Why Isn’t MMA the Biggest Sport on the Planet?
By Stan Burdman
You English and your soccer…you don’t know what you’re missing. I was watching a little bit of
“Green Street Hooligans 2” the other day, a movie missing the quaint boyish charm of Frodo
Baggins which made the first one so delightful. This movie is a bit more like “American History X”
rather than its predecessor.
Anyway, the whole story is based on the concept that soccer somehow warrants radical fanaticism.
Let’s break soccer down: You have an unnecessarily giant field. I mean seriously, what’s with the
field size? These poor athletes are running a marathon on top of the pressure of scoring goal.
David Beckham would have health problems if he wasn’t a natural athlete. I mean look at David Icke,
that poor soul ran so much he literally went insane.
Now the GOAL of the game (Pun intended, HA ha!1) is to get a ball into a big net, the type people
use to catch tuna, or, carry Michael Moore’s lunch. Where is the surprise there? I mean we know
what the final tactic is. There is no final tactic in mixed martial arts. You can score a goal by a jiu-
jitsu hold, or a punch in the face, or in Lyoto Machida’s case, by running around the ring making
your opponent angry and frustrated. The same can be said for most any ball based sport. When
people start cheering as someone throws a basketball into a basket, I just go “TOTALLY saw that
coming.”
Monotonous predictable repetition of ball based sports aside, they are missing one important
feature, violence. If you beat someone in tennis, you beat them in tennis. If you beat someone in
MMA, you kicked their ass.