CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 187: WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY

Carl doesn't look at the White House.

SUNDAY, JUNE 14 FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
MAIN CARD 5 PM PDT / 8 PM EDT

I’ve been thinking about this for months and I’m still not entirely sure what I want to say. Rather: I know what I want to say, but it’s a bit of everything and I don’t know where to start.

At least, I didn’t until today, which, as of this writing, is Monday the 8th. Ariel Helwani, the Only MMA Journalist That Matters, decided to chime in on the White House card with his enlightened point of view:

After my eyes stopped spontaneously spewing blood in three-foot arcs I went back to my giant folder of .txt files and deleted my notes on the spot, because I have never felt such a need for the honesty inherent to stream of consciousness.

So, if you are here for a breakdown of the fights as per usual: My apologies, we are not doing that this week, but Jess has you covered in her usually perfect style. If you are here for purely angry ranting, we’re not doing that here, either, but Eric’s gonna have you covered tomorrow.

If you are here to try to make sense of your persistent bewilderment about why, exactly, any of us are still here: You have come to the right place.

PART ONE: EVERYTHING IS BAD

I’m just so tired, man.

This card doesn’t fucking matter, so let’s just dispense with the idea that it does. We’ll just get it out of the way; it won’t take long. You’ve got a Lightweight title fight where the top contender is a guy who already lost to both of the actual top contenders but it’s fine because he beat Paddy Pimblett, a Heavyweight title fight where one guy has failed to win the title on three separate occasions and the other has never fought at the weight class and is on a winning streak of One, Sean O’Malley against The Only Remaining Top Contender They’re Confident He Can Beat, multiple-time retiree Derrick Lewis vs Josh Hokit, the only man too insufferable for the current state of things who also just got hit 214 times two months ago, a damaged Lightweight contender in Mauricio Ruffy getting some attempted rehab against Michael Chandler, who is inexplicably still ranked despite his only win in the last five and a half years coming against Tony Ferguson, a damaged Middleweight contender in Bo Nickal against Kyle Daukaus in the most “he plays golf with Trump and is vaguely bigoted so we need to find a space for him” matchup possible, and Diego Lopes, who lost two title fights in ten months, against Steve Garcia.

That’s it. That’s what this whole giant democracy-destroying fuckfest is giving you. Two bullshit title matches that exist solely for marketing reasons and a bunch of managerially-favored prospects in intentionally lopsided contests and then there’s one fight that’s Actually Neat so it’s the one getting the least attention or care. For the Biggest UFC Event Ever, it is bloodless and cynical.

Which makes it the perfect encapsulation of this moment in the sport.

I started writing these in January of 2022. For almost five years, we have been watching mixed martial arts die. The UFC has become a parody of itself, a ramshackle organization that has spent those years casting off its veneer of respectability or legitimacy in favor of turning into a gaping tumorous mass formed from sheer corporate id. There’s no semblance of meritocracy anymore. The head of the company beats his chest at public press conferences about sidelining #1-ranked competitors out of personal discontent. Veterans, successful prospects and even undefeated top contenders get fired if management dislikes them. Titlists are crowned by fiat. The last two Heavyweight champions of the world left the company in mid-reign, and with the growing acrimony between the UFC and Tom Aspinall, we appear to be heading for a hat trick.

But it’s not just them. The rest of the sport has been choked out in parallel. The American B-leagues of MMA are a smoldering crater. Bellator, the second-best we could do, is dead. The Professional Fighters League, the slouching trash compactor that consumed it, is such a mess that in 2026, the year they realized their huge, ambitious plans of jettisoning their tournament format and embracing life as a Real Organization with standing champions and a roster, they’ve only managed seven events in the first half of the year, and that’s with such big headline fights as Jay-Jay Wilson vs Darragh Kelly and Logan Storley vs Florim Zendeli. But don’t worry! More than a full month after their last card they’re coming back in style, featuring no less than Salamat “No Wikipedia Page Necessary” Isbulaev in their main event. Invicta FC, the only major women’s MMA promotion in stateside history, has been MIA for the last thirteen months while the company that owns it focuses on getting deeper into bed with the WWE, and, thus, TKO and the UFC.

And the international scene isn’t doing all that great! When I started writing these ONE Championship was genuine international competition with a major cable broadcast deal and now it barely promotes the sport. Rizin is fun as hell and doing their best to keep the flame alive for Japanese MMA, but the business has had to draw down to stay healthy, and over the same timeframe that turned ONE into a dead husk, Rizin has gone from thirteen shows a year to eight. The UK has been trimmed down to feeder leagues. Brazil has been fragmented to hell. Absolute Championship Akhmat is chugging along in Russia, but its only big move in years has been signing Jailton goddamn Almeida.

