I’ll be honest, there are times when I accidentally start talking like an adult when I’m discussing sports. When I pretentiously let my mind wander to a fictional land where the results of a baseball game actually have has consequences. This is all preposterous bullshit. And I hate when I catch myself doing it.
I don’t watch sports for the wins and loses.
Or the post-game, analytic breakdown.
I watch for the spectacle.
I guess at heart, I am still just a little boy who loves superheroes. Batman. The Power Rangers. Dragon Ball Z. The Matrix. That moment when Icarus is flying towards the Sun, and you think he just might make it.
However, the superhero necessarily requires the super villain. The resistance is just as important as the unstoppable force. For it is not the superhero in a vacuum that I love, but rather, the encounter. The battle. The Clash of the Titans. The no holds barred struggle for life. Without the Sun, Icarus is just some dude getting high on his couch listening to Dark Side of the Moon.
And the greater the magnitude of the encounter, higher the stakes, the more captivating the spectacle.
This is why I engage in ridiculously juvenile conversations like, Ok, if a grizzly bear fought a lion, who would win? or What about the grizzly versus TWO lions?
And I do not think I am alone. Are we really so different than the Romans? However "uncivilized" it may sound, there is an inherent draw of the gladiator's fight to the death. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Bruce Willis movies. War.
It is the “kill or be killed,” the fight or flight, the animalistic Id that very few in “society” wish to address. Yet, it persists within all of us. Some wish to shut the creature out, but the perverse caveman still remains. This is never more apparent that one observes the visceral, borderline orgasmic, reaction of the crowd when an actual fight breaks out in the midst of a sporting event. The moment when the mere metaphorical fight becomes a real fight. When the “grizzly bear vs. lion” argument actually plays itself out. At no other point is there such an emotional frenzy. Or such excitement.
There are definitely some mild analogies to these encounters in mainstream sports: Lebron vs. Kobe, for instance. But once you witness the real struggle. The real fight. Those brave enough to engage in the actual practice of what every other sport pretends to be. What every other sport wants to be. Where one human wins, and the other loses. And where the consequences are real. Physical. Etched into one’s flesh and bones. You can never go back. Or at least I couldn’t. Once I had witnessed the high stakes mayhem of mixed martial arts (MMA), every other sport seems to just become a lesser, watered down derivation.
I assume this is probably the same mentality that most heroin-addicts adopt. Once you take it to the highest level, how can you take a step back? What is football if not the pretend version of two opposing armies struggling to control an arbitrary piece of land? Why waste my time watching the pretend war when I can see the real one take place in a locked cage?
I’m not making a morality play on the virtues of fighting. Or here to say that the emergence of MMA is a good social commentary on the direction that our society is heading. I’ll leave those issues to the adults.
I’m only here to say that MMA is the single-most entertaining sport in the world. And it’s where the real superheroes reside.
(coming soon - an outrageously nerdy breakdown of which fighters are analogous to which superheroes)
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