Guest Post: The UFC’s Meat Packing Plant, Part II
The following article is a guest submission from Discord server patron Iggy (@chunguskhan03), an author of editorial and analytical work - as seen on MMASucka.com. Hailing from the Republic of Buryatia, Iggy’s insightful, humorous and fiery commentary is always appreciated by our team.
Check out the first edition of Iggy’s rage-fueled musings.
Opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Fight Site staff.
***
Photo by Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images
The Implications of Justin Gaethje Murdernating Tony Ferguson and the UFC’s My Little Pony Jar
Justin Gaethje made Tony Ferguson look like Tony Ferguson fought Tony Ferguson in a 5-round execution in dead silence in a dark, empty room that reminded me of the gangbang scene at the end of “Wasteland” starring Lily Carter and Lily LaBeau.
Justin Gaethje slammed bricks into Tony Ferguson’s face until both the canvas and his own body were splattered with Tony’s blood. Justin flung shins at Tony’s legs until he couldn’t make a single step without toppling over. Justin beat Tony until his brains were getting scrambled by damn near every punch he threw. Finally, when one final piston-powered jab compelled Tony to try and shake the stars out of his vision, his face a swollen wad of a hamburger, stumbling all over the shop, stopping short of slapping his own skull like a faulty TV set, Herb Dean had seen enough, and stopped the fight.
Justin Gaethje is the new guy with the belt. Khabib is the other guy with the belt he now has to krump. Time will tell if he’ll be the one to say “Zug-Zug” in the end.
I wrote about the change in Justin when he dispersed half of Cowboy’s brain cells into the atmosphere way back in September 2019 in the first piece that I’ve ever written for a publication in any halfway official capacity.
It all began when Justin smashed himself against Eddie Alvarez over and over again until a battered Alvarez had finally broken through Justin’s armour with his continuous body assault and kneed Gaethje right in the jaw, knocking him spark out, prompting Gaethje to choke out a demented “Fuck yeah!” in the aftermath. Trevor Wittman saw his monster fall, realised what it took to kill it, and smiled. “I can work with that,” was the thought that was written on his face.
Dustin Poirier hammered the lesson home, finally managing to roll an anti-tank grenade under the assaulting machine that was in the process of amputating his lead leg. Once again, Justin got murked, this time with a perfectly-timed counter left straight. Whilst most of Gaethje’s corner was mortified, a stony-faced Wittman simply got up and approached Gaethje with a look that seemed to scream: “See what happens?”
The lesson seemed to stick.
And so Gaethje let Wittman get to work. And he worked, and he worked, and he worked, and his creation kept killing, killing, killing. UFC 249 marks the grisly and clinical culmination to all that work.
But we already know all this, so let’s zoom out a little.
“I Run Iowa’s Largest Wildlife Preserve”
In a way, UFC 249 itself was also a culmination of sorts. It was a low-key culmination to all the trends and signs of things to come that one may have noticed if one strayed a little bit to the side of all the narratives pushed both by the UFC and mainstream MMA media. Namely, fighter progression, and the way the UFC builds its business.
It’s bad.
Which you may not have noticed.
But your brain did.
Those who know me also know that I tend to be kinda down on the UFC as a fight promotion and the way it goes about things, and I’ve expressed my grievances at length in the past but right now I want to discuss the hangups I have with the UFC’s inability to nurture talent in particular.
The UFC prides itself on pitting the best against the best whilst they’re still in their prime but upon closer examination it’s not really the case. Sure, the fight game is a fickle mistress and fights will always get postponed, rescheduled or cancelled because of various uncontrollable factors. Did you expect the world to stop because of a ravenous deadly disease?
I mean I did think it’s gonna be flesh-eating bacteria that’ll do us in but a silent suffocating assassin works pretty well, too.
Still, the truth of the matter is that the UFC will usually just book whatever’s gonna bring the most money in their opinion, and cool bookings that look like a barn-burner on paper mostly turn out that way because of happy coincidences. Like both fighters actually being good. Or both fighters having the precisely needed level of defensive deficiencies to turn the fight into a thrilling blood-and-guts war. But no matter how much Daniel Cormier or Joe Rogan tell me that Anthony Pettis and Donald Cerrone are “savages” that “look good” and are “high-level”, with due respect, I think I know what I’m watching, “DC”, “Joe”.
“Dana”.
I’d argue that the booking of some of the genuinely good fights is almost incidental. Most of the time people were hyped for the guys in question already — which brought enough attention that even the UFC suits wouldn’t be that dumb not to notice.
