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Quote of the Day – comparing MMA to waterboarding
By Zach Arnold | February 4, 2008
What a job it must be to be the public editor of The Sacramento Bee:
“I strongly object to the glorification of the ‘sport’ of cage fighting,” said Hill-Weld’s e-mail.
As for the detailed description of the guillotine hold, he said, “This hold sounds a lot like ‘waterboarding,’ which most people consider torture.
“While this ‘sport’ may be legal, I do not think it is the type of sport we want to encourage our young people to take up. What could the editor have been thinking even assigning someone to write the article and then splashing it across the front of the Metro section?”
My take is the story was legitimate but belonged in sports. That’s where readers expect to find stories about boxing and cage fighting, and where gruesome details about the guillotine hold would be less shocking.
Topics: Media, MMA, WEC, Zach Arnold | 15 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
The “gruesome details about the guillotine hold”? Has this person ever seen a guillotine choke? There is more “gruesome” footage on the network evening news every single night at 6:30 PM.
There was probably more gruesome news in the police blotter on the same page. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction.
Putting a willing opponent into a choke hold is a little different than strapping someone to a table angled with their head down and pouring water into their mouth and nose.
And I’ve never heard of the guillotine choke being the preferred method of the Khmer Rouge for obtaining signed confessional statements used to justify the execution of political prisoners.
We should all write to newspaper editors and condemn things we know nothing about.
Guillotine chokes are way worse than waterboarding IMO.
If you’re going to have fights in a gimmicky cage, of course you’re going to have the mainstream belittling the sport and calling it “cage fighting” instead of MMA. HBO’s Latin American branch signed a deal with the IFL. The IFL uses a ring. Enough said. That’s one of the few smart things about the IFL.
I wouldn’t call the cage a gimmick. As we all know, there’s more to striking in an octagonal shape since you can’t easily cut opponents off, and the fence lends an entirely new dimension to ground work.
It was probably instituted as a gimmick, but with the development of the sport, the use of the cage has matured with it. Meltzer has written on this before, as have most MMA writers.
People like that writer associate cage fighting with savagery because they’re ignorant, not because the cage gimmick is feeding them lies.
It depends how you look at it. The cage favors wrestlers who can push you against the fence and the ring favors strikers, who can corner you. I don’t see the octagon/cage being more tactical, it just promotes a different way of fighting. But to the mainstream, the cage will come off as gimmicky to them (even if it’s not intended anymore as a gimmick). To mainstream writers/media, they’ll think “cage fighting is barbaric” and to the casual fan, they’ll think “cagefighting? awesome dude.”
While the cage favors wrestlers over strikers, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, simply because the cage much more closely resembles natural conditions than the ring, which is as artificial an enclosure as possible. Anyway, wait another ten years and nobody will complain about the cage anymore.
“the cage much more closely resembles natural conditions than the ring, which is as artificial an enclosure as possible.”
Ummmm…ok??
The cage is a gimmick. You know why? Because UFC MARKETS it as a gimmick.
“If it’s not in the Octagon, it’s not real!” The cage is almost a fetish for the mainstream UFC fans, and they sure as hell know it.
I guarantee that if you show PRIDE footage to the casual fan, they’d think it wasn’t ‘hardcore’ or ‘real’ enough because they’re fighting in what appears to be a boxing/wrestling ring, and not UFC’s trademark octagon.
The cage was far more of a gimmick in the early days. There’s no question about that.
Now it’s the particular shape of the cage (the octagon or the hexagon, or what have you) that’s the “gimmick.”
The cage definitely does a lot to define UFC and other promotions that are in the US/English mold versus the promotions that are more characteristically Japanese.
It’s ironic that now, promotions in the US feel the need to differentiate themselves by aping the Japanese promotions by using a ring.
The Octagon has more surface area than a Ring. In a street fight situation, you often don’t have that much space. None of the combat sports comes close to resembling a real fight. Whatever you do, don’t start wrestling or doing BJJ with a guy in a street fight situation. Being on the ground is the last place you want to be in a life or death situation. Rorian Gracie/Art Davie UFC was Vale Tudo/NHB with only two rules but didn’t exactly replicate the conditions of a street fight either considering the environment.
Dave2: I’m not denying that none of the combat sports come close to a real fight (in a real fight, I’m bashing your head in with whatever I can get my hands on). But a ring is simply more unnatural than a cage. Hell, I’d prefer a caged enclosure the same size as a ring to an actual ring. Ropes are the least natural fighting environment possible.
“It depends how you look at it. The cage favors wrestlers who can push you against the fence and the ring favors strikers, who can corner you.”
Shaky assumptions. Plenty of fighters have had success grappling in a ring, and plenty of fighters have had success striking in the cage.
I think the cage is a bit less forgiving to fighters with a limited skillset on the ground, since the fence makes ground and pound particularly vicious, but that’s complicated by the fact that the ring often frustrates ground work, with ropes getting everywhere and so forth. So it’s difficult to say which environment is friendlier to which strategy. As Randy Couture has shown, the cage is just as much a defensive tool as it is an offensive one.
But that still doesn’t mean there’s really any way to make concrete assumptions about which environment does what, since it depends almost entirely on the fighter(s). It’s just that, calling the cage a gimmick is overly dismissive – it’s come to acquire a life of its own despite the UFC’s attempts to brand it otherwise.