Why Doesn't MMA Care About Its History?
Why Doesn't MMA Care About Its History?
A Guest Post from Hybrid Shoot
There was a wonderful tradition in boxing when I was a younger man, one that helped connect whatever the current display of fisticuffs was to a grand tapestry of violence weaved together over the decades. Before a major bout, champions of yesteryear would be introduced in the ring to the roar of the crowd, a chance for the fighter to relive old glory and the aging fans in the audience to school newcomers on men like Joe Louis or Ray Robinson, fighters who helped build the foundations that have allowed the modern industry reach such frightening financial heights.
There’s something about that kind of history; those threads connecting Louis to Rocky Marciano to Muhammad Ali to Mike Tyson, that makes what could be a sordid bloodsport feel like something bigger than two men bludgeoning each other until one falls down.
Pro wrestling has a similar reverence for its past. Sure, it’s carefully and deceptively manipulated by the ruling McMahon family to position them in the best light, but the sport cares very deeply about its mythology. If you click on the WWE tab over on Peacock you’ll find documentaries going back decades and playlists of classic matches it would take months to watch through. Names like Randy Savage and Steve Austin mean every bit as much today as they did 30 years ago. Fans have been taught that these legends matter—and so they do.
Mixed martial arts, a sport breathed into existence in 1993 by a motley collection of Brazilian grapplers, karate masters, Japanese pro wrestlers, slick salesmen, and minor television executives, doesn’t have that kind of deep history to fall back on. Unfortunately, and by design, it doesn’t really have a formal history at all.
Every few months a new fighter is proclaimed “the greatest ever” by UFC promoter Dana White, this is parroted by the television announcers who work directly for him (rather than a broadcast partner) and the collection of media sycophants who make up MMA’s traveling circus of content creators (journalist is too strong a word). This extends up and down the weight classes and no one is immune.
Israel Adesanya, a fun fighter on the path to greatness, is the best middleweight of all-time according to the UFC. I have nothing against Adesanya. But he hasn’t yet matched Anderson Silva’s accomplishments inside the cage—pre-ordaining him the king only makes any eventual deserved succession seem cheaper and smaller than it otherwise might.
Likewise Kamaru Usman, a welterweight who fought for the title twice with a thoroughly overmatched Jorge Masvidal, two more times opposite pillow-fisted Colby Covington and once against his own teammate Gilbert Burns, was declared the best 170-pound fighter to ever step in the Octagon. This in a world that includes the impossibly great Georges St-Pierre, a two-division champion and a gem of a human being.
Those two, admittedly both credible contenders for an all-time top 25, are hardly alone. Before most pay-per-view spectaculars the UFC rewrites the standard of greatness, conveniently positioning its next headliner as a contender for the top spot on the completely mythical pound-for-pound list. In isolation, that could be powerful marketing. Since it’s done so frequently, however, it’s just more white noise, something else for Joe Rogan to scream in his too-tight black dress shirt in those awful minutes between the free prelims and the pay-only portion of a broadcast.
Because the sport’s fandom seems to change-over so frequently, the nostalgia that powers other combat sports doesn’t exist. The kind of fans who would cry foul if you tried to position Devin Booker as the top shooting guard in NBA history, for example, don’t really exist in the broader MMA space. If he were an MMA fighter, Booker would be proclaimed the GOAT by virtue of his current status in the league. He’s the best right now, after all. How could he not be the best ever?
Michael Jordan, MMA fighter, would be merely a myth some old curmudgeon wrote about in the comments section of a blog. If mentioned at all in contemporary times, it would be as someone who the game passed by, mercilessly “exposed” by more modern, superior athletes. The idea of celebrating or venerating the Jordans of our sport doesn’t even occur to White and the UFC brass. It’s a history-less sport on purpose, context-less by design so no one thinks too hard about the quality of the endless fights thrown haphazardly onto ESPN+ to satiate the world’s endless bloodlust.
You’d be forgiven if you thought the only fighter of note in UFC history was Chuck Liddell. A company man who was White’s top client back in the days he managed UFC fighters, the “Iceman” is frequently featured in the crowd at bouts on the West Coast. Not often pictured? Royce Gracie, Ken Shamrock, Don Frye, Tito Ortiz, Rampage Jackson, Frank Shamrock, Randy Couture and a host of others who built this sport from the ground up and made it into something corporate ghouls would pay billions for.
The few documentary style videos UFC has produced in White’s two decades with the promotion have mostly come and gone with little notice. At the world-famous Las Vegas Fight Shop, boxing and wrestling nostalgia moves like hot cakes. MMA stars, conversely, fade from shelves almost immediately after falling out of the spotlight. If the sport actively denigrates its former stars and doesn’t care about its past, why should the audience pretend to?
The official UFC history that does exist is a pack of ever-changing nonsense. Coined “the Zuffa Myth” by the kind of journalists White drove out of the sport, it positions the UFC boss as an all-powerful creator, giving him credit for both everything his predecessors did to create the sport and everything his subordinates did to help it grow. It’s how you get endless reports in major publications repeating the fiction that UFC ran from regulation before White and only sought to become a real sport under his stewardship. It is a good story and he’s a masterful manipulator equally good at telling it.
“I built this thing,” White would say early and often. And he said it loud enough and with enough conviction that many believed it, especially mainstream journalists not willing to put in the time to do even the most basic fact checking.
It’s White’s omnipresence that prevents UFC from truly celebrating its past beyond a once-yearly Hall of Fame presentation. A famous grudge-holder, he’s beefed with almost every legend in the sport’s short history. You name an icon and he’s almost certainly had a sustained, public squabble with them, in part because of UFC’s earned reputation as a meat-grinder leaving fighters out of the circle when its time to cash the big checks after each bout.
His relationship with most top fighters is eerily similar over time as they work their way up the promotion’s various hierarchies.