The Ghost Sport

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

Paul Beston calls boxing the ghost sport, because it’s such a faint shadow of its former self, but what immediately jumped out to me — and numerous commenters — is how he failed to mention the rise of MMA and the UFC.

Comments

  1. Faze says:

    I suspect that many men my age are made deeply uncomfortable by seeing two men face one another in a boxing stance and suddenly start kicking one another. To us, this looks like the end of western civilization. In my day, if you kicked another guy in a schoolyard fight, that was more or less a signal for all the other guys friends to jump on you and pound you. You don’t kick. Girls, sissies, and low-class outsiders kicked. If you kicked in a fight, you lost status and would likely be razzed about it for years. MMA and UFC appear to us to be products of the age of permissiveness. They do not elevate manhood and the self-control that’s essential to the strategic use of power. MMA and UFC appear to us to be a spectacle of men fighting like girls or low status colonized ethnic groups — it’s a degrading sight.

Leave a Reply