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MONTREAL — There will always be a line that some will never cross.
Mixed martial arts may be the growth sport of the early 21st century, and its most successful exponents, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, have made enormous strides in attracting a mainstream audience.
On Saturday, one of its most attractive stars, Georges St-Pierre, was the main-event headliner in front of a hometown audience at the sold-out Bell Centre. He is terrifically athletic, possesses remarkable technical skills and agility and seems like an entirely decent guy.
And the script couldn't have been better: the first UFC show in Canada; a rematch between St-Pierre and Matt Serra for the welterweight championship, after Serra's unexpected first-round knockout win a year ago; and a good guy, obviously, and someone more than willing to play the ugly American heel in the interests of the promotion.
St-Pierre walked to the octagon in a bright red robe, every inch the warrior hero, to a deafening ovation and chants of “G-S-P, G-S-P”, while Serra, who hails from Long Island, who has a bit of the old, smirking, Mickey Rourke about him and who stirred folks up here by referring to St-Pierre as “Frenchie,” wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name of one of his sponsors: GunsAmerica.com, which is just what it sounds like, an online weaponry swap meet.
Could it be any more clear?
The fight itself was a mismatch almost from the start. St-Pierre took Serra to the canvas quickly, spent most of the first five-minute round working him over, then did the same in the second, as Serra's eyes blackened and his face swelled.
With the clock ticking down to round's end, Serra was curled in a defensive position, doing his best to protect himself. He wasn't willing to surrender (though in mixed martial arts, unlike boxing, doing just that, “tapping out,” is deemed acceptable). But his guard began to falter, and St-Pierre seized the moment, cuffing the side and back of his head with his fists. Then, again and again and again, he drove his knee into Serra's rib cage, and though at ringside the frenzied crowd noise mostly drowned it out, you could still hear a sound like a side of beef being struck with a baseball bat.
There's the line. It doesn't matter if you understood that Serra would be just fine, though awfully sore, afterward, that MMA is strictly regulated, that it is safer than boxing, at least in the sense that the fights are shorter and the combatants don't absorb repeated blows to the head.
It's the gut reaction.
If you flinched watching St-Pierre finish Serra off and if you felt the need to avert your eyes, then you will probably be forever outside the tent.
And if you were thrilled by it, as was the crowd (mostly young, mostly male) and no doubt the large pay-per-view audience, then you can look forward to much, much more of the same, and to feeling like part of the next big thing.
“I had a lot of pressure on my shoulders,” St-Pierre said afterward about fighting at home. “I had a hard time trying to sleep. That's what keeps me sharp and afraid to fail. . . . I'm not a coward. I'm not a chicken. I step into it and do my job.”
There's no arguing that these guys have figured something out, that Dana White and the Fertitta brothers (the UFC money guys who stay in the background) have distilled something that's already out there in the culture, and then served it up in a slick, clever package.
Their show rolls into town complete and unvarying, right down to the big screens, ring announcer and the octagon girls. Watch it a couple of times and you can see how the wheels must have turned in White's head.
Fighting as spectacle has always sold, whether in genuine form, like boxing, or in the pantomime of professional wrestling.
Wrestling had the noise, the music, the elaborate entrances and the back stories, and UFC scooped all of that, right down to creating a reality series designed to add new, fresh characters to the mix on a regular basis. But what might have turned some of those potential consumers off wrestling? The fact that it's fake, the fact that the first Internet generation has access to all kinds of nastiness in which no punches are pulled. Note one of UFC's slogans: As real as it gets.
Boxing had the glorious history, the tradition of epic fights. But who knew who the real champions were in a sport fragmented among greedy, short-sighted promoters and corrupt regulatory organizations? What if 12 rounds were too many for the video-game crowd, what about those hugely anticipated fights that turned out to be technical chess matches rather than brawls?
The UFC has played hardball in the interests of remaining a de facto monopoly, controlling championships, controlling fighters (and their paydays) and dictating the storylines and the matchups. They shortened everything, and all but mandated action. If you don't like one fight, be assured there are 10 more coming. And if you come to see someone get bloodied and beaten up, then there's a 100-per-cent chance of satisfaction.
Not everyone is buying. By and large, the mainstream sports media still shy away, aside from occasionally playing the freak-show angle. (The UFC can live with that, since most of its core audience aren't reading the morning paper in any case.) And in a few jurisdictions, regulatory hurdles remain. The UFC hoped, for instance, that this first foray into Canada might finally open the doors in Ontario, where MMA remains verboten. The word is that's not going to happen unless political pressure comes to bear, and it's hard to imagine any politician making this a cause célèbre.
That will be comfort to many, and to many others irrelevant, except that it will force them to continue to travel for their live fix. Those are two camps that are never going to mix.
