MMA fans are a hateful bunch, but the most hateful of all are the self-proclaimed “hardcore” fans who spit on others and seemingly wish for a dark future for the UFC and MMA itself.
However, even amongst hardcore fans, there is a schism.
There are the hardcore fans who simply have a wide-eyed love of the sport and all of the brave athletes who partake in it. Their love of MMA has fueled them to research the sport’s vast and relatively unknown history (and I’m sure, much to fellow Bleacher Report writer Jonathan Snowden’s dismay, Total MMA isn’t part of the curriculum in most schools) and to teach it to newer people who are joining the ranks due to the FOX era.
Such hardcore fans are the good guys. They don’t seek to embarrass new fans or make fun of them—they just want to help them love and understand the sport the way they have loved and understood the sport for so long.
But such mild-mannered hardcore fans are rare, as the majority of the hardcore fans are of a different sort.
These fans aren’t fans so much as they are whiny, incessantly miserable critics, bullies and pseudo-hipsters. They belittle new fans for not knowing who Waldemar Santana was, what MARS stood for, how many times Travis Fulton fought Jeremy Horn or any other such arcane factoid.
This breed of hardcore fan can barely even be called a fan since they malign the developments in modern MMA. They loathe the UFC as well as Zuffa, the corporate entity behind the promotion, and they have a special contempt for UFC president Dana White—to whom they ascribe many of modern MMA’s ills.
Just read the prominent MMA forum, The Underground, and you’ll see examples of such “fans.” They are practically giddy at the UFC’s declining ratings and, at the same time, they ignore the faults of all promotions outside Zuffa’s umbrella.
Would it be too much to say that these same people secretly wish the sport fails to go mainstream and retreats to a pre-The Ultimate Fighter level of popularity?
After all, the only thing that makes hateful hardcore fans smile is recalling the days of Pride, back when the UFC was nothing special—a sideshow, or something on the level of FX’s Toughman.
So, no. It wouldn’t be too much to say that some percentage of hardcore fans want the sport to return to the “good old days” of MMA back before kids across the country sported TapouT shirts and before people said they “trained UFC.”
But then there is a group within those same hardcore fans that doesn’t want the sport to retreat to parking lots, strip clubs, shady casinos and other sordid venues. They don’t want this for MMA because they believe in the sport’s superiority.
That is to say, they believe that MMA is the one true god of sports, but they don’t believe in Zuffa and the UFC.
This group wants MMA to succeed and go mainstream but doesn’t want the UFC to carry the torch—an understandable desire when you consider the mindset of the typical hardcore fan.
The hardcore fans love Pride above all else, but Pride was purchased and subsequently destroyed by Zuffa—a fact they’ve never forgotten nor will forget any time soon.
Now all the hardcore fans are left with are dead or dying legacies of fighters once thought to be invulnerable supermen, stories of how Pride wasn’t the benevolent and pure dreamland they once thought it to be (stories of fixed fights and other controversies are surfacing now that the promotion has been dead for several years), their old VHS tapes and their memories.
None of these things will help the hardcore fans deal with Pride’s loss or Zuffa’s undeniable control over the MMA world. There may be some subsection of fans who wish to see the UFC destroyed and the sport returned to its roots, but that won’t happen—not as long as White and the Fertitta brothers draw breath.
The haters can wish and dream all they like, but MMA promotions and global sports empires are not destroyed by wishes and dreams. The UFC will forever remain triumphant, and the hardcore fans who detest the sport’s growth will gradually shrink in number and fade into irrelevance.
After all, do the ABA or the AFL still have fans pleading for the death of the NBA or NFL?
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