Even then, a lot them go ignored outright, like for example Whittaker vs. Romero II which accumulated a criminally low amount of views when compared to the insane balls-to-the-wall action we got in the fight itself. Holloway vs. Poirier II regularly gets put behind Adesanya vs. Gastelum as the 2019 Fight of the Year purely because it’s a little too violent, even for the UFC’s unfettered taste.
Mind you, this is the organisation whose social media department decided it’s a good idea to release a clip of Anthony Smith handing the referee his own teeth in a fight in which he got beaten within an inch of his life due to both the referee’s and his own corner’s negligence.
Meanwhile McGregor, being McGregor, had literal millions tuning in to watch him walk through Cerrone in an objectively much less compelling fight. A fight in which Cerrone was bizarrely marketed as the guy that broke every bone in his body and had half his guts removed from his abdomen.
I suppose it does bring up the question of marketing in the sense that the UFC literally does not seem to understand how to market their own fighters, usually explaining some of their failings away by pushing the blame onto the fighters, as the organisation is wont to do.
“He’s just not a drawl”.
We can argue for days on end about the process behind the matchmaking and the thinking that goes into it — and most of the time it would seem like there kind of isn’t any. Except for one clear-cut parameter:
What the UFC is really looking for, is name power.
Whoa.
Yeah, it’s not like it’s some sort of a grand earth-shattering revelation — every hardcore fan at some point in their lives must have become frustrated with the UFC for pursuing superfights, money fights, freak show fights, etc. but if you think about it, every significant fight is kinda a money fight. I mean it’s usually a money fight for the UFC, not the fighters themselves but still.
Slugfests are usually rewarded by the UFC with Fight of the Night bonuses, and whilst exciting fighters are valued for the ratings they might bring and because they look good on highlight reels, they’re also pretty much just cannon fodder. Am I saying that ultra-violent action fights between great prospects aren’t awesome? Of course they are. But not for nurturing talent within the organisation.
The UFC’s survival of the fittest approach makes sense given that it’s a fight promotion but it’s also incredibly inconsistent in the way it applies its own supposed meritocracy.
Khabib Nurmagomedov has built most of his career on favourable matchups that made him look inevitable and invincible, whilst Max Holloway and Robert Whittaker had to fight through a murderer’s row of who’s who in the UFC. Meanwhile pretty much all of the Welterweight prospects were stuck in limbo hacking lumps off each other whilst the top of the division was clogged up with weird, boring and meaningless old man fights before Kamaru Usman finally flattened a befuddled Tyron Woodley in a fight that reminded me of the steamroller scene from Austin Powers.
And the division promptly went back to business as usual with yet more headscratchers like the recent Vicente Luque fights that seemed designed to end his prime before he’s ever developed into something resembling a multi-faceted fighter, as if he’s the spy who shagged the matchmaker’s mum.And then you realise this is the case with pretty much all of the divisions.
Okay, you might argue, but Iggy, this is just how the fight game works, you can’t predict how everything will work out. And you’d be right, except what I’m getting at here is that the UFC did a great job at adopting the “it’s the Hurt Business” excuse to blow smoke into the fans’ eyes whilst still maintaining the idea that its matchmaking is purely merit-based. And the consequences of this deception are finally beginning to unravel with the rapid and often grisly aging-out process across pretty much all of the divisions’ Top 5.
The cream of the roster is getting old and beginning to show prominent cracks, and with the way the UFC goes about nurturing its talent, the matchmakers are on their way to pretty much brick the Top 20 like a shitty BIOS update.
DOOR STUCK
Both Lightweight and Bantamweight have been lock-jammed for years on end.
Lightweight more prominently with Conor McGregor hogging up the belt and moving onto making actual money in white collar boxing matches — everyone knows this.
Bantamweight’s rice cake constipation meanwhile flew somewhat under the radar — first with Dominick Cruz getting the nod in a controversial decision against TJ Dillashaw, and then dragging a geriatric Uriah Faber back into the octagon to style on him one last time before getting all of his technical hangups exploited by Cody Garbrandt who himself got punished for his tactical failings by a vengeful TJ, and then Dillashaw threw a wrench into the division’s workings by performing a heel-turn and trying to assassinate Flyweight on behalf of Dana White, followed by Cejudo forgoing defending his Flyweight crown in favour of going up in weight and fighting for the vacant Bantamweight belt whilst TJ got bonked by USADA in what I assume was essentially Dana White punishing his made man for his failure.