So when I see Ariel Helwani, the canonical voice of mixed martial arts journalism, extol the virtues of ignoring the political ramifications of the UFC holding an event at the White House in favor of celebrating just how far the sport has come, my second reaction was to say, motherfucker, that was ten years ago. The sport has come so far back down over the last decade that we’re swimming in the same primordial muck it started in, back when fans were stabbing Renzo Gracie through the cage and Gerard Gordeau was gouging out Yuki Nakai’s eye. Back when the presence of rapists and Nazis was not only accepted but expected. Celebrating the success of the sport in the present is like throwing a birthday party for a corpse.

But, again: That was my second reaction.

My first was to say, dude, you know perfectly well why you don’t feel the need to view this as a political event.

PART TWO: NOTHING IS REAL

I have not forgotten the years of keep-politics-out-of-sports discourse that came up every time someone dared to imply that anything happening in mixed martial arts had any significance outside of people punching each other for money. I have not forgotten the attempt to talk down Dana White’s early flirtations with promoting Trump or his first speech at the Republican National Convention that he ludicrously described as an apolitical act of friendly support. I have not forgotten the way the sport and pundits treated Fallon Fox as MMA’s only visible transgender competitor, nor the way that we have somehow fallen so far backwards that once upon a time the UFC disciplined Matt Mitrione for being transphobic and now Sean Strickland posts AI-generated bigotry violence porn of himself beating up Dylan Mulvaney to peals of laughter from the worst people on the internet.

I have not forgotten Dana White’s decade-and-a-half-old proto-cancel-culture woe-is-me video blogs about how he was silenced for throwing around the calibre of slurs I’m not going to type here, or repeatedly calling reporter Loretta Hunt a “dumb fucking bitch,” or his simpering “I’m sorry I offended the gay and lesbian community” non-apology afterward that apparently burned his ass so badly that he held onto it for more than a decade before gleefully joining the hell-march of 2020s CEOs celebrating that culture is back where it’s supposed to be because now they can shit on people with the forbidden words again without having to pretend they care, or ever cared, about anything past whatever sparked a couple picograms of dopamine in their wealth-rotted brains.

I have not forgotten the way fighter conduct used to matter so deeply to the UFC that Ultimate Fighter finalists would get made public examples of for being drunk and disorderly, and now the UFC roster proudly boasts litanies of bigots, domestic abusers and sex criminals, and Conor McGregor, a man who is on camera assaulting numerous people, a man who nearly destroyed a UFC pay-per-view by hurling a loading dolly through a bus window, a man who was found liable for the rape of Nikita Hand by multiple juries, is having the red carpet rolled out for his grand return against one of the sport’s biggest stars.

If that seems like a strange aside after two paragraphs of sociopolitics: It shouldn’t. They’re the same goddamn thing. Every abdication of responsibility, every cut contender, every piece of outrage marketing, every cost-cutting Apex event, every Contender Series fighter shoved sidelong into the rankings, every sordid fighter-abusing negotiation tactic, every side-eyed poke by a commentator at Tom Aspinall’s cowardice for wanting his eyes to work more than he wants to defend the UFC Heavyweight Title for 1/10th of what he’s worth, every Elon Musk ringside reaction camera angle they’ve ever shot, every octagon winner who’s ever had extra minutes tacked onto their post-fight interview because they chose to spend them singing the praises of special guest Donald Trump as he sat perpetually half-aware of his surroundings. The continuum of who-gives-a-shit that brought you the TKO merger and the cessation of so much as the appearance of sport is the continuum that brought you Perennial Title Contender Colby Covington and It’s Okay Because He Didn’t Actually Successfully Rape Anyone Gable Steveson is the continuum that tells you a UFC event held on a fucking Sunday on Donald Trump’s birthday on the lawn of the fucking White House can be in any way construed as an apolitical event.

Being unable to watch the UFC without being a part of that continuum is the reason most of the people I know who used to passionately love mixed martial arts can’t stand it anymore.

A little over a year ago, UFC veteran Bryce Mitchell started a podcast and failed to get more than one episode in before immediately going off on a rant about the way Adolf Hitler was a misunderstood hero who loved his country and simply wanted to save Germany from the perfidious Jews who were trying to turn all of its men gay. (Also, the Holocaust was a lie indoctrinated into us by the corrupt system of public education.) In response, the UFC pulled Bryce from a grappling match they’d agreed to let him do at Karate Combat and instead speed-booked him onto a pay-per-view against Jean Silva, because if anyone was going to capitalize on his controversy, it’d be them.

At the time, in the end, I said this.

By and large, I do not care what entertainment you like nearly as much as I care about what you do. Some of the best political demonstrators I know are fans of the WWE. One of the most tireless advocates for trans rights I’ve had the pleasure of knowing is a Harry Potter fan. Even in the right-wing cesspit of the mixed martial arts fandom I’ve made friends with a number of queer activists, leftists, and simply good people.

