There was a distinct crack a moment before Jake Ellenberger fell—this past weekend at UFC Fight Night 108 in Nashville—a sound very much like a tree makes an instant prior to toppling to the ground. It’s fitting, then, that Ellenberger collapsed in much the same way, stiff and wooden, his arms reaching up like he was trying to hug God, desperately grabbing for something that wasn’t there.
He would find no solace, though, divine or otherwise. Mike Perry’s elbow had seen to that, sending Ellenberger to the land between this life and the next, making many watching wonder if the worst had happened, if we had all just witnessed a legal execution inside the UFC’s hallowed Octagon, the perpetrator still break-dancing as medical personnel rushed to his victim’s aid.
For many, it was a nauseating experience. Some, I’m sure, turned their televisions off, unable to process the gruesome harm one man is capable of doing to another.
I’m built a little differently. More than a decade covering prize fighting has left me immune to all but the most extreme violence. Perry’s step-in elbow didn’t turn me off. It woke me up.
Ellenberger’s slow motion plummet to the mat wasn’t just the likely knockout of the year, not to me. To me it was something more—the moment I knew that Mike Perry had the chance to be one of my guys.
Every sports fan has athletes that belong to them, proprietary favorites who make the drudgery of sports something more than a grind. There are hundreds of televised mixed martial arts bouts a year. Many of them are staggeringly dull, talented athletes doing little more than leaning against each other against a fence, animated it seems by all the urgency of an employee slowly walking back from a smoke break.
In the face of that ubiquity we need something, someone to embrace. It’s what makes you leap from your seat, celebrating a magical moment like you were part of it, not a mere spectator.
Although it’s frowned on in the journalism world, I’ve always picked favorites. It’s what has kept me interested in the sport as grizzled street toughs gave way to athletes who sometimes feel more commodity than man.
So why not Mike Perry, an angry YouTube comment brought to life?
When I expressed this passing thought on Twitter, I could practically hear the collective gasp. I quickly found out that Mike Perry is reviled by all of the sport’s most righteous fans—and with good reason.
It turns out that Perry’s face tattoo is only like the eighth most objectionable thing about him. Whether he’s taking pictures in blackface, casually dropping racial slurs on the Gram or defending the indefensible, Perry is what the kids call problematic. Worse even—he’s #problematic.
Now, it goes without saying that none of the above even passes for acceptable behavior. Frankly, it’s more than a little disgusting. Perry is gross, unstable and probably not fit for polite company. If you wanted to picket UFC for employing a man like this, no matter how good he is at his job, I wouldn’t be opposed.
As a human being, Perry is an anathema, rightly shunned by decent folks. As the purveyor of violence inside a steel cage, however, he’s exactly what I want to see. That’s a thought that troubles me.
Then again, in some ways, Perry’s colossal ignorance makes him the perfect proxy for his sport. Other fighters disguise MMA‘s inherent ugliness behind a facade of sportsmanship and the architecture of athletics. Perry, with his utter lack of moral decency, lays it all bare. His job is to bludgeon, strangle or twist another man’s body until a representative of the state tells him he has to stop.
And he’s good at it.
While many MMA fans pretend to be engrossed in nuance, analyzing footwork and the intricate dance on the mat, in our hearts we know the truth. People watch MMA to see one fighter smash the other one in their stupid effing face. Put bluntly, fans tune in to watch people try to hurt each other. In the darkest recesses of our primal minds, we crave the extreme, the gory, the unspeakable.
And fighting delivers.
It’s why, after a night of bouts that really shakes you to the core, it’s hard for even the spectators to sleep peacefully. Watching a fight is like nothing else, a personal, intimate and painful pantomime of actual combat. The stakes are high and so are the emotions.
Very few things in life can make you really feel. Only the very best artists can deliver a portrait displaying man at his most vulnerable, stripped to the waist and thrust into battle with another snarling savage. Only a handful of fighters can deliver that glimpse into the human soul, dirty and foul as it might be.
Mike Perry, flawed as he is, can do that. God help me, he’s appointment television—whether I like it or not.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
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