Because that’s me. Maybe it’s because I grew up when boxing filled endless hours of ESPN with cheap programming that wasn’t time sensitive as well as fights still on network TV. So, it’s pretty easy for me to follow regardless if it’s a championship fight or two guys in a prelim 4 rounder on late night tv.
MMA just leaves me cold. A long time ago, when bars were open, I’d glance at the TVs showing it and it was just as interesting as 2 am when some of the stations had flipped to informercials or televangelists.
I became less and less of a fan of boxing, probably from seeing the progressive decline of Muhammad Ali - a hero of mine since grade school. Became it harder and harder to ignore the emphasis on head shots. Boxers really absorb tremendous damage. You’d have to look as something like Muay Thai to see more. I guess as I aged, I became less able to appreciate “gladiators” so blatantly sacrificing their health for my enjoyment.
I studied MA, and love the footwork and skills of boxing. MMA more closely resembled what I was training.
I REALLY liked the earliest UFCs, where you had practitioners of different arts, as well as brawlers. Fucking Gracies and then a couple of monster wrestlers like Dan Severn convinced everyone to take it to the mat.
I’m the same. When I lived in Vegas we used to go to the live fights (mostly the minor league stuff) regularly.
Boxing is traditionally barbaric & interesting to watch. MMA is modern entertainment-barbaric and revolting to watch.
Although as @Dinsdale rightly says my conscience too is becoming less comfortable with the morality of any of these concussive sports including NFL & the various flavors of rugby. At least for now I can console myself enough that I’m only watching reruns. But it all feeds the money machine that persuades these young men to sacrifice themselves.
I never played NFL-style football, but when I did play rugby, my impression was that the lack of pads imposed a limitation on the extent to which players would weaponize their bodies. That and the lack of blocking and such. Lots of broken bones and stuff, tho.
I agree rugby is not the same sort of concussive risk as NFL, but I watch a lot of Oz’s NRL & the UK’s Premiership Rugby Union.
I’ve seen a number of players escorted off with concussions. More from inadvertent collisions than deliberate head first attacks. Those guys are so strong and so fast even the accidents are injurious.
I was a boxing fan for most of my life, and still am. At first, I thought MMA was too barbaric so I avoided it. After a while, I realized that despite the often sickening amount of blood, these guys appear to be in far better mental shape after a fight relative to boxers. Main reason is that fights end pretty quickly once a major blow or submission technique has worked successfully. Boxers simply have to be able to stand, and get a count to recuperate from a knockdown, only to continue absorbing blows to the head later. So I think MMA, or at least the UFC, Bellator, etc. versions of it, are better for the athletes long-term. Now I don’t miss any major fight, and these days spend just about every Saturday evening watching. Not great for my entertainment budget since I buy just about every UFC or boxing PPV offered,
I was a huge boxing fan from about the 5th grade until the 1990s before MMA became mainstream. I started watching MMA and gradually became less of a fan of boxing. I even went to a PRIDE fighting even in Japan, where MMA gained mainstream acceptance about 10 years earlier than in the US.
I came back to the US at around the time that PRIDE folded due to a major gambling/organized crime scandal, which sent a lot of their best fighters to the United States, where they were quickly snapped up by Dana White and UFC. From about 2006 to 2011, UFC was the absolute shit. It was a great product. I would walk 20-25 minutes in rain to go to a bar where I’d pay a $10 cover to see an event. It was that good.
But it’s just become more and more corrupted and showmanship-like for my tastes as of late. Another factor was that a lot of the fighters that I really followed and admired gradually got older and retired (or became otherwise mediocre), and the new crop of fighters didn’t seem to be as good. John Jones and Conor McGregor have been the exceptions, and of course they both had to end up being such jackasses that they’ve thrown away the primes of their careers. It’s just becoming more and more a b.s. product to watch and I don’t even watch it as much when it’s free.
By contrast, my interest in boxing has gradually returned, and I have found a new appreciation for boxing that I didn’t have before. Yes, in a real fight, an MMA fighter could kick a boxer’s ass most of the time, but there’s a lot of skill in boxing that I took for granted. Boxing is much more of a thinking man’s contest than I gave it credit for being. It’s not just letting fists fly, which is what I thought when I was younger and my eyes were less trained. You can see how fighters are, like pitchers in baseball, using one move to set up the moves to or three moves they’ll try later. I appreciate the footwork in boxing (and in MMA for that matter).
To answer DaleJ’s question, I get why some people like boxing and not MMA, especially if you get two MMA artists with a background in grappling. A grappling contest is interesting if you have an interest in wrestling, but if you want to watch guys throw some punches, it gets boring fast.
By the way, looking forward to tomorrow! Probably the card I’m most excited about this year. Costa looks to be a beast, but hoping for Adesanya to pick him apart.
