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MITCHELL COLUMN: The Ultimate Fight: White Guys, Black Guys, Boxing, and MMA By Bruce Mitchell, MMATorch columnist
May 23, 2008
A recent story here cited an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that monitors white supremacist activity, that featured a couple of racist MMA fighters with followings on skinhead message boards. These groups have figured out what some former worked pro wrestling promoters did - that they could make a buck running indy mixed martial arts shows for like-minded fans. After all, who knows when they'll need bail money?
Is the sport of Mixed Martial Arts racist? Nah, these are people are on the margins of the sports and the margins of society. They don't represent much more than their own sorry selves.
Further, MMA offers opportunity to just about anyone of any race or background who can either fight (Anderson Silva), fight and draw money (Chuck Liddell), maybe fight and draw money (Brock Lesnar), or draw money (Kimbo Slice). Putting on fights with clear winners and losers means that the Ultimate Fighting Championship and other promotions have constant turnover as some, but not all, stars rise up and down the money ladder according to their win-loss record. Whatever your background, win with an exciting style and you'll end up getting paid in MMA.
Still, I wasn't surprised by what the SPLC uncovered. Their article got me thinking about the racial and cultural undertones that inform the sport of and, more specifically, its relationship to its competitor - boxing.
Boxing has always had a racial undercurrent. It, and now MMA, are different from every other sport, even professional football, because both are in the end about what man can best physically impose his will on another. "Who's the toughest?" has historically been a question tied up in ethnic and racial pride. At its core it's about who is a man.
Whether white America was appalled by the dominance in and out of the ring of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, learning to grudgingly respect Joe Louis, angered and entertained by Muhammad Ali, or scared and thrilled by Mike Tyson, it had to, over the course of the 20th century, slowly accept that the boxing heavyweight champion, the toughest man in the world, wasn’t going to be a white guy anytime soon.
The first fifty years of the century? White guys were in the hunt. There were great fighters like Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Max Baer, and Rocky Marciano who not only contended, but wore the heavyweight crown in dominant style.
Marciano, though was the last great white champion. It wasn't too long until Caucasian tomato cans like Chuck Wepner and Gerry Cooney benefited from boxing's own affirmative action program, as cynical promoters searched fruitlessly for the famed Great White Hope to exploit the racial emotion in the white man symbolically regaining physical dominance over the black man.
In the '70s, unknown writer/director Sylvester Stallone took note of the widely-felt frustration that no one could shut that loudmouth Ali's mouth, and produced a movie (and booked himself) to do it on the big screen. He made more money doing that than the real black fighters did winning the title itself, in part because Hollywood was somewhat less crooked than the ol' Sweet Science.
The world turned. Boxing did a lot of damage to itself with Alphabet Soup governing body bad booking controlled by the likes of Bob Arum and Don King. It found itself supported mostly by an older black and growing Hispanic audience.
As for white folks, if you can never win the fight then change the game. Brazilians (and shooter/performers in pro wrestling) had another way to prove who could really fight than deciding it by stand-up punches in rounds - simply putting two athletes in an enclosed cage and waiting to see who could knock out or submit the other. This evolved in the last fifteen years into the sport of MMA.
Is part of the Ultimate Fighting Championship's growing appeal that white guys now have new Great White Hopes like Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell that can claim fighting supremacy?
Call it a new audience.
The rest of this is just anecdotal evidence from my personal experience, and as such you can take it or leave it:
Back in the '90s when I first went to some UFC/MMA shows, I paid more attention to the differences in the live crowd there than to the WWE/WCW audiences I was used to seeing. I was too surprised by all the hot girls there, and I didn't go to live boxing events, to take note of the tough white guys preening at ringside.
It took awhile to dawn on me, but a few years ago I began to notice that many black friends of mine who followed boxing politely blew me off when I asked if they saw whatever big UFC fight has just occurred. The UFC pay-per-view bar experience around here is predominantly, but not totally, a white party - and I've seen some racial tension there. The black bars show the big boxing events when they want to draw a crowd and not UFC, but you'll sometimes hear Ultimate Fight conversations in the slow moments.
How this all settles out won't be determined until either UFC cements itself in the mainstream of sports, settles into a secondary role, or fades away completely. Still, while it's not always upfront, because of the long history of fighting in this country, racial issues will always be an undercurrent in the Mixed Martial Arts story.
Editor's Note: I'm proud to announce that PWTorch senior columnist Bruce Mitchell will now also be a regular contributor at MMATorch.com. He has followed MMA since its inception, attended numerous major and minor MMA events in person dating back to the mid-'90s, and closely followed the evolution of the MMA industry. He is among the most highly regarded pro wrestling writers of this generation, writing relevant, hard-hitting, newsmaking, thought-provoking heayweight columns on the pro wrestling industry for Pro Wrestling Torch since 1990. Look for more of the same from him covering MMA periodically here at MMATorch.com.
