The bloody part is incidental; you have to look at it as a part of a greater whole. Noses and lips bleed when they get hit; it’s not a big deal. The guy on the bottom getting pounded and getting bloody isn’t necessarily in a great amount of trouble. He can be bleeding, yet most of the blows are meant to distract him and keep him from thinking while the man on top sets up either more serious blows or submission holds. The tiny gloves mean knockouts and bad cuts happen all the time, and one slipup and a good jiu-jitsu player will have you in a submission and tapping before you even know what happened. Yes, it’s a rough sport, especially now, when many people grow up so distant from fighting and blood. But it wouldn’t have been considered rough a hundred or two hundred years ago, and before that, MMA would have seemed mild and overly refereed.
After you watch the fights for a while, you start to see how amazing some of these guys are, not just as athletes but in their composure and their technical thinking. Of course, Pat’s right: It’s not for everyone. But there can be no denying that it is a legitimate sport, a contest of wills, an arena for excellence on a par with any sport in the modern world. Fighters go into the arena stripped to their core, naked for the world to see and judge. They go in the face of a highly trained man whose goal is to break them down and destroy them.
After the Olive Garden, Robbie went to bed and everyone else went out; and we fell or were picked off by the Vegas evening, one by one, until we were all gone.
Fight day in Vegas was rainy and grim, and no one stirred before noon. Around four o’clock that afternoon we came together to walk Robbie down into the arena. He was quiet and relaxed; the rest of us were a little more keyed up. I overheard Matt saying that he finds it more stressful to be in the corner than to fight.
We headed through the cool, quiet, carpeted halls and into the dense casino. The crowd was thick with fight fans in black T-shirts and tattoos calling after Robbie, and we tried to keep moving. Robbie stopped sometimes and shook hands or signed, but we moved quickly, across the casino floor and into the dark depths of the Events Center.
We found our private locker room, and Robbie sat in the corner. I went to find some water and took a look out through the heavy black curtains. My press pass was a shield against the angry glares of the ushers and security guards. The Events Center was a steep stadium, not huge but with seats for twelve thousand, and it was maybe half full before the preliminary fights began. I found my name printed on a seat at the press table, just like a real journalist. I headed back to Robbie.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Blood Rites is a fascinating attempt by an admitted layperson to understand some of the roots of violence and its “nobility.” She posits a gem of an idea: Homo sapiens, for most of his evolutionary history, was prey. He’s weaker, smaller, slower, and without natural weaponry like fangs or claws. His natural inclination was probably toward group survival, like the monkey’s: throw rocks, keep watch, and run and hide up trees when predators approach.
As Ehrenreich writes, “No doubt much of ‘human nature’ was indeed laid down during the 21/2 million years or so when Homo lived in small bands and depended on wild animals and plants for food. But it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves.”
However, Homo sapiens, with his big brain and his tool building, has become the ultimate predator on the planet, by a thousand times. Ehrenreich argues that this is a social and learned change, as opposed to an evolved one. Man learned to hunt in packs, to build better and better tools. He has moved to the apex predator spot relatively recently, yet his “wiring,” his natural inclination, is to act like prey.
Fear is part of our lives—fear of the dark, the unknown, of strangers—especially at a young age. Fear of being eaten is the rudimentary evolutionary concept that we all share. All of the old gods required sacrifice, forms of which exist today: Thus the ritual of sacrifice reveals an almost universal attribute of the archaic deity to whom sacrifices are offered: He or she is a carnivore.
What Ehrenreich argues so interestingly is that man has to undergo a change; he has a euphoric release from fear (it’s hardwired in) as he realizes his place as predator. This euphoria is what leads to the sacralization of war. She talks at length about initiation rites and “manhood” as boys become hunters. It’s all about realizing that you’re the predator, not the prey, and the savage joy of survival. Why do little boys always play with guns and swords? Because they contain in themselves the schematics to overcome the prey status.
Joyce Carol Oates explains in On Boxing that “man’s greatest passion” is not for peace, it’s for war. Men, as the evolved protectors of the tribe, are wired to be more passionate about war than peace because the more warlike men were more successful in the darker ages of human prehistory.
Sporting events reflect this learned change from prey to predator. When a boxer wins a fight, he thrusts his hands into the air and the crowd goes wild. He has proved himself to be the predator, not the prey, and the crowd is vicariously identifying with him. How many sports fans, when talking about the team they support, identify with it to the point of saying “We”? As in, “We had a shot at the Super Bowl but had too many injuries.”
I always feel like saying, “What ‘we,’ motherfucker? Are you on the team?” but the fan’s emotion is an honest one. Everyone wants to be the predator and feels ecstatic emotion when the predator status is confirmed. It boils down to a refashioning of “We will not get eaten today.” It’s a survival mechanism that is out of place in the modern world, where survival is not threatened on a daily basis. So it finds a fit with sporting events, and it fits the best with fighting.
The backstage private locker room was small and white concrete, with several showers and little lockers and free soap and towels. Robbie was very calm, and Jeremy and Matt maintained an easy flow of conversation. We had time. A couple of Nevada Gaming Commission inspectors in red jackets joined us and sat watching our little TV and talking about free food and how to get more from the caterers. About forty minutes before the fight, an older black man with an event uniform vest came in and taped Robbie’s hands with professional ease. He’d been taping boxers for a hundred years. The taper asked Robbie something, and Robbie said, “Don’t worry about the grip, I’m not trying to grab,” and everyone laughed. I asked the inspectors what they were looking for, and one of them told me a story from a year back, when a fighter was caught with several pounds of tape on his fists, essentially turning them into clubs. The taper signed Robbie’s wraps, smiled, and went to the next dressing room.
The mood was light. Another photographer commented on it: “Man, you can tell a winner’s locker room,” he said. “Some of those other guys are acting like somebody died.” The ref came through, and there was a brief discussion of the rules. We were getting closer, and Robbie shadowboxed, sometimes commenting to Pat, “If this one lands, it’s a life-or-death situation,” and “I think this is the right he might walk into.” Matt and Pat pulled his gloves on, a tough struggle with the little gloves that protect the hands and allow fighters like Robbie to throw big punches.
Now we were almost there. Robbie hit the focus mitts with Pat, sparred a little with Jeremy, did some standing grappling with Matt called “pummeling,” to warm up and loosen up. They were careful not to tire him, as soon, essentially, he’d be fighting for his life. Only two cornermen, Pat and Matt, could walk out with Robbie, so I left to find my seat.
The crowd presence hit like a wall, a massive entity in itself. The place was dark and crowded, a narrow canyon of teeming humanity. It was a warm monster that surrounded and buffeted us with its heat and noise and mood; it actually breathed a hot wind on us. My front-row press seat was amid a sea of journalists and laptops. I edged past and through to my seat, annoying the journalists, and pulled out my two-inch notepad and pen and tried to look professional.
The music was deafening, different death metal for each fighter. Nick Diaz came out first—a slender, dark-haired, goateed kid with an aristocratic Spanish face. He didn’t look nervous. The music changed and Robbie was making his entrance, and with a roar the crowd let us know who the favorite was.
The fight took place in the Octagon, a wide arena fenced in with a high chain-link fence that at first seems campy but is actually important. When fights go to the ground in the ring, there is always a danger that the combatants will spill o