The question of sport versus spectacle is one that's
haunted mixed martial arts since the beginning, but seems
increasingly relevant now that the sport seems to be here to stay and
its promoters are attempting to create a stable, mainstream platform
for it. The UFC, which mostly focused on legitimate championship
battles and the struggle to move up the rankings (plus a reality show
and the occasional freak show fight), ended up beating out rival
promotion PRIDE, which focused on showmanship and spectacle[1].
However, despite the introduction of official fighter rankings, the
past year has seen several UFC title matches put together for the
sake of a "big draw" that have little to no competitive
justification. Jon Jones vs. Chael Sonnen is the most obvious one of
these, but a similar case could be made for Aldo/Edgar, St.
Pierre/Diaz, Aldo/Pettis, and now Rousey/Tate 2.
Bellator MMA, the UFC's most prominent competition in
North America, would seemingly have a greater claim to legitimate
competition. Its tournament format was designed in the name of
objectivity, and makes unearned title shots like the ones mentioned
above theoretically impossible. Of course, as ever, perfect
objectivity is a mirage which always seems to be just over the next
hill -- as I mentioned in a previous post on MMA. The presence of
judges and referees already adds a layer of subjectivity to a
seemingly self-contained cage fight. And while Bellator may not
control who advances in the tournament, they do control the field and
the bracketing. So there is some reality to the shade being thrown
on Bellator's matchmaking as of late.
The four-man tournaments featured in this event, the
first of the annual "Summer Series", have been cited by
pretty much every MMA writer as an example of the promotion trying to
game the system that it created itself. The light heavyweight
tournament in particular is seen as a showcase for big-name signing
"King" Mo Lawal, who now only has to beat a distinctly
less-than-impressive field of losers from last season's tournament in
order to secure a title shot. As such an air of perfunctoriness
hangs over the entire venture. Still, without the tournament system
one expects Lawal would have been given a title shot the moment he
signed a Bellator contract. One can see the four-man tournaments as
Bellator struggling with itself[2].
These divisions reveal themselves even in the opening
hype video. The tournaments, carrying with them connotations of
serious and objective competition, are present in only a subordinate
role. The main focus of the video and its narration are on the
card's three big names (Renato “Bablu” Sobral, King Mo, and War
Machine, all former UFC and Strikeforce fighters), and their quest
for “redemption” after recent setbacks. This is a nice
narrative, but it puts the unavoidable focus on star fighters and
their personalities. As in wrestling, the matches themselves will be
staging grounds for these interior struggles – the video suggests
that winning their match tonight would provide narrative redemption.
This makes sense for King Mo and Babalu, who are trying to get over
recent losses, but one wonders if a low-stakes MMA victory will
really signify that War Machine has overcome his stint in prison[3].
Still, this sort of thing is common in sports narratives
The first fight of the TV broadcast, featuring the
promotional debut of controversy-creator War Machine (yes, that is
his legal name), is another example of sport and spectacle clashing.
From a sporting standpoint, War Machine's match with Blas Avena is
more or less irrelevant and probably doesn't deserve a spot on the
main card. The former Jon Koppenhaver is an Ultimate Fighter washout
and general journeyman who is mostly known for a spectacular
flame-out involving ill-advised MySpace posts, a stint as a porn
actor, and a couple of years in prison for assorted assaults and bar
fights. The fight is against another journeyman, the 8-7 Blas Avena,
and War Machine wins in easy but not particularly impressive fashion.
Out of context, it all appears spectacularly pointless.
But of course, it isn't out of context, because any
fight – like any sporting event, like any text – has a context
which we are never not aware of. And Bellator makes particularly
sure to highlight these contexts, as the hype video for the fight
extensively references War Machine's time in prison (although not
what caused it). Some have deemed Bellator's promotional use of War
Machine's prison time as exploitative, and there's certainly some
truth to that, but this is really a regular part of their
presentation.
Bellator's pre-fight videos tend to focus as much on the
athletes' personal lives and stories as they do the upcoming fight.
