Followers of the Final Preventing Championship (UFC) have had Saturday blocked off on their calendars for months. They had been all anticipating the long-awaited return of former UFC featherweight and light-weight champion Conor McGregor in UFC 303. However a damaged toe ruined these plans simply two weeks earlier than battle night time.
As an alternative, viewers are tuning in for what finally is likely to be a significantly better contest between gentle heavyweight champion Alex Pereira and former champ Jiří Procházka. The battle might be a rematch between the 2 brawlers, who final met in November 2023. That first battle was a back-and-forth bout, with every fighter touchdown large blows and takedowns. Pereira received through TKO after a devastating hook allowed him to take Procházka to the bottom for an old school pounding, touchdown punches and elbows earlier than the referee stopped the battle.
This time round, the 2 will meet in entrance of greater than 20,000 followers at a sold-out T-Cellular Enviornment in Las Vegas — with an estimated greater than 2 million viewers watching from residence.
UFC 303 is anticipated to usher in a record-breaking gate of $20 million, which is a feather within the cap for probably the most dominant league on the earth of blended martial arts (MMA). The UFC was just lately valued at an eye-popping $11.3 billion.
However the UFC is greater than only a sports activities sensation that lures battle followers and uninitiated looky-loos towards expensive pay-per-view occasions promising violence and pleasure. The league is a cultural phenomenon. It’s turned fighters into celebrities; it’s created new expectations for what combating appears like in films and media; and it’s even intersected with nationwide politics.
The truth is, how UFC bought this large says so much about America in the present day — and the place American politics could possibly be headed subsequent.
How the UFC bought so big
The UFC hasn’t at all times been a behemoth. In its earliest days, it was unpolished; one of many firm’s taglines was “there aren’t any guidelines.”
Its no-rules violence led Sen. John McCain to name the UFC “human cockfighting.” The lifelong boxing fan wrote letters to governors in each state asking them to ban the group’s occasions saying, “I’ve seen individuals repeatedly getting smashed within the face with a man sitting on high of them. That’s not sport!”
“That basically despatched [the UFC] to a fairly horrible place. It bought kicked off of Pay-Per-View. A whole lot of states didn’t even need something to do with it, they’d shut down [fights] on the final minute,” Luke Thomas, a fight sports activities analyst for CBS Sports activities, advised the Right now, Defined podcast. “And in January 2001, the fellows who initially based the UFC, they threw within the towel. They bought it for $2 million to Dana White, [and] Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta.”
UFC’s new house owners struggled too. Then Donald Trump referred to as, White mentioned on a podcast, and mentioned, “Come to my place. We’ll have you ever right here on the Taj Mahal.”
Trump’s invite helped the UFC’s new house owners within the quick time period, but it surely was actually once they seized upon a brand new pattern — America’s love of actuality tv within the early 2000s — and created the truth TV sequence The Final Fighter on Spike TV that the league’s fortunes circled.
“For the informal viewers who had possibly heard of UFC this put a model new face on it,” says Thomas. “The world bought to see actually distinctive individuals doing a very loopy factor on the top of the truth TV present growth. And it labored!”
And the success of the primary season led to extra seasons. It led to offers with ESPN. The UFC was finally valued as a billion-dollar sports activities group. And it’s solely improved its worth and stature in tradition since.
How MMA turned MAGA
Journalist Sam Eagan has been a longtime fan of fight sports activities. He writes and podcasts fairly typically about UFC, MMA, and home extremism. And he says that he started to see the matters overlap after reporting on the expansion of neo-Nazi battle golf equipment within the US.
“I’d say combating is on no account inherently a conservative sport, but it surely presents as being in regards to the particular person. It’s one particular person competing in opposition to one particular person in a really violent, dominant style,” Eagan advised the Right now, Defined podcast. “So there’s these themes of domination and violence — and within the case of the actually, actually far proper … they’re very simply paralleled in MMA.”
But it surely’s not on the extremes the place Eagan sees an overlap. He pointed to the 2016 Republican Nationwide Conference the place Dana White grew to become one of many first individuals to publicly endorse Trump.
“For over 15 years, Donald Trump has been a loyal and supportive pal,” White mentioned.“And I do know that if I wanted Donald, he could be there for me, similar to he was once I first met him.”
Quickly after that Trump was elected president. However in 2019 he was fairly unpopular. He was booed on the World Sequence in Washington, DC. “And so, he makes an look at a UFC occasion shortly after. And, , it will get the complete remedy, the cameras panned to him, and fighters are cheering his identify and speaking about him of their post-fight interviews,” Eagan says.
Trump continues to look at occasions periodically for the subsequent few years. However then in 2023, it actually takes off, Eagan says. “By my rely, he appeared at three separate occasions in that yr alone. [And] as I used to be watching these occasions, I’d discover this appears like a captive marketing campaign cease for Trump.”
“I’m positive there might be many extra within the lead-up to the election.”
But it surely’s not simply Dana White displaying love for the previous president. Former title contender Colby Covington has constructed an entire persona round being a Trump fan. He wears MAGA hats on a regular basis; in post-fight interviews, he makes shoutouts to first responders, members of the navy, and to Trump himself; and throws round phrases like “pretend information” recurrently.
Jorge Masvidal, a Cuban American fighter from Florida, held a sequence of pro-Trump rallies referred to as Fighters In opposition to Socialism. “We both re-elect President Trump and hold America nice,” Masvidal mentioned at one rally. “Or we let Joe Biden destroy the best nation the world has ever seen.”
Regardless of the rising reputation of the UFC, and its proprietor’s and fighters’ embrace of conservative politics, Eagan says, “I don’t suppose that the UFC will sway the election [for Trump].”
However he does imagine that Trump’s embrace of UFC and fight sports activities has created a kind of blueprint for interesting to younger males who “could also be vaguely conservative however are typically kind of apolitical.”
Based on the sports activities knowledge website IMG Enviornment 75 p.c of UFC’s followers are males and 88 p.c of these males are between the ages of 18 and 44.
A demographic any candidate could be joyful to faucet into.
