“Is mixed martial arts a sport or brutal violence dressed up as entertainment?”
That was the topic of discussion on tonight’s The Late Review with Tom McGurk when SBG head coach John Kavanagh and journalist/ sports historian Eoghan Corry debated the legitimacy of the modern phenomenon of MMA.
“My first big debate about this was with my mother when I started doing it almost 20 years ago,” Kavanagh said. “So it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.”
To open the segment, host Tom McGurk showed a series of gruesome injuries sustained by fighters over the years including Georges St-Pierre’s bruised face after the Johny Hendricks bout and the haematoma suffered by Mark Hominick against Jose Aldo.
“I think it’s highly competitive but I wouldn’t use the word ‘violent,'” Kavanagh explained.
“I would concede that this sport played at the level that Conor McGregor does it is dangerous. There are dangers. As there is in all sports played at a professional level, whether it’s rugby or boxing or so on. But is it more dangerous than them? Factually speaking, no.”
The issue of crowd behaviour was also raised in the discussion but Kavanagh was able to rubbish any talk of fights taking place in the audience being a common issue.
He said: “When we were at the MGM a couple of weeks ago, there were almost 17,000 people there to watch Conor win the world title, most of them Irish and most of them had been out celebrating all day so it was a pretty volatile crowd… They had a few drinks as we do but that night, there wasn’t a single incident. However, let’s compare that with a typical football derby. The fans need to be separated by riot police.”
Asked about the theatrical nature of the sport, Kavanagh clearly explained the dynamic.
“It’s prizefighting so there is the sports aspect of it and then there’s the entertainment aspect of it. The UFC do a really good job of putting the two of them together which is why it’s one of the few global sports.
“The majority of the people doing the sport in the many gyms around Ireland do it at an amateur level but at the absolute highest level like Conor’s competing at, they are very good at blending the two together – the sports side of it and the entertainment side of it.”
When questioned about the lawless appearance of the sport, the first Irishman to earn a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu also had the answers.
“In boxing you can throw blows to the head, that’s the most dangerous aspect of the sport. The fact that there’s grappling allowed, like you can do chokes and stuff. That actually makes the sport more safe and, I hate making comparisons with boxing because I’m a huge boxing fan too, but in boxing the only option is to hit and if you try to clinch the referee will break it. But in MMA it continues on and if you get a choke, they tap and the fight is over.
“It’s the combination of a few Olympic sports. In Taekwon-do, you have kicks to the head. In boxing, you’ve obviously got punches to the head. In wrestling, you have throws and in judo, you have submissions. So the name explains what it is, mixed martial arts.”
Kavanagh’s opponent on the debate, Eoghan Corry, expressed his belief that the popularity of MMA is fleeting.
“It’s ephemeral and inconsequential,” Corry said. “It’s not a sport that’s here to stay, it’s something that’s arisen from the debris that was the collapse of professional boxing into all its constituent parts.
“There are effectively four big ones (boxing organisations), you have 17 different weights, you’ve got 60 odd people claiming to be the world champion. You had this situation where you didn’t have programmed fights.
“One of the reasons that people like myself who wrote about boxing were attracted to it was the smell of corruption around all of this. The Bob Arums, Don Kings, Jack Solomons and Mickey Duffs of the world. There was a great sense that the big fighters weren’t being matched up.
“The UFC saw this. It’s effectively a created (sport). Once it had got past the big violence question and the big violence question was solved by removing eye gouging.” {Gouging was never permitted in the UFC}
“It isn’t a sport,” Corry reiterated. “It’s a top down sport. It was created from eight constituent parts. It’s a massive marketing success created by one body, one organisation, which ruled out the boxing problem and it cashed in because boxing decided to put the shutters down, go behind pay-per-view, all of those sorts of things. The UFC saw the opportunity, moved in. It’s great, it’s the pantomime, it’s a gaiety.
“Boxing is violence as well. They used to say about boxing that it was show business with blood, this (MMA) is show business with a little bit more blood but I don’t think it’s here to stay.”
“This sport, mixed martial arts, is the original sport,” Kavanagh retorted. “This was the original sport at the Olympics and it was called pankration. It was combining grappling and boxing.”
“It’s mythologised history though, John,” Corry responded. “Every sport creates a little bit of mythology about their past. The way it has come about through Brazil is from a constituent body of sports and all of those constituent sports have big participation basis.
“The UFC/mixed martial arts, because they’re interchangeable. The company that runs it and the sport are interchangeable. There’s no other sport that has that, probably Formula 1. The problem is that it doesn’t have the participation, it doesn’t have the under-11s being collected on Saturday mornings. It doesn’t have the work that’s being done by the Irish Amateur Boxing Association.
“It’s a top-down sport. It’s very theatrical with wonderful TV audiences and we all love to wave the flag.”
It was a back-and-forth debate in which you’d have to say that Kavanagh came out on top because he clearly explained the basic principles of the sport, picked holes in the theories espoused by his opponent and came across as the more knowledgeable speaker.
Kudos John.