What you do and what you are matters more than what you watch. If something sparks joy in a cold world, I think that’s worth keeping.

But I cannot help understanding why anyone outside of the WWE, or MMA, or the NFL, or the World Cup, would be horrified by the idea that people still enjoy them.

And as someone who dreamed of mixed martial arts before they knew it existed, as someone who has passionately loved it for most of their life, I cannot help wondering how many pieces of that joy will be tarnished by what it has become, or how permanent some of those stains will ultimately be.

I cannot help thinking about how incredible it is that here, at the nadir of this sport, we’re adjacent to the nadir of another one from that quote. Even as we prepare to deal with the complete corruption of mixed martial arts into an engine for propaganda, the World Cup is about to start, and the world’s single biggest sporting event has been thoroughly pissed on by Trumpism before it could even begin. FIFA, whose primary identifying traits are “corrupt” and “pathetic,” somehow managed to debase itself even further by inventing its own equivalent to the Nobel Peace Prize just to kiss up to the emperor. After an entire year of ICE threatening to hound tourists, players and their families, hotels are reporting disastrous booking figures, fans are less motivated to watch the only sport that matters than I have ever seen them, and in the most passive-aggressive bit of pants-pissing dominance possible, America won’t actually let the Iranian team stay in the country. They get to sleep in Mexico, fly into America every time they have a game, and fly right the fuck back out when it’s done. And even that’s a step above referee Omar Artan, who was turned away at Miami and forced to leave the country because he happens to be from Somalia and the government currently requires you to believe that all Somalians are thugs and thieves if you want to have a job.

And there, once again, is that continuum. The UFC isn’t the end-all and be-all, it’s just our beat. One more arm of the same media octopus that strangled the Washington Post or hired Bari Weiss to hollow out CBS News; that turned Facebook into a platform that enables genocide and twisted Twitter to the ego of a man who stokes hatred against immigrants, trans people, and anyone else whose misery could earn him a nickel.

The continuum of who-gives-a-shit ruins lives. It erodes institutions. It strangles decency and lets you shrug away suffering and death and vote for Trump or Brexit because, hell, it sounds funny, and really, who gives a shit about anything else?

It entrenches itself in things you love and demands that you accept it. It’s not crazy! We’re not doing anything wild, here. It’s just a little speech at the RNC. It’s just a walkout for Donald Trump. It’s just the tacit endorsement of bigotry. It’s just the open endorsement of bigotry. It’s just the active advertising of bigotry as a desirable and marketable trait. It’s just the insistence that if you don’t love bigotry, you’re the one who’s wrong. After all, it’s been this way for years. It’s been this way forever. Anyone who tells you it wasn’t always this way is wrong.

And even if it’s not: So what?

Why can’t you just enjoy mixed martial arts as a celebration of the sport and its fighters?

PART THREE: WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY

I mean, you can. No one’s stopping you.

The problem with Ariel’s viewpoint is not that it is invalid. The problem is that Ariel Helwani is the one saying it. As the foremost figure in mixed martial arts journalism, you should have more to say about the UFC putting on a White House propaganda show. One would hope that after almost a quarter-century of covering combat sports as its most cherished little media guy, and after repeatedly selling off your credibility to get paid gigs from the same companies you’re supposedly objectively reporting on, you’d have something, anything to say about this outside of the most obvious ‘oh golly gee why can’t we just enjoy the sport’ point of view that most definitely has nothing to do with the event’s political values conveniently aligning with your own.

But that’s Ariel. That’s not the average person who remembers Anderson Silva or Brock Lesnar and wonders aloud once every five years if Ultimate Fighting still exists. That’s not you.

Just like it’s not me.

I started watching mixed martial arts because I liked professional wrestling and heard it was like that, but real. I liked Bruce Lee and Joe Frazier and the Surf Ninjas, but the idea that there was a thick line separating “fighting” and “grappling” seemed counterintuitive in ways I had neither the knowledge or experience to explain. My first full MMA event was a Blockbuster VHS rental of UFC 6; my first fight was Tank Abbott destroying John Matua in seconds before mocking his seizing body. Oleg Taktarov disassembling Tank and choking him out in the finals of the night’s tournament taught me about the missing pieces of technique I had been dreaming of.

I loved MMA before I knew it existed. I wound up loving the community I found from it, too, but that community wasn’t the Ed Hardy-wearing Just Bleed crowd the sport was trying to cultivate, it was the outsiders on its fringe. People who, as members of societal out-groups, found a sympathetic experience in following a societally-shunned sport that was trying as hard as it could to be accepted. One of the closest, dearest friends of my entire life is a non-binary jiu-jitsu black belt who used to love talking about martial arts, mixed and otherwise. They’re married to a trans woman now. The sport went from making them feel accepted and interested to openly propagandizing for their destruction.

