Instances of Crypto-Transgression #7: The Victory of Strick
Adam explains the cultural importance of Sean Strickland's defeat of Izzy Adesanya for the UFC Middleweight championship...
On September 9, 2023, I made almost $3 grand on a $300 bet. All I had to do was trust in the power of authenticity, honesty, and masculinity. Allow me to explain…
I get very excited in the weeks that lead-up to a UFC pay-per-view event. I have very little interest in most sports. American team sports have become woefully corporate. The players are for-profit entities, protected by layers of PR management and lawyers to project a squeaky clean and fundamentally fraudulent brand. Lebron James is amazing, of course, but who the fuck is he? Honestly, what is he actually like? All his public statements are regurgitations of DNC party lines and occasional pro-China talking points; after all, we can’t alienate that burgeoning Chinese NBA fandom, now can we? Money to be made. Even when American athletes do say something interesting, like, say, Aaron Rodgers or Kyrie Irving did during the scamdemic, they are punished dearly for it. Where athletes used to be cultural figures who often understood the power of their platforms and used their voices to take confrontational and unpopular but fundamentally vital positions — think of Muhammad Ali or Jim Brown during the Civil Rights Movement, or Pat Tillman who left the NFL to fight for America after 9/11 only to find himself utterly AND PUBLICLY disillusioned by what he observed to be the total lack of point of us fighting in the Middle East, getting murdered by his own squad for his beliefs — athletes now can’t seem to say anything that hasn’t been preordained by “Big Race” or “Big Gender” and what have you. Kaepernick takes a knee and signs a bigger Nike deal than quarterbacks who were actually good. How could I possibly respect this?
MMA, on the other hand, is rife with narrative, idiosyncrasy and rebelliousness. It’s exciting, and not just because it’s the closest thing we have to a sport of pure combat. It is, of course, because of that; the UFC is our version of Roman gladiators. But, it’s also because Dana White, due either to his own beliefs and/or the business structure that he’s built the UFC promotion around, not only allows the fighters to be weird, eccentric, and vitally themselves – he encourages it.
The greatest stars of the UFC aren’t just the best fighters in the world; they are also performance artists, and often quite avant-garde ones at that. Conor McGregor became the biggest star in the world because of his eccentric and near surrealistically quick-witted trash talking that he always backed backed up with a series of unprecedented knockouts. Many of those knockouts which transpired exactly in the way that Conor had predicted. His rise to fame was the most exciting sports phenomenon I’ve ever witnessed (and I’m a Boston kid who remembers the Red Sox coming back from 3-0, I just hate baseball.) Jon Jones, the most lethal man on the planet, might actually be a psychopath, and we can’t help but find such a notion compelling: “What would Bones be doing if he wasn’t in the UFC dominating the violence of other men?” we can’t help but ask. Such things trigger the imagination. Proving definitively how important the art of performance is to the UFC, look no further than the story of welterweight Colby Covington. Early in his UFC career, he won his first four fights. But he did so boringly and without style. A wrestling specialist who pinned opponents and racked up points on the ground and one without much persona at that, Covington learned that Dana White planned to cut him from the roster DESPITE his wins. Learning this, he became the Colby that we know today: a brash, provocative, and MAGA signaling red-blooded American male. He’s a superstar on his way to a championship bout with Leon Edwards.
The UFC isn’t just the pinnacle of combat sports, it is a narrative machine. It could even be said to be a Situationist theater. Hell, it’s basically a Theater of Cruelty in the truest and most Artaudian definition of the term.
“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames,” shrieked Artaud.
Conor is such an actor. We feel his glory, we weep for his failures. He makes us believe that everything he does is real, but it also is real. These contradictions — pseudo fictional narratives that collapse beneath the potency of real violence, real cruelty — define the promotion. It runs on characters, storylines, glorious rises to fame, and crushing falls towards the oblivion of failure. It prides itself on being a company founded upon American principles of freedom, idiosyncrasy, and ingenuity. In our contemporary paradigm of progressive social values occupying the hegemonic culture and media spectacle, it is inherently counter-cultural. To be a fan of it, even as its popularity is at its apex, feels like the waving of a fundamentally masculine rebel flag. It’s blood sport. It’s show business. It’s performance art. Athletes succeed by being themselves, not by being versions of themselves compatible with a Chinese boardroom’s tastes.
For me, the UFC is what the art world must have seemed like decades before the life was choked out of it by academia and commerce: a place of unvarnished and limitless freedom to provoke, inspire, and express. In recent years, however, this most seductive quality of the UFC has slowly diminished. After its mid-2010s peak — the era that saw Conor solidify it as the world’s premiere combat sports promotion after predicting and securing his championship belts in two weight divisions as well as the rises of charismatic looney tune Tony Ferguson and dominant and fearsome Dagestani mongoloid Khabib Nurmagomedov — the promotion signed a highly lucrative distribution agreement with ESPN and, yep, you guessed it, parent company Disney. The changes that transpired within UFC’s branding were slow and subtle at first, and then less subtle. Conor’s fall from grace after being submitted by mongoloid Khabib, also in 2018, signaled the end of the UFC’s golden era. Its most charismatic and, yes, artistic champion was starting to show fatigue and decline. The fighters started being fined more and more for stepping outside of the boundaries of political correctness — which they did often — and though Dana White despises applying contemporary political dictums to the fight business, there seemed to be little he could do in the face of this new corporate structure.
The UFC’s slight slips into “wokeness” — by god I’ve come to hate the term but until we have a new one I don’t know what else to call it — was solidified, however, by the ascendancy of now former middleweight champion Israel Adesanya. Though born in Lagos, Adesanya, or “Izzy”, was moved to New Zealand at age 10 by his petty bourgeois parents who wanted him to receive an elite high school education. Immediately separating Izzy from the kind of men who typically grow up to be fighters, Izzy had almost no interest in sports as a child. Instead, he was obsessed with anime and manga and other pursuits typical of the teenage nerd (and, to be fair, future artists.) He was bullied mercilessly as a teenager, predictably, and credits that abuse with his pursuit of mixed martial arts.
“"I remember a kid from school kept on riding past my house and going, 'go back to your country, blackinese,’” said Izzy in an interview in 2019.