Why So Serious?!

I'll admit that I'm relatively new to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fandom, but I'm a bit surprised by the articles I find on the internet about a couple of the fights from UFC 100 on Saturday night.

The first involves Brock Lesnar. In a nutshell, the guy is a great athlete, he's enormous (he fought at 6'3", 265 lbs.), and he was fighting Frank Mir in a rematch of his first UFC fight. In that fight, Lesnar was busy rearranging Mir's face when inexperience led him to leave a leg exposed. Mir grabbed Lesnar's leg, bent it in a direction it's not supposed to bend, and Lesnar tapped out. It's Lesnar's only loss, and he has decimated the competition ever since, becoming the UFC heavyweight champion in November of 2008.

In the rematch last weekend, Lesnar once again made it his mission to pound Mir into a pulp, only this time, he didn't make the rookie mistake of leaving a leg exposed. The referee eventually stopped the fight in the second round when Mir was incapable of blocking any punches with anything other than his face. I really don't remember Mir ever landing any punches. I remember Lesnar landing about 4237 of them, give or take a couple thousand.

What happened after the fight is getting much more attention than the fight itself. After the ref stopped the fight, Lesnar pointed one of his enormous fingers at Mir's bloody face and yelled something at him that I'm guessing wasn't, "I'll see you and your wife tomorrow night at our house for dinner!" Lesnar then gave the Mandalay Bay crowd that was booing him incessantly a double-barreled 360-degree middle-fingered salute. And when the moron Joe Rogan brought his circus act into the ring immediately after the fight to interview Lesnar, Lesnar's background in professional wrestling, combined with the adrenaline rush he was still under from utterly obliterating Mir and avenging his only loss (only to have the crowd boo him), formed the perfect storm. Lesnar proudly stated that he had succeeded in pulling the horseshoe out of Mir's ass (in reference to Mir's seemingly "lucky" win the first time they fought) and had beaten him over the head with it. Then he let loose with his desire to "drink a cooler full of Coors Light because Bud Light [one of the UFC's main sponsors] won't pay me anything" followed by an announcement that "Hell, I might even get on top of my wife tonight."

(His wife, by the way, is Rena Mero Lesnar, better known as Sable, one of the original divas from the professional wrestling scene. She's pictured to the left. I seriously doubt that she was terribly embarrassed by her husband's announcement of his hopes for later, given her experience with the World Wrestling Entertainment and her Playboy spreads and such. She doesn't strike me as the shy, private type.)

Being several Coors Lights into the evening myself, I was still cheering him for his horseshoe and Coors Light comments when he busted out the gettin'-on-top-of-his-wife comment. I was absolutely howling with laughter! So was everyone else in the house. I had tears streaming down my face from laughing so hard.

The next day I read that the UFC's president, Dana White, immediately locked on to Lesnar as he exited the octagon and ripped him a new one in the locker room. Lesnar followed up their meeting with a public apology later in the evening, while holding a Bud Light.

Apparently, White was (understandably) upset that Lesnar had pissed off one of their biggest sponsors, but from what I read in the countless other articles running Lesnar down for his "antics", White (and several sports writers) felt like Lesnar's post-fight behavior somehow made the UFC less prestigious.

I don't understand that argument.

The UFC is wildly popular and is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. The sport is basically two guys in a cage, using mixed martial arts to beat the hell out of each other for three or five five-minute rounds until one of them taps out (gives up) or gets knocked out, or until time runs out, at which point judges decide who won. Big-boobed women prance around in between rounds, dressed in almost nothing, and holding up signs indicating what round is next. This isn't exactly some high-brow, civilized, thinking man's sport that we're watching here. We're not sipping tea and nibbling on crumpets. It's guy stuff! I know some women watch the fights, but the vast majority of them only do it because they're there with their husbands or boyfriends. The guys are all in the living room, in front of the largest high-definition TV known to mankind, at least ten beers into it, jumping out of their Lazy Boys, yelling and pumping their fists and chest-bumping each other when one fighter knocks another one into next month. Where I watched the fight, Lesnar's comments only furthered the yelling, fist-pumping, and chest-bumping. We were all ready to run out and buy a box full of Brock Lesnar t-shirts, if only one of us had been sober enough to go out into public.

The UFC sets up all sorts of media events for weeks in advance of a fight, the fighters call each other names, question each other's manhood, and try to rile each other up, and everyone is whipped into a nearly-boiling-over frenzy right up to fight time. They finally let these wild animals loose in a cage, two at a time, in a fight to be the last man standing. And seconds after the fight is over, they send some buffoon like Joe Rogan into the ring to shove a microphone into the still-frothing wild animal's mouth...and they expect what, exactly, to happen? A Jeff Gordon-like interview, thanking every sponsor known to man, without really saying anything about the event that just took place? I'm so tired of that canned crap, I can't stand it. So when Lesnar let loose with whatever was on his mind at the moment, more power to him. If I had been in Las Vegas, I'd have found a step ladder, climbed up it, and high-fived him.

Maybe if the UFC doesn't want their fighters saying potentially embarrassing things, they should wait until the fighter has a chance to cool off, let the adrenaline move on through, take a shower, get dressed, and regain some of his composure. Then he can come out and Jeff Gordon the media like some sort of UFC automaton.

But if they insist on using Joe "Bozo" Rogan to stuff a microphone into a fighter's face just moments after he has left his opponent crumpled in a bloody heap on the mat, then they shouldn't get bent out of shape when he says something they don't like.

The other fight that led to a reaction that puzzles me is the Dan Henderson / Michael Bisping fight. From what Chuck tells me, the UFC puts on some sort of reality show (I obviously don't watch it), where several hopeful fighters live together in a house and battle each other for supremacy and a UFC contract. In a recent season, it was the British vs. the Americans. Bisping coached the Brits. Henderson coached the Yanks. Chuck says the British obliterated the Americans all season long, and Bisping frequently let Henderson hear about it. After this fight was announced, Bisping continued to run his mouth for weeks on end.

In the first round of the fight, Henderson chased Bisping all around the cage, basically punching him at will. In the second round, Bisping turned to Henderson's right, just as Henderson had seen Bisping do several times in film of Bisping's other fights, and Henderson unloaded with a right hand that connected square with Bisping's jaw. I'm pretty sure Bisping was out cold before he even hit the mat. But Henderson then added an exclamation point to the sentence, pile-driving a wicked forearm into Bisping's face while Bisping was in la-la land and before the ref could get there to stop the fight. In the post-fight interview with that clown Joe Rogan, Henderson basically said he knew Bisping was out cold, but that second shot was for all the crap he had to listen to from Bisping for weeks.

"Normally, I'm not that way in fights," Henderson said. "I know if the guy is out, I tend to stop. I knew I hit him out. I think that one was just to shut him up a bit."

Dana White apparently had something to say to Henderson, too, after the fight. And now a lot of stories I read on-line are criticizing Henderson for the cheap shot.

My thoughts? Maybe Bisping should think twice before running his mouth like that in the future. When you're purposely trying to get under someone's skin for weeks at a time, you better pray to your god that you win the fight when the time comes. Otherwise, there is a signficant price to pay. Good for Henderson for shutting him up.

And Dana White? Ease up a little bit, buddy! UFC 100 was my favorite fight night so far. When I'm ready to see some uptight stiffs in business suits trying to control violent beasts' behavior, I'll watch the NFL. When I want to get rowdy with my buddies, drink too much beer, see nearly naked women, and watch guys pound each other into oblivion, I'll turn on the UFC. And if Brock Lesnar wants share that he's hoping to get on top of his wife later, that only adds to the festivities.