I have been interested in boxing since the days of Muhammad Ali. I still watch an occasional big fight if it features someone interesting. However I think it would be no great loss if the sport was banned, although I don’t begrudge people the right t get rich doing it.
I think, when I first saw whatever was the earliest version of MMA, I was instantly put off by the hitting the guy on the ground. I had seen fights like that before, in schoolyards and pub parking lots, and hadn’t thought very highly of the activity then, even when conducted by children and drunks. So I find the whole spectacle very easy to ignore.
I still prefer boxing, but both are fine. Boxing is a more specialized martial art. Both suffer from a lack of regulation. MMA is still evolving, I expect a number of scandals before it settles into a consistently low class business like boxing is.
If you look at the crap that MMA uses to sell fights now it’s already becoming low class. The pre-fight pressers are predictable drama. The last pre-fight event I liked was Diaz-McGregor, but most of it’s just trash talk, just like boxing used to be (or still is, I guess).
I miss the days of Georges St. Pierre, Fedor Emelianenko, and Anderson Silva. But speaking of Silva, an even bigger problem for MMA is steroids.
Early MMA was a freak show. It was just a freakish tough man contest for professional martial arts junkies and barroom brawlers like Tank Abbot. I admit that when I was younger, I cracked open a few beers and just watched it for shits and giggles, but it wasn’t sport.
But to MMA’s credit, it did evolve into a sport. I’d argue that it actually evolved first in Japan as a legit sport a few years before it evolved in the US. In fact Kazushi Sakuraba was the first to defeat a Gracie in an actual competition, IIRC. But there’s no question that by the early 2000s, the skill level of MMA in both countries was definitely much-improved.
One:
From a social perspective, having WAG half the 15-30 yo males in the US consider themselves wannabe MMA badasses probably causes more bar fights than having the same demographic consider themselves wannabe boxers or wrestlers. That can’t be good.
Two:
I had a possibly controversial thought a few years ago when MMA got going = the heyday of UFC. I don’t follow MMA closely enough to know whether what I’m about to explain is still accurate today. Nor can I say for sure I was right then. But the shoe seems to fit.
By and large in the USA professional (even low-level pro) boxing in, say 2005-2010, was a sport for black & Hispanic athletes. With the heaviest weight classes being almost exclusively black and the lightest classes being almost exclusively Hispanic. If there was a competitive white guy anywhere, he was a foreigner. The Klitschko brothers being the standout examples of that era; they were the exception that proves the rule.
During the very same era, UFC & the like was substantially all white guys.
I don’t think that was an accident.
MMA was (is?) designed to appeal to an audience of working class young males. A bit like the gladiator / agility TV shows or world’s strongest man contests, this isn’t a traditional sport from a more rough and tumble barbaric era. It was an recent invention of Hollywood (or the sports-entertainment equivalent thereof), designed from the git-go as entertainment, not as true sport.
ISTM that some promoter/showbiz guy looked at boxing, decided that some large fraction of the increasingly racially aware (resentful?) white working class was tuned out because of the non-whiteness of the boxers, and decided to invent a fresh “white man’s combat sport” to gather that audience for himself. Viola - MMA was born.
For sure it’s not just that simple. There are legit traditional origins in the other classic martial arts like judo, wrestling, or krav maga, and the classic tournaments those sports have also held for decades or centuries. But making it into a high profit high-paying TV sensation versus a low budget labor of uncompensated sweat & love, that was novel. And done by investors for a return. Aiming it deliberately and directly at the same demographic that Fox & later Trump would exploit.
Am I all wet? Is this a just so story by a sniffy coastal leftie? I think I smell smoke; is there fire? Or is/was the racial disparity just a coincidence? Even if coincidence, did that play a role in UFC/MMA’s meteoric rise then and ongoing popularity now?
As Columbo might say: just one more question …
And why do we call things a “meteoric rise” when meteors only fall, never rise? Damn good question. English: whaddayagonnado?
Dead on, because it’s the big thing right now. Not that long ago everybody was Kung Fu fighting.
Now, then, and almost always, boxing has been the sport of poverty.
Not really. UFC emerged out of US based Tough Man contests and their audience reflected that. The UFC contestants themselves were quite diverse though, the US was not the center of martial arts training and development.
Common myth. Throughout history most martial arts contests have not been legitimate or severely limited to prevent injury. It is very difficult to find people who willingly engage in a fight to the death. That’s what actual unlimited martial arts contests are. UFC started from a virtually no rules basis but quickly adapted the same kind of protective rules needed for any such contests. Legitimate versions of these sports are all very recent, rarely pre-dating the 20th century.
MMA became popular with suburban middle and upper middle class white guys for the same reason that karate became popular in the 1980s after the karate kid. It appeals to the image of the macho badass.
