Phil Davis (Photo/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)Super Bowl Sunday is fast approaching and in preparation for the game, fans of football will stock up on various forms of processed carbohydrates, sugar water and beer. The game is compelling -- a rematch of the 2007 game, one that many would argue was the most competitive in decades -- and people have already taken to making bets with their office mates and bookies.
Not just about football anymore, the Super Bowl is equally known for is the commercials, a brand of once-a-year 30-second theater that Americans have come to covet as much if not more so, than the game itself. While everyone (the broadcast is expected to crest 168 million viewers in America alone) watching the game won't be cheering for their favorite team, they will all be supporting their favorite past times -- advertising and capitalism.
The ratings for football have never been better, and with two large market teams playing, New York and Boston, the ratings will be analyzed, chopped, rehashed and reorganized for several days following the final whistle. What should be the nation's biggest game in its biggest sport, has ultimately devolved into slivers of athletic distraction spread along four hours of advertising. Frederick Exley would have trouble recognizing his beloved Giants, smash cut between bikini-clad Doritos girls and car commercials.
The discussion of ratings in the NFL and the commercial success of the sport seems to coincide well with the recent UFC on FOX 2 card aired live on Fox last Saturday from Chicago. Since the ratings began trickling in Sunday, journalists (the bastards normally responsible for unsavory societal misdirection) have been dissecting the meaning behind the numbers. "What exactly does 4.1 overnight in Tulsa tell us about who the UFC should be choosing to headline?" "Does fewer viewers later mean ..."
Media intelligenstia enjoy dissecting hard data, and in a post-Moneyball world sports fans welcome the objectiveness of numbers. But should fans of the UFC and MMA care about FOX's ratings? Does analyzing the data and subsequent tinkering of the product bring us any closer to the core elements of the sport that originally attracted fans to MMA? Or are we just trying to be among the sporting elite because Dana White said it was possible?
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the FOX card, specifically that the wrestler-centricity made it a boring positional battle, rather than a stand-and-trade that more fans would like to see. More blood, they say. More action, they heckle. The sport of mixed martial arts is propped up on a different emotional latitude than football, baseball and basketball. Those team sports have breaks and have been mastered by producers to create drama. An NFL fan can enjoy a Rams-Packers game as much as they can the Super Bowl, based on nothing more than the surrounding storytelling. It's nothing but boilerplate schtick, yet has earned those organizations millions of viewers and billions in profits.
There are a majority of MMA fans who watch the sport because they simply distrust, or dislike the four-hours of pomp that surround the 15-minutes of padded, representative conflict. The fight fan supports individual courage, the slow build of the comeback, the instinct of the underdog, and all because it can't be scripted, or spread among 22 players over the course of an afternoon. For fans of fighting the sport is about anticipation and confrontation, the ability to argue the matchmaking as much as the outcome, and where CompuStrike and other forms of objective fight night data can bolster arguments, ratings do nothing but distract from the emotional composition of a fight.
It's understandable that every 18-49 year old man would like to sit next to John Hamm and coax down another glass of whiskey and debate the finer points of marketing to MMA fans. The capitalist mindset is embedded in our sense of Americana, but the fans of MMA should care less because their sport can't distract, or offer simple viewer-friendly scripts for every bout. What fight fans do have is authenticity, which is special in the sports world, something to be coveted, not brought into question because some writers and fans wanted more blood to be spilled and more followers on Twitter.
MMA fans should have a passing interest in the mainstream viability of their product, but not if that interest morphs into a product that is fundamentally altered to meet the perceived desires of America-at-Large. Fighting is an individual sport stripped of ritualistic traditions seen across football fields in America. Kowtowing to the lowest common denominator fan might mean more short-term profits, but it would mean the crippling of the sport's cultural appeal.
This weekend's Super Bowl will be an orgy of capitalism, with advertisers breathing down your neck to buy financial trading services from babies, Honda's from Ferris Bueller and beer from a furry, anthropomorphic doll. Those sales jobs keep the interest of at least some portion of the 168 million people watching the game, the ones who like to be sold and the ones who want to buy. During the game announcers will be feeding viewers story lines about blood and tears, the triumph of some individual player who made it all the way to "This, the world's biggest stage." That player might catch two passes, pound his chest and scream violently into the sideline camera. But as a fight fan you'll know that it's insignificant, it's acting, it's salesmanship.
Fighting shouldn't have to exist with the snarky sales pitch of a Madison Avenue executive, or be diluted into four-hour spectacles like we'll see on Sunday. Those approaches don't legitimize anything; only sour what fans of MMA have learned to appreciate. Mixed martial arts is about two guys entering a cage to figure out their problems, it's fair, it's natural and it's something football could never hope to be; it's authentic.
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