. He was an unpredictable knockout artist, pulling his techniques seemingly at random from the entire world of martial arts, in a way that was almost impossible to predict or react to. McGregor has always been an impulsive person, and his brilliance was in turning that impulsivity into a strength. By training in so, SO many disciplines, he gave himself a million different combat options to choose from at any time, and to his opponents, it looked like he would pull techniques out of the air seemingly on a whim.

McGregor wasn’t just a fighter who put on fun individual fights. His entire career was fun to watch, purely due to the variety of fights he would put on. Even though most of his fights would often end in knockouts, it was a staggering variety of knockouts. Wild hooks, crazy feints, sneaky counter-punches, punch-kick sequences, mounted finishes, there was not a single way of punishing another human being that Conor McGregor would not try.

Conor McGregor was extremely good at violence in general. Possibly one of the best to ever engage in combat sports in general.

 

How successful was Conor McGregor?

Extremely.

McGregor was signed to the UFC in 2013.

By 2014, he was already publicized as a rising, heavily promoted star, winning two straight “Performance of the Night” awards.

By 2015, he was a champion, defeating Jose Aldo for the UFC Featherweight Championship, in what was (at the time) the most heavily promoted fight the UFC had ever had.

In 2016, while still the Featherweight Champion (although he had lost it briefly before regaining it), he defeated Eddie Alvarez for the UFC Lightweight Championship, becoming the first man in the history of the UFC to simultaneously be a champion in two different weight classes.

What’s more, every single McGregor fight kept making more, and more, and more money. The rise of McGregor, along with the rise of Ronda Rousey at the same time,  catapulted the UFC into the multi-billion dollar fighting ecosystem that it is today.

This was, due to in large part, due to McGregor, personally.

He knew it. Anyone watching the product knew it. And if you didn’t know it, he would tell you.

 

The Mouth of Conor McGregor

As I’ve mentioned more than a few times up to this point, Conor McGregor has a massive ego. He is loud, he is outspoken, he demands to be the center of attention at all times, and above all else, he is impulsive. Whereas in the normal world this would likely land you in prison, in the world of Combat Sports, these habits have a nasty tendency of elevating mere “Excellent Fighters” into “Legends”.

Both McGregor and the UFC as an organization would capitalize on his antics as much as possible, all in the name of further promoting his (already heavily promoted) fights. At the start of his career, he was merely a colorful trash talker, and his outspokenness would lead to some legitimately hilarious moments. But overtime, with no-one able to reign him in, he would turn into an obnoxious, drunken, coked-out jackass. Not to mention racist as hell. Like, REALLY racist.

Everyone in the MMA community at the time benefited from the fact that McGregor was living as a character and not a person. He was a wheel spinning fast, getting more and more bold with his wins, getting bigger and bigger in his media presence, getting more and more over the top in his promo. He was a wild, racist, misogynistic, alpha-male-coded, reckless cannon, with his endless bravado being backed up by wild, exciting, genuinely innovative, and fun wins.

So what happened?

Well, the wheel spun so fast that it flew off the axle altogether.

 

The First Downfall of Conor McGregor

About a year after becoming a Double Champion, McGregor was stripped of his Featherweight championship due to inactivity. In other words, he was simply not accepting any challengers for the title, and attempted to maintain his championship without actually defending it. It is not as if he was inactive as a fighter altogether, it just appears that he decided to prioritize one weight class over the other.

Actually, no. He was inactive as a Lightweight as well. Instead of accepting any challengers in the UFC at all, he stepped outside the organization to have a boxing match with Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr.  Despite attempting to stall out two different weight divisions in the UFC, McGregor entered this boxing match as an active (but oddly non-fighting) UFC champion. In fairness to him, he did make (allegedly) $130 million USD from this one fight, so this decision makes sense.

However, after further refusing to defend his remaining title, the UFC stripped him of his Lightweight Championship as well. The “Double Champ” had lost both titles without a fight, because he simply refused to fight.

Thus started an embarrassing cycle of McGregor “retiring” for attention, “un-retiring” for a big- payday return fight, “retiring” again, and repeating the process. His first un-retirement fight was against Khabib Nurmagomedov, which McGregor lost in a decisive and humiliating fashion.  

In addition to losing the fight, this fight also marked the turning point in McGregor’s life as a celebrity. Before the fight itself, McGregor had committed SEVERAL crimes against Nurmagomedov and his fight crew, very publicly, for which he was arrested and charged. Instead of going into the details here, u/Nomerdoodle was kind enough to write up this incident all on its own, and I think they did a fantastic job. You can read it here. TL:DR, this was the point where the appeal of “Wild, Crazy Guy” McGregor was starting to wear off, and the public was beginning to see him as “Dangerous Washed-Up Nutjob” McGregor.

This retirement-un-retirement cycle would see McGregor develop a miserable, losing record. Other than one win against Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone (the shoulder hit I showed earlier), every fight he had at this point was a loss due to his own personal failings. Fights where he just didn’t seem to try or train particularly hard. Fights where McGregor’s own body, clearly neglected through his life of extravagant excess, began to fail on him.

