It is the aftermath of UFC 140 in Toronto and living in the city, the buzz is surely on the brutal finishes of the fights from the card on Saturday night.
All the coverage and talk of Frank Mir breaking Nogueira’s arm, along with local reports of how all the Maple Leafs and hockey players in attendance thought it was quite a brutal sport, has left me throwing caution to the wind.
The finishes, and some of the fights we saw this weekend fall directly into the five-90-five percent rule, and it must be explained before any judgement is passed by the uneducated MMA fan.
Five percent of all fights will end in some sort of shocking, brutal or even gruesome fashion, 90 percent will end in exciting, even thrilling but normal finishes and the other five percent will end in boring and uneventful fashion.
Usually, the shocking and brutal finishes are spread and sort out among the many different fight cards in a year or period of time. In my opinion, a case could be made that we saw three fights that had finishes in the first five percent.
Frank Mir’s brutal kimura on “Big Nog” is definitely one, Jones’s somewhat brutal-looking choke and how he landed plastered face-down was another.
It could be argued that Chan Sung Jung’s knockout seven seconds in qualifies in there, too.
Mir’s destruction of Nogueira’s arm is comparable to the worst injury in any other sport suffered under the rules, like a broken neck on a clean hit in football, a broken leg on a knee-on-knee hit in hockey or a broken arm from a collision at home plate.
You can’t judge the sport on the most brutal of its incidents. They happen but they are rare. Just like Machida getting choked out on his feet and dropped or Hominick getting knocked out in seven seconds.
The only difference in these incidents is what makes MMA even safer than some of the other sports mentioned.
Both Nogueira and Machida could have stopped these incidents on the spot by swallowing their pride and tapping out to the opponent—a choice not available in mid-action in most sports.
But both men chose not to tap, and both men suffered very cold and real consequences.
Dwight Wakabayashi is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report MMA and correspondent for MMACanada.net.
Catch him on Facebook and Twitter at wakafightermma.
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