Keith Jardine errs in his judgment, and it's obvious to everyone looking on. That's the beauty of the elemental sports, the contests without a cult of technology attached, without elaborate equipment, without designed-to-baffle terminologies and strategies. On some level, anyone can get them, can understand instantly what's going on without enduring a short course on the fine points of the game.
Mr. Jardine has the look, certainly, demanded in the Ultimate Fighting Championships, the leading purveyor of a sport known generically as Mixed Martial Arts — a shaved head that was covered in a black tuque as he made his walk to the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena; a nasty little goatee; an expression of extreme grumpiness; and a magnificent nom de guerre — The Dean of Mean.
Forget for the moment that Mr. Jardine holds a degree in human performance and sport from New Mexico Highlands University (you can look it up), that he is a former football player and rugby player, and more gym rat than street thug. In appearance, he is all cartoon menace, as is his opponent, Houston Alexander — African-American, same shaved head, same intimidating countenance, equally ominous nickname (The Assassin) but minus the college degree.
Mr. Jardine is a rising star, Mr. Alexander a near unknown, and so the outcome seems inevitable: When Mr. Jardine lands his first punch, Mr. Alexander wobbles and Mr. Jardine moves in for the kill.
Trouble is, Mr. Alexander was only a little off balance, and trouble is, Mr. Alexander is one skilled and savage guy. He starts punching in return and rocks Mr. Jardine's head backward with an uppercut to the jaw. Eventually, Mr. Jardine falls to the canvas, but in this sport, there's no eight count, no retreating to a neutral corner, and the referee doesn't intervene immediately.
Mr. Alexander keeps pounding away at Mr. Jardine's head until he is on his knees and finally unconscious. His mouthpiece drops to the canvas just before his face hits, hard and flush and uncomprehending. There's a bit of blood dripping from between his slack, gaping lips. Only then is Mr. Alexander pulled off.
The 14,000 fans in attendance, including a sprinkling of minor Hollywood celebrities, love every minute of it. A continent-wide audience is tuning in, in record numbers, through pay-per-view. This night is the coming-out party for the UFC, its first real crack at the mainstream, and as always it delivers bang, and blood, for the buck. Though it still isn't even legal everywhere, there is a growing sense that the product packaged and sold by the UFC has the chance to largely supplant boxing and cross over to mass acceptance.
It's certainly not to everyone's taste. The short bout, over in 48 seconds, seems everything that those who see the UFC as the featured event in a Wide World of Dystopian Sports imagine it is: two men, locked in an octagonal cage, stripped to the waist, barefoot, wearing minimal padding across their knuckles, assaulting each other by just about any method they choose until one or the other quits, is knocked or choked unconscious, submits in the face of unendurable pain or, occasionally, is judged the (invariably bloodied) winner or loser once a bout reaches its time limit.
Ah, the triumph of the baser instincts, the descent of the human species, the coarsening of modern culture, the handiwork of porn and video games and ultraviolent films and equal doses of ecstasy and Red Bull. "I was going to rip his fucking arm off and take it home with me!" one of the fighters shouts after winning a submission victory. Weep for a world that could produce this, and remember what happened to Rome.
But really it's more straightforward and ancient, though perhaps no more benign. The origins of this spectacle predate even the big Cain vs. Abel bout. It goes all the way back to the snake in the tree, to the essential capitalist equation. Give the people what they want, even if some of them won't acknowledge those desires, and then make them pay for it.