That was a long-ass goddamn sentence but it doesn’t even begin to convey how frustrating the actual dynamics themselves felt when they were playing out.
But that was then. What are we seeing now?
Well, uh. Petr Yan committed aggravated assault against the perennial centenarian Uriah Faber. Henry Cejudo lost to Dominick Cruz in a battle of headbutts and promptly decided to announce his retirement, seeing as his most prominent weapon is no longer reliable. Lightweight Top 10 features such young and dynamic prospects as — a moment, please.
Donald Cerrone, Al Iaquinta and Paul Felder.
I wish I was fucking joking.
But why is that? Is it solely because of inactive champions? I mean you can get mad at them all you want but at the end of the day, most fighters and their teams usually understand that they’re not here for a long time. The fans must understand this, too — I mean look at all the people jumping into DC’s boat on his Brock Lesnar whale hunt.
The goal of every prizefighter should be to make as much money as possible in a as short amount of time as possible, and get the hell out with his brains still intact.
The UFC doesn’t really want that. As I’ve said before, they’re here to milk you dry. The superfights and all that clown shit like the Great American Brock Lesnar Trapping Expedition were pretty much only encouraged because the corporate interest aligned with the prizefighters’ financial interest for once. Of course this bullshit is going to make money. Not to mention that a lot of the champ vs. champ fights were set up as a way to get rid of the champion the UFC brass dislikes for whatever reason.
No, what the UFC usually does, is pit you up against some other killer whilst both of you are still barely out of your diapers to see which of the brothers learns to pick up a rock first. And even if you do manage to prove yourself whilst narrowly escaping several stints at the hospital in a row, then tough luck — wait for the grown-ups to age out first. And whilst they’re aging out, you’re not exactly getting younger either.
This is the nebulous entity of Name Power at work. The guys up top are recognisable — people have heard their names announced before, and the UFC’s marketing team doesn’t like it when they get too much work dropped into their lap. And so what should be your formative years as a prospect instead gets used as a way to test whether you’re photogenic instead of whether you’re good at fighting.
I mean for all the laziness of the UFC’s marketing team they’re surprisingly diligent when it comes to coming up with narratives and excuses for your lack of skill. A lack of skill exacerbated by the breakneck pace of the scheduling and the insultingly low pay that barely allows most guys to break even on their expenses — which means you have to fight and fight and fight without really giving yourself any time to evaluate and refine your own game. The steep opposition usually put in front of prospects doesn’t allow for much breathing room to learn new skills and understand what your style should be like without experiencing insane pressure. This means dozens of promising prospects constantly redline themselves without ever understanding what they’re even good at.
MMA as a whole seems to be set up as a system that deliberately hamstrings fighters’ development to make short-term profit from gnarly brawls and sloppy knockouts, only to then drag out your time at the top of the rankings just because you’re recognisable, until your skills and attributes completely and irrevocably decline.
And then you get used up some more, this time to prop up new talent. Repeat ad nauseam.
The UFC simply does not give enough time for their prospects to round out their game and develop as fighters whilst stretching out their time in the spotlight to use up as much of their name power as possible for short-term profits. The primes are getting shorter as the prospects’ offensive skill rises but the defensive craft keeps lagging miles behind. What’s supposedly every fighter’s priority №1 in most “normal” combat sports is almost a side note in the MMA fighter’s game due to the time constraints involved and the pressure put onto the fighters due to the ruleset, the meta, the matchmaking and the reward system.
This is why the MMA meta is currently stuck where it is right now: you’re either an offensive dynamo, or you’re getting beat up by the offensive dynamo.
This is why mid-level action fighters with no defense are dime-a-dozen and those who are ostensibly championship material fighters routinely get exposed as having glaring, gaping holes in their skill-sets. Even the champions themselves aren’t safe; I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the belt is just a trinket. It doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s a promotional tool. It’s even described as a promotional tool in the UFC’s Terms of Use. It carries as much weight as the UFC wants it to.Your favourite UFC champion might be your own personal Rainbow Dash but they sit in a jar full of Mickey Mouse cum in the UFC’s closet right beside the heater. The power switch may be flipped on any moment now — they just need to say one wrong thing at the right time.
UFC 249: The Goggles Do Nothing
5 fights deep into the prelims I realised that out of the 10 fighters showcased, 8 are completely done.
Ryan Spann is a no-hoper, and Sam Alvey will never make me smile no matter how much he ends up resembling the cockmongler meme guy.