Loving shots of family, mumbled stories about growing up in the
favela, and shots of the fighter's hometown are commonplace. By
contrast, the UFC's pre-fight videos tend to focus exclusively on
what that fighter has done in the cage, along with an assurance that
it will be a good fight and will most likely end in a finish.
Ironically, the show whose format focuses so much on competition uses
personal narratives much more in its promotion.
There is a reason for this outside of aesthetic choices
(which also play a part). Bellator doesn't have the luxury of
assuming that the audience knows who their fighters are. The UFC's
athletes are not household names, other than maybe major stars like
Silva and St. Pierre, but they do have a minor sports media centred
around them and a large fan following who can be counted on to
remember at least the upper echelon of UFC fighters. By contrast,
Bellator doesn't get a lot of coverage from even the MMA media, and
when it does that coverage is generally related to their shady legal
maneuvering.
The pre-fight videos, then, are a way to provide an
instant narrative for the fight. Major sports can generally rely on
the media to create and cultivate these narratives, but Bellator has
to do it themselves. Before the videos, this is just another MMA
fight between two unknown guys with bad tattoos. After the videos,
it's a struggle between a devoted father trying to provide for his
family and a talented athlete who escaped from poverty. The
tournament structure is also a part of this instant narrative,
providing stakes for the fight and suggesting a progression that will
unfold over the course of the season. The pre-fight videos put the
fight in two separate personal narratives akin to what one might see
from a Hollywood boxing movie. The viewer learns what happened before
the fight and what can happen afterwards, depending on the battle's
outcome. The fight becomes the intersection of a series of
intersecting narratives and contexts.
Ultimately, these personal narratives are competing
along with the fighters. Typically, a video suggests that the
fighter in question needs to win, and that only a victory will
provide narrative catharsis – the hero triumphant, the son making
his father proud, the veteran proving he can still hang, etc. But
there are two videos for every one fight, and only one fighter can
win (barring draws and other bizarre circumstances). Thus any given
episode of Bellator is a procession of tragedies: a father who does
not win enough to support his family, a fighter whose MMA dream
doesn't come to fruition, a lover who has to go home beaten and
bloody to his girlfriend. These narratives are rarely emphasized on
the broadcast – they exist as shadow narratives, suggested by the
events that unfold but not explored or spoken aloud. It's customary
for commentators to interview the winner of a fight, but rarely the
loser.
The night is heavy on finishes, which is generally seen
as a good thing. The finish is the money shot of MMA – it adds to
a fighter's highlight reel, makes an impact on the viewer, and
suggests triumph much more than an announcement by a panel of judges.
Of all finishes, the most privileged is the straight knock-out,
preferably from one big standing punch or kick, and we get a couple
of those in Bellator 96. Babalu's loss, where the referee steps in
to save an obviously messed up but still standing fighter, feels much
less viscerally satisfying. Beyond the violence, there's a level of
aesthetic beauty to the knock-out – the fluidity of movements, the
singular element of the punch, the ripple of its impact against the
opponent's cheek, the sudden loss of human function.
The Babalu-Noe fight is the only one that goes past the
opening minutes – other than that we get a lot of quick finishes
and one-round fights. This makes for almost ideal television – a
fight is over before the first commercial break, and there's always a
new fight around the corner. But after a while it starts to feel
like having ice cream for every meal. A quick finish means little if
it's easily attainable, and such results seem to suggest one-sided
matches. And some of these were clearly created as showcase matches,
notably War Machine/Avena and the Mo/Peteruzelli main event. On the
other hand, Rich Hale and Ron Sparks are legitimate fighters who have
looked scary in Bellator before, but from watching only their fights
tonight they could easily appear as cans.
I can’t help but compare the overall aesthetic of this
broadcast to Vince Russo's idea of “crash TV”, which he attempted
to apply to wrestling in the late 90s to decidedly mixed results.
The essence of Crash TV is that it never leaves the viewer alone with
their thoughts – every thirty seconds something new is happening,
and usually happening with bright colours and loud noise. This is
the same philosophy that motivates the rapid-fire editing of reality
television, and has even started to trickle down into scripted
programming.
