The Old School Lunch

[Best bit: one fighter dubbed “man of faith” wearing a t-shirt with “PIMPIT” on the front.]

Saturday night was the much anticipated National TV debut of MMA fighting on CBS (”Saturday Night Fights!”). CBS was the first and probably not last major network desperate enough to put the old octagon on primetime and I say this despite the harsh criticism by some saying that the fights (for the most part) and the event was bad for MMA and made a horrible first impression with Americans. I watched the entire thing, all 4 or so fights that aired on TV and what was probably just as interesting as the fights themselves were the sponsorship deals and the commercials in between the fighting: Street Fighter 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, beer commercials and Burger King commercials. And to sum it up, you’ve got a love for martial arts and fighting in the SF crowd, a love for Eminem and doing crazy shit in the GTA crowd, women=product in the beer crowd and of course the “real men eat meat” in the BK crowd.

One of the most interesting aspects of this entire debacle was seeing the Kimbo Slice hype play out. CBS promoted this as Kimbo, the “internet legend” and real street brawler going toe-to-toe with trained fighters making it seem like all he does is kick ass in the streets and now they’re just getting him ass kick fights in organized bouts. They wanted to paint him as the struggling former homeless man, the man who would fight anybody but when you actually heard Kimbo talk, you’d hear him say that he isn’t the thug everyone wants him to be and that despite the outward appearance, he’s a family man who goes to church on sundays. He’s doing this, as he said at one point specifically, for the money. I’m sure that him being Black (scary black man!) had no part in how he was advertised. No part whatsoever.

One fight I was actually looking forward to was the Gina Corano vs “college co-ed.” As I’ve blogged about Carano and women in MMA before, even though i’m 100% against what MMA and fighting in general is being promoted as with boys and men, there’s still sexist shit (surprise) that goes on in that world. All the dialogue was about how these “beautiful ladies” can actually fight. What I was surprised with, however, was CBS not making this into a cat-fight “I hate that bitch (cat meow sounds)” story. Well, I guess they couldn’t do that when they made it seem like these two were pretty much the only women who fight and can fight, but I was relieved.

All in all, as I was watching this I remember thinking that this was a historic moment in TV because this would be the start of some bad shit to come. GTA4 being so popular, MMA starting to really get advertising dollars and I knew Jackson Katz would have his hands full for Tough Guise 2, 3, 4, and 5. But then upon retrospect I wonder if it is truly worse, just as bad or dare I say better than when WWF/WCW was hugely popular? With the latter you had scripted, unbelievable sexism. You had wrestlers with storylines around women being abused, raped, drugged, humiliated, beaten, etc. With MMA, for what it’s worth you get some boxing style “I don’t like you” hype and then the actual fight. And by fight I mean men vs men and women vs women as WWF was/is so famously known as to blur these lines. But I don’t know. I don’t know what billions of hours normalizing the sight of bloodied and brutalized bodies is going to do to people’s psyches. There’s no use wishing this shit will blip off the radar but I do hope that for now it stays with it’s limited audience on pay-per-view TV and not on the free channels where it becomes normal to just stumble upon it.