For all the talk of competing with the NFL, with basketball, and even internationally with soccer, the UFC showed clearly last night that it wasn’t ready for primetime. It was a promotion and a sport more comfortably spoken in the same breath with “WWE” or “monster trucks” than with “NFL” or even “Nascar.”
The meme all week was that UFC 100 was a time for celebration. The sport had recovered from it’s past as a violent spectacle; today it was a sporting competition filled with world-class athletes who weren’t trying to hurt anyone. They were simply sportsmen in a violent sport. Unfortunately for the UFC, potential sponsors and media bigwigs who tuned in for the first time in years saw through that lie. This sport was a pig in lipstick. And these respectful and honorable athletes, sold as college graduates and family men, were as loathsome as anyone in sports.
Dan Henderson was quiet during the buildup to his fight with Michael Bisping. Apparently he was holding it all in, waiting for a physical outlet. He knocked Michael Bisping out with a tremendous right hand. That was within the bounds of sport. But then he took it beyond the pale. He followed up with a hard shot to a prone and unconscious Bisping, a dangerous shot that could have been much worse. To make matters worse, he admitted after the fight that he did it to simply hurt his opponent. He knew the fight was over and wanted to “shut his mouth.”
In any other sport, that would be entirely unacceptable. A declaration that a borderline unsportsmanlike act like that was done to hurt an opponent would result in an immediate suspension or at least a month in the media grinder. Not the UFC. They glorified it, showing replay after replay and never once mentioning it might have been a scummy thing to do. They compounded the damage by forcing Bisping on his feet to hustle him out of the cage. He should have been on a stretcher on his way to a CT scan. But I suppose that would have looked too bad on PPV.
For all its depravity, the Henderson late punch wasn’t the worst display of the night. Brock Lesnar, a borderline lunatic with public quasi-racist views and unapologetic homophobia , took his heel act to the next level post fight with Frank Mir. Lesnar was disrespectful, threatening and taunting an obviously out of it opponent before going on a tirade in his post fight interview. He played the role of pro wrestling villain with all the subtlety of Adam Sandler or Gallagher, putting an evil look on his face and encouraging the boos. Lesnar then insulted the UFC’s top sponsor and left the ring to “get on top of his wife.”
This was MMA’s coming out party, only they weren’t announcing themselves as the next great sport, the one that replaces boxing in America. This was simply a new competitor for pro wrestling, a crass pseudo-sport with all the mainstream appeal of monster truck rallies, an inevitable cultural relic. I guess there’s always UFC 200 to make a second impression.
Jonathan Snowden is the author of Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting, as well as a contributor to Fiveouncesofpain.com and the Fight Network blog among other MMA websites. Snowden is a former lawyer, has worked for the U.S. Army and the White House Communications Agency, and currently works for the Department of Defense.