Legitimate sports like MMA can't be aesthetically
manipulated as easily, and they usually have their moments of dull
contemplation – that lull in watching a soccer ball being traded
aimlessly around, or in watching two fighters circle each other for a
long minute. The long action of a sport forms together a kind of
rhythm interrupted by flares of bravura. Bellator 96 is all flares,
with the advantages and disadvantages I've outlined above. It makes
for a more immediately appealing product. But it's important to
remember that Crash TV sort of destroyed wrestling, as the art of the
long, gradually-building match was lost from the mainstream. This
doesn't apply as much to MMA cards, which assemble themselves in
their own aesthetic forms and are indifferent to the wills of their
promoters, but it should give pause to the desire to see all
knockouts all the time. The cards full of knockouts are more
meaningful because of the cards full of decisions.
Still, there is a great deal of beauty in a show like
this. The highlight is King Mo's ground strike to finish off Seth
Petruzelli – a long, diving punch, like a fist from heaven,
shattering his opponent and forcing him (it turns out) into
retirement. It is good enough to make Mo look impressive in winning
a fight he was the heavy favourite in. By contrast the War Machine
victory, while quick, is pedestrian and even ugly.
The only fight on the card which escapes the trend of
quick knockouts is the three-round battle between Babalu and Jacob
Noe. It would be easy to turn this into a Hollywood story: the aging
legend gets beaten up in the first round, comes back in the second,
and then eventually passes the torch and rides out into the sunset.
The opening video package follows this formula to the T, with lots of
softly-lit images of Babalu teaching children jiu-jitsu and reference
to his legacy. Instead of focusing on the importance of Sobral
winning the fight, it basically retires him beforehand.
As is usual, there are different narratives that could
be told of Sobral. He could be a villain, capable of acts of cruelty
such as the illegal choking which got him kicked out of the UFC. He
could be a failure, a man who has fought many big names but beaten
few of them. All of these have as much grounds to them as the
saintly picture Bellator paints.
As for the fight itself, it follows the script above,
with the surprising comeback and the inevitable defeat. But it's not
the barn-burner that Hollywood would depict. The fight has a lot of
clinching against the cage, leg kicks, and slow fighting for
position. It is the same story, but told in a cruder vernacular, or
perhaps a different language altogether. Anyone can understand a
one-round knockout; to understand a fight like Sobral/Noe and the
narrative that weaves through it you need to be fluent in MMA.
And then there's the knockout. Instead of a punctuation
mark, it is more of an ellipsis. Sobral is stopped on his feet,
being questionably ruled unable to continue. Babalu's career, if it
really is over now, ends with him complaining to the referee. It is
the final fight everyone wanted, but everything is a bit off. The
end of this battle is faintly pathetic. I mean that in the classical
sense: it generates pathos, a strange combination of sorrow
and fulfillment. One is unsure how to feel after this fight, but
that uncertainty is more powerful than the simple, cliched
satisfaction of the retiring fighter riding into the sunset.
This is where the easy narratives peddled to us by the
sports media fail us. Bellator and others like it want us to believe
reality is like a movie, with heroes, villains, climax and
resolution. Of course, movies are full of uncertainty as well –
rather, they present reality as the image of a trite and melodramatic
sports film. But real life, even the heightened version of it
presented by competitive sports, is the stuff of uncertainty,
contradiction, and confusion. We need art – and yes, B-league MMA
broadcasts are a kind of art -- that reflects these contradictions
and finds the truth and beauty within them.
[1] As much as I'd love to see this as a vindication for
competitive matchmaking, PRIDE's collapse had more to do with its
shady business practices, including ties to the yakuza, and shaky
accounting.
[2]It may be silly to draw an analogy between the
practices of a second-tier MMA promotion and larger political
tactics, but this struggle within Bellator suggests that institutions
that are designed to merely create the illusion of fairness or
accountability can nevertheless prevent gross injustice. Up here in
Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office is a good example of this.
This doesn't mean that we should trust these institutions, just that
we can use them as barriers to slow down the worst tendencies of
those in powers. Bjorn Rebney may not exactly be "in power",
but Bellator is owned by media giant Viacom, so it's not that much of
a stretch.
