New York Times latest article on MMA

The New York Times has been upping their MMA coverage for some time now. The latest edition of their Sunday Magazine featured a story entitiled Blood Sport describing a UFC event as a "sick but seductive event."

I have seen this style of color piece before. Where the wife is unsure of a sport that her husband loves, and being devoted she attempts to delve into the hobby that she finds so off-putting. I've read it about a soccer hooligan's wife, a NASCAR fan and a woman who is married to a Steelers fan. I guess it was only a matter of time before I would see a similar piece about mixed-martial arts.

Virginia Heffernan is more than a capable author and story teller and she fills her piece with eloquent language that describes the brutal nature of the sport. Her obvious talent doesn't stop her from making some simple mistakes, such as referring to MMA as 'Ultimate Fighting' or her failure to understand the PPV model which exists in boxing as well. This of course could be forgiven, however since the whole point of her narrative is to describe a UFC event as an alien, foreign, brutal, gladiatorial spectacle it would do her well to grasp some basic facts. Of course this destroys the naive wife angle that she is playing up.

Case in point,

The televised versions of the two sports are equally distinctive. With the N.F.L., the task of TV producers is to humanize the sport: to make the travails and victories of masked men in heavy armor less abstract. With the U.F.C., the task of TV producers is, in some sense, to make the sport less human: to render less terrifying the manifest suffering of two gasping, bleeding, moaning, nearly naked mortals.

If anything the NFL tries to make their events less human. How else could you explain the fans total ambivalence to steroids and HGH, or the massive health toll that each player undergoes. Whereas the UFC is constantly reaching for respectability, how else do you explain their constant reminder that the UFC contains several Olympic athletes.

Of course MMA, pardon me, Ultimate Fighting, has to be compared to boxing. On one hand 'Ultimate Fighting' is described as a blood sport, while the few comparisons to boxing are occupied by an idealized mythical status of the 'sweet science.' For anyone who has seen a live boxing event, such noble thoughts surrounding two men beating each other into a pulp for 12 rounds are laughable, akin to Hemmingway describing the death of a bull by a matador as somehow 'honorable'.

But while Virginia watches these 'murderous' fighters she can't help but feel drawn in. In the end she finds herself whooping for joy when her husband's favorite fighter wins.

As I said, I've read this story before.