Carla Esparza and Michelle Waterson should never fight again. It was nice of them to demonstrate the right way to do social distancing but they can do one better: stay safe and stay at home. Both have been beat up by the few good Strawweight fighters already, and a new run to the top will just mean they’d get smashed once again. Any signs of improvement from them would mark the true end of the world for me. Jackson-Wink should just close.
Cowboy vs. Pettis 2 was depressing. A bloated, flabby Pettis squeezing an ugly decision win out of a cobbled-together Cowboy whose face immediately explodes into hematomas if you so much as slap him. Both looked like they honestly forgot how to fight. Pettis with his perennial ass-backwards approach, with a classy blitz attempt off an eye poke left unaddressed by the lethargic ref, and Cowboy somehow managed to look like an even worse version of his shot self. Both have been hollowed out with predatory matchmaking that put them up against new hotness purely because there might have been some weight left to their names, and Pettis did that cool kick once.
The most illustrative example on that night though was Vicente Luque vs. Niko Price II.
Luque’s career is that of a quintessential action fighter’s: dynamic knockouts, nifty submissions, and violent back-and-forth decisions, with many Fight of the Night and Performance of the Night bonuses — all because of his style and the way he’s been matched up. And said style got him to the point where he now looks like a shell of himself; slow, plodding, getting outhustled by Niko Price of all people — who himself has experienced his fair share of rough stoppages and beatings.
Both are fairly young and are yet to develop Dominick Cruz’s Old Man Face, yet a 28-year-old Luque fought like I’d expect a 45-year-old Vicente to fight, and Niko at 30 resembled a battered veteran trying to come up with a better way to fight too little too late into his career.
Vicente has never developed into the pressure fighter he wants to be, and never developed any defense past a chin and a pair of forearms. Niko Price just never developed full stop, scraping by on freakish genetics.
The Hurt Business
It may not seem like it but I actually really like MMA.
There’s nothing in the world like combat sports. Studying other people’s careers so intently, you can’t help but develop a very specific brand of empathy that lets you come closer to truly understand what it means to be human. You have to skirt the line between putting yourself into the fighter’s shoes and remaining aware that you’ll probably never attain even a sliver of your favourite fighter’s physical and mental strength. You need to be critical without becoming presumptuous.
Being a dedicated fight fan means vicariously living through fighters, living through the whole gamut of emotional highs and lows, by watching two people push each other to the limit of what the human body and the human spirit can take.
The emotions and experiences that permeate combat sports can run the whole gamut from the most discouraging to the most inspiring, and combat sports as a whole can be considered a microcosm of the human condition.
I feel that translates very well into becoming an understanding and empathetic person, one that can imagine themselves experiencing all sorts of things, without becoming judgemental. I think becoming this particular brand of fight fan has been hugely beneficial for who I am as a person. Combat sports have turned me into a better human.And so the empathy that I’ve developed over the years of watching fights and studying the history of the fight game and the lives of legends whose achievements still echo in the arenas — stadiums, gyms and backyards where they had their first scuffle — this empathy will not allow me to ignore the often ugly, filthy, corrupt underbelly of combat sports.
The way fighters are often swindled out of their fortune earned through actual blood, sweat and tears. The way fight promoters and fight promotions keep dragging fighters who should have retired ages ago back into the ring to get their brains scrambled by some new upstart who’s going to be used and abused in the exact same way if they don’t mind their Ps and Qs all the way through. The way it’s considered to be part of the game both by its fans and fighters alike. It’s common knowledge that the fight game is a cruel game. It’s an unforgiving game.
But it doesn’t have to be a dirty game.
The fighters I’ve described in the UFC 249 section are what both Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje might have ended up looking like if they weren’t a level above all other competition in their division.
But it’s not just pure talent that sets them apart, it’s the way they progressed as fighters, and the way they trained and the way they were coached, either for better or for worse.
Fighters and coaches alike can learn from Tony and Justin, both from negative and positive aspects of their development, and I still believe the sport is yet to have its true golden age. Coaching may evolve into something coherent and camps may figure out that protecting their fighter and their growth on the way up is the team’s №1 priority.
If they can’t see it, then either the fans or the media will have to point it out, then.
Otherwise why bother?
Both Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje are simultaneously exemplars and outliers for the UFC model and typical MMA fighter progression, and I plan on extrapolating what I mean by that in the next installment of the UFC’s Meat-Packing Plant series.
Dakhin ulzytra, bayartai.
To Be Continued in Part III.