Thursday, January 22, 2009
On the new release shelf at a downtown bookstore sits the year’s finest sports read thus far — a seminal one at that.
See, every major sport has a library of timeless books dedicated to it. Those who’d no sooner pick up a book than a Tijuana hooker read George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion” in the 1960s and beyond. John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink” was among the earliest accounts of Bob Knight’s spirited coaching techniques. The Library of Congress likely couldn’t hold the glut of tomes dedicated to baseball.
And so it’s fitting that L. Jon Wertheim’s “Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC” was released last week in the heart of a decade that has seen MMA — namely the Ultimate Fighting Championship — explode into the sporting pantheon.
Wertheim — a Sports Illustrated senior writer — pens a colorful narrative of the UFC’s rise and that of Miletich, who now runs the sport’s world famous training school, Miletich Fighting Systems Elite in Bettendorf, Iowa. Wertheim details the UFC’s ascent from its barbaric infancy to its current standing among the nation’s biggest sports. Entwined is Miletich’s story of triumph from personal toil and tragedy to tutoring the likes of MMA stars Matt Hughes and Tim Sylvia to name a few.
By now, the UFC’s popularity is common knowledge. One needs only to pass by Buffalo Wild Wings on a Saturday fight night to see a scene in which eager patrons spill through the door — some huddled near a window to catch a glimpse of the main event.
Equal parts curious bystander and well-versed fans, crowds at pay-per-view purveyors keep growing like the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme that wasn’t and $50 events remain recession proof among households as well — the UFC has routinely pulled in an upwards of one million buys per card lately. MMA has effectively replaced boxing and its cesspool of corruption and disorder as the de-facto fight in town.
It belongs at Kansas City’s Sprint Center and soon. Face it, Sid the Kid and the Pittsburgh Penguins led us on and not a credible word has been uttered alluding to a pro basketball franchise calling Kansas City home anytime soon. We should be sick of half-assed exhibitions and demand blood (of the UFC variety).
That said MMA finally has an incredible read that sets the record straight on a sport still misunderstood by many. Thumbing through its pages one more time, one quotation reverberates and perhaps serves as an appropriate summation of MMA’s allure:
“There’s a part of our genetics that likes watching ultimate competition,” announcer Joe Rogan tells Wertheim. “When you break it down, what are sports all about? One guy dominating another guy, within a sport. (In MMA) you shed away as much as possible: goalposts, helmets, most rules. The purest form of sport is fighting, and the purest form of fighting is mixed martial arts.”
— — Edited by Chris Horn
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