I’d say that the timeline is more like the 1970s until about the mid-2000s - pretty heavily Black and Hispanic during that time. Yeah, this is because boxing gyms became a way for people in rough neighborhoods to spend time off the streets. Gym owners started taking one rough kid off the streets and putting him against other rough kids, and pretty soon, that’s how you get Joe Fraziers in boxing gyms in North Philadelphia or the Kronk Gym in Detroit. I’m sure there were gyms for suburban white kids, too, but look, boxing’s a rough sport. Eating punches to the kidneys and face ain’t fun if you’re a white teenager at AAU getting his first taste of what it’s like to go against someone who might even skip school once in a while to spend more time on the heavy bag because he thinks it’s his ticket out of his urban hell. Much easier to play tackle football and take some karate lessons twice a week.
The UFC started out as a kind of PPV freak show in which top competitors from different martial arts disciplines would get to compete against each other to show which martial art was the most effective in a real fight. It was sold as a way to determine which martial artist could beat whom and which martial art was ‘the most badass’ art. This is why white guys everywhere paid to watch those first few telecasts that were anything but sport - because young white guys wanted to know whether to take karate or tae kwon do lessons or sign up for their wrestling team. Older guys a little past their primes just wanted to watch teeth get knocked out over a few beers.
The early contests were anything but sport, but that changed. And the reason was that it got a lot of negative attention, with local lawmakers threatening to ban, and in some cases actually banning, the competitions. UFC moderated and worked with state athletic commissions to develop a set of guidelines to make ultimate fighting a little more sportsmanlike. They went from having no rounds to have 5 minute rounds. They outlawed certain strikes, kicking a downed opponent, etc. They made fighters wear gloves.
One reason you didn’t see a lot of Black and Latino athletes (except for Brazilians) is that there just weren’t a lot of Black and Hispanic Americans taking martial arts lessons. It costs money - money that white suburban kids had but others didn’t. However, that changed over time because of one thing that Black and Latino kids actually did do: freestyle wrestling. Although wrestling is dominated by corn-fed white guys from Big10 country, some of the better wrestlers in the heavier weight classes are Black and Latino: Daniel Cormier, Jon “Bones” Jones, Cain Velazquez, Rashad Evans, Phil Davis, and the list goes on. Although you didn’t see a lot of Black and Latino guys with a background in judo, karate, or Brazilian jiujutsu, there were wrestlers, and wrestling is a great base for MMA.
At the same time, I think that there are other ways now that poor Black and poor Latinos try to escape rough circumstances. Obviously, many find it easier to get good grades and get a scholarship, particularly since the laws are less discriminating in 2020 than they were in 1975 when were just a few years removed from the Civil Rights era. They can also get paid playing other sports like football and basketball. They don’t have to spend time getting pummeled in the ring, especially since the era of big money fights in boxing is mostly over.
This is a long-winded take, but that’s how I see it.
For those of us who spent decades of our lives following boxing, I think many of the things allowed in MMA seem barbaric. Hitting an opponent when they’re down, kicking, holding, etc. are naturally distasteful. It takes time to break those mental barriers before one can appreciate the sport.
After getting into UFC and Bellator, I started noticing that after every fight, no matter how lopsided or brutal, both fighters seem to walk off just fine. Sometimes you see a broken bone like Anderson Silva vs. Weidman, but almost 100% of the time, both fighters are able to speak clearly and walk off without help. Plus, there are obvious rules that disallow unsporting or unfair actions. This isn’t Bloodsport.
Surprised there has been no mention yet of full contact karate and kickboxing in the 70s and 80s. Superfoot and Benny the Jet did a lot to pave the way for MMA. Some of those bouts - and the rarer televised Muay Thai, struck this impressionable youngster as brutal!
Boxing is a real martial art along the lines of karate, judo or tae kwon do. It’s just that it’s an Anglo/American one, and it’s one that’s been marred by decades of corruption, etc… in its professional form.
I mean, my grandfather (a 1930s Golden Gloves amateur boxer) taught me how to box as a kid, and I remember some of my karate/tae kwon do practicing friends being amazed when we’d screw around that I actually knew how to throw a punch hard and accurately. Better than them, actually. They were so immersed in the idea that boxing was something else, and not really a martial art, that they weren’t aware that boxers can actually punch well.
I can watch a good boxing match and appreciate it- as a matter of fact, I’m not about seeing someone get their ass handed to them; something like Olympic boxing is more entertaining.
MMA on the other hand seems to be what the howling drunks who want to see blood watch.
Boxing, for all its inherent brutality, has a dignified style that MMA doesn’t.
You see a KO in boxing, the opponent falls down and the aggressor backs away. In MMA, the aggressor would wind up atop his prone opponent’s body hammer striking his face over and over until the referee pulls him off. Boxing hides its brutality better.