Quotes of the Day (Liebling and Wright, on Yesterday’s Contests and Today’s)

“You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”—Oldtime gym proprietor Harry Wiley on boxing, quoted in A.J. Liebling, “Poet and Pedagogue,” in Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (2004)

“[Middleweight Dave] Menne executes a sneaky jujisu move and traps [Gil] Castillo in a choke hold called a ‘guillotine.’ Castillo struggles helplessly, blood from eye wounds streaming down his face. With each gasp Castillo’s eyeballs roll farther back in bloody eye sockets. His arms flop helplessly. He looks like a rat being strangled by a snake.”—Evan Wright, describing a typical example of “The Ultimate Fighting Championship,” in “Fight Night,” Men’s Journal, March 2002

We’ve come a long way from the “Sweet Science” of boxing hailed by Liebling—peopled by the likes of Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Robinson, the young Muhammad Ali, and others who survived on guile and courage—to a monstrosity called the UFC, or "Ultimate Fighting Championship."

Fans call the UFC a “mixed martial-arts” sports. I call it all organized mayhem. We have no business looking down our noses at gladiatorial contests as examples of the ancient Roman penchant for “bread and circuses” to distract the masses when matches in 21st century America are scarcely less bloodthirsty.

Five years ago, though it seems blessedly longer, I encountered on 48th Street in New York a line of nearly two dozen men in black tie and masks, walking away from the Fox studios. They were contestants on a thankfully short-lived Fox reality dating show called “Mr. Personality,” hosted by Monica Lewinsky.

Well, I guess that if I were on a show hosted by Ms. Lewinsky, I’d want to wear a mask, too, lest my friends and even lots of people I didn’t know discover my infamy. As I watched the long line of these men walk by, I thought I would never again behold a scene so bizarre or so exceeding the boundaries of bad taste. I mean, it was presented by Fox, right? But that was before I read Wright’s account of the UFC.

I had never even heard of the UFC before coming across it in the article by Wright—who, incidentally, in his freelance work for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, LA Weekly, and other publications, has become a vivid chronicler of America’s underbelly. This time, he shows that the UFC is a sport where anything goes—not just the boxing championed by Liebling (perhaps more than deserved, given the rash of pugilists who’ve sustained significant brain damage in recent years and made old before their time), but also kicking and gouging. The whole spectacle only ends when one fighter is knocked unconscious or gives up.

While Republicans and conservatives flail around in confused nihilism today in Obama’s Washington, let’s give them credit for one thing they got right, if only for a short while, on Capitol Hill while they were in control: In the 1990s, Sen. John McCain and columnist George F. Will shamed cable TV from televising the UFC bloodmatches. It looked as if what McCain aptly called a modern form of “human cockfighting” was on the ropes.

But it was not to be. After a few years of peril, new owners of the UFC turned around and mandated “safety rules” and new equipment, such as lighter gloves, making it easier for cable to put on these slugfests all over again.

I’m sorry to say that these “safety regulations” are a myth. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Dr. Steven Brown, a supervising physician for these matches from the Nevada State Athletic Commission. In Atlantic Monthly’s recent profile of former UFC champ Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Brown does his best to make the “sport” sound within the bounds of civilization—it’s not especially brutal, he says—but inevitably what he says spins out of control. He says that he’ll have to leave his ringside seat and enter the ring, because the skill of the fighters is such that an injury is almost guaranteed. Moreover, head injuries are more frequent in mixed-martial-arts fights than in boxing, and there is more bleeding, with eight of 10 cuts that we see coming from the scalp.

Shame worked at least for awhile, so what do you say we try it again—only this time, let’s start on the celebrities who, for reasons because left to their psychoanalysts, have come to the UFC Las Vegas events to cheer on the contenders. Among those who’ve attended these bash-a-thons: Justin Timberlake, David Spade, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jenna Jameson ( just the type of tacky exhibition the porn superstar would attend) and Mandy Moore (just the type of show you’d never expect the sweet girl-next-door singer to watch).