Around the same time the UFC took off, I got sucked into the world of working for tech companies, which I eventually narrowly escaped. Someday, when there aren’t much more important things going on, we may tell that story in full. But I never stop thinking about the years I spent stuck in rooms with wealthy executives, a truly disconcerting number of whom are now billionaires, listening to them talk openly about minimizing the entirety of the world down to profit. People, minorities, concepts, societies. Rich fucks who have since positioned themselves as moral arbiters for America, if not the world, that used to openly discuss the joy they took in watching other people try to care about things like media consumption and ethical standards.

I have not forgotten the glee they took in watching people fight each other over how best to live ethically in the world they were buying out from under them.

Over the past couple of weeks, the UFC has been getting an unusual amount of attention. This was, of course, the deal. Trump, who is in reality whiny and pathetic, gets his big birthday fight party that cements him as The Most Masculine President for his base; the UFC, which is in reality ice-cold and ignored by the public, gets an unprecedented and unignorable level of spectacle that makes people perceive them as huge again. For the first time in years I’ve found myself talking to regular people about the sport--not for the sport itself, but for the reporting they read on noble heroes like Sean Strickland or Bryce Mitchell who’ve taken ethical stands against the White House card thanks to America’s alliance with Israel or the Trump cabal’s support for pedophiles.

Attempting to say ‘hey, as someone who still watches the UFC, please do not ally yourself with temporarily convenient bigots who hate everything you actually care about’ to people, as it turns out, almost universally ends in the same question:

“Why should I listen to someone who still watches the UFC?”

And: It’s a fair question. When I see the old guard of MMA journalism--the actual journalists--talk about their relationship to the sport these days, it’s almost always somewhere between heartbroken and antagonistic, and even that’s reflective of a fall-off that started in a basement. MMA has never been a place of honor. Whether it was UFC broadcasts on Spike TV sandwiched between commercials of slow-motion boobs and things exploding or watching pirated Pride broadcasts live from Japan at 4 in the morning and absorbing racist stereotypes you didn’t grow up with enough to parse automatically, or seeing Oplot Challenge go from a small little livestreamed fight club in Ukraine to a foothold for Russian ultranationalists to try to take over a country, this sport has been immoral and terrible far, far more often than it’s been a force for good.

But that’s not what MMA, by its nature, is. That’s what MMA is made to be by the terrible people who run it. MMA, even the UFC, can just as easily be a place of inclusion as exclusion. We know that, definitively, because that’s what Dana and the Fertitta brothers spent years trying to make it, right up to the point that it became more profitable to change their minds and turn the sport into something backed by so much right-wing money that they don’t have to care if they drive fans away in droves. They get their $7.7 billion streaming deal no matter what.

Eventually, that, too, will change. All of this, the bravado, the spectacle, the sheer audacity of putting on a UFC event at the fucking White House--that is, once again, that continuum. The one that demands you accept that it is an immortal, unstoppable force of nature. The one that desperately wants you think of it as the new normal, forever, rather than a handful of CEOs and apartheid billionaires celebrating a decrepit rapist’s 80th birthday while desperately hoping their stranglehold on society outlives him.

The one that wants consuming its media to be synonymous with supporting it, while it laughs in boardrooms and smoking lounges about getting the people it hurts to hurt each other.

As I said above: I don’t care what you watch, I care what you do, but I understand why anyone else would. It is particularly impossible to ignore that at this moment in time, when an entire sport swirls its way into a party at the bottom of the sewage tank that is America’s present political climate. But what you do isn’t just what you are doing with your life, it is self-awareness about what you are consuming and why, and that includes the awareness of what you are giving away every time you consume it. In a perfect world, it should just be time and attention. But when you expunge that self-awareness, on a long enough timeframe, you run the risk of becoming the kind of person that looks at an event named “UFC Freedom 250” on the White House lawn on Donald Trump’s birthday and says “I am perfectly fine seeing this as an apolitical event devoid of meaning.”

One day, as hard as it is to presently imagine, the sport, and the world, will not be this. One day we will have to again wrestle with the reality of things mattering, and one day the engines of bigotry will have cooled down to prepare for their next attempt to find a way to rebrand white nationalism, and one day the UFC will be run by an entirely new set of clueless corporate suits who are just as mystified by whatever the hell a Josh Hokit was as we are today. The phrase “hey, remember that one really stupid fucking time they held a UFC event at the White House?” will be a gag. And if you watched it, maybe you’ll have a funny anecdote about it. Maybe it will have been a timeless clusterfuck. Maybe you shared it with other friends who laughed at how craven and awful it was.

Or maybe you’ll be the guy who tried to convince everyone it was fine to view it as just another day in the sport.

I’m skipping this one. It costs too much for me. If you watch it, go with god, but please do not let them rifle through your heart while you’re there.