By 2021, McGregor said he was done with fighting. And it looked like it would stick this time.

So what would Conor McGregor do with himself, without the daily focus of MMA?

Well, several things. He had already been engaging in a wide array of business ventures before this most recent retirement. He was a fixture in multimedia, making cameos in television shows, movies, and video games. He had bought his own Whiskey distillery, “Proper No. 12”, and was extremely passionate about its promotion. In 2025, he declared himself as a candidate for the President of Ireland on a far-right platform, before rapidly withdrawing due to his sudden allergy to actually fighting anything in any manner whatsoever.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the rape.

 

Intermission 2- April 9, 2002

My parents are looking at me. I’ve just gotten home, I’m no longer crying, but I am still sniffling.

“You know they say that SK might be sent to military school. Although I’ve heard that Juvenile Hall is on the table” says my Dad.

I made a noise.

“We’re a little concerned. They said you cried a lot.”

I nodded.

“And they said you cried hardest when you found out SK would get in trouble.”

I said nothing, confused. I tilt my bruised and cut head.

“I did?”

My parents looked at each other.

“They said you were loudest when you heard that.”

“I guess…… I was laughing.”

A moment.

“I was crying too, and crying harder than the laughter, but I found that funny.”

“What?”

“I mean, he’s a bad person. He’s hurt me. My friends. Why wouldn’t I laugh?”

My mom seemed to understand. My dad was slightly confused.

“But…. They said you were crying a LOT. You weren’t crying for him?”

“No”.

I hold up my right hand, and my parents winced.

“Jesus christ, is your wrist broken?”

“It doesn’t quite feel like the break that one time. But it’s bad.”

“Why……. Why didn’t any of the teachers notice?”

“They were more concerned with getting SK under control.”

A moment.

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“I was enjoying the moment.”

“But you were crying?”

“Yes, but bad things were finally, finally happening to SK. And he’s a horrible person. Isn’t that good? Isn’t that funny?”

My parents took me to the hospital, and we never spoke of it again.

It is funny, right? I mean, don’t you think so?

 

The Rape of Nikita Hand

In an unnamed hotel in Dublin in 2018, right before his career began spiraling out of control,  Conor McGregor heavily beat a woman named Nikita Hand, and then raped her.

Ms. Hand’s allegations would not be fully reported to the Irish authorities until 2021, for unknown reasons. The nature of these investigations and proceedings seems far more opaque than they would be in the American legal system, so it is difficult to source exact details about the details of the proceedings or the legal affairs (if they are reported at all). But what we do know is, that at the time, Conor McGregor was one of the richest and most prominent men in Ireland, and much of the investigation seemed to take unusually long.

There had been other, similar allegations against McGregor from around that time, but most went formally un-charged, or underreported. In addition, many of the accusers seemed to suffer from coincidental violence, right around the time their accusations went public.

In 2023, an anonymous woman alleged that McGregor violently assaulted her on a yacht. Shortly after her allegations were publicized, her car was blown up, and a brick was thrown through her court window. She did not press charges against McGregor.

Even Ms. Hand had her share of this coincidental violence. Close to the start of her trial in 2024, four masked and armed men broke into her home, smashed the windows, and stabbed her boyfriend (he survived, thankfully).

For whatever reason, the Irish government declined to press Criminal Charges against Conor McGregor. However, Ms. Hand was allowed to pursue a civil suit against McGregor.

So, she did.

My detail on what happened in this exact trial, or the exact evidence or nature of the narrative, are necessarily scant at this point. From the best of what I can tell, within the Irish legal system, trials for rape or similar sexual crimes are closed to the general public, whether they are civil or criminal. I am by no means any sort of expert or authority on Irish Law, but I can find very little information on the trial itself, other than the verdict and aftermath, and this appears to be the reason. If I’m wrong, someone please correct me on this point, as I’d hate to be mistaken on such a serious matter.

Speaking of the verdict, Ms. Hand won. A jury found, in a legally conclusive way, that Conor McGregor had beaten and raped her in 2018. The court ordered him to pay her 250,000 euro in damages, and an additional 1,500,000 euro for her legal fees. McGregor would deny all guilt, appealing the case repeatedly all the way to the Irish Supreme Court, and would lose entirely at every level.

At this point, McGregor’s brand was toxic. His former Whiskey Brand, which he had been so proud of before, stripped all of his imagery from their promotion. His sponsorships and endorsements dried up. He was still rich, but practically, his only remaining media asset was his previous reputation as a fighter.

By 2026, McGregor had not fought in any capacity for five years. Yet he still remained one of the most recognizable MMA fighters of all time.

He was going to make his comeback. He was going to do what he did best. He would fight again, and he would win, and everyone would love him again.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

There are many, but this is mine. Er…. Actually I painted it as a gift, so technically it’s a friend’s…