Josh Rosenblatt explains how Fedor Emelianenko made him love MMA:
A few years ago I read an article in ESPN magazine about back-alley bareknuckle-boxing king-turned-prizefighter Kimbo Slice. Despite a lifelong aversion to violence, I was curious about the YouTube streetfights that had made Slice so famous, and after watching him pound down a rag-tag assortment of street toughs I decided (as I’m sure many did) that he must be the toughest man in the world, impervious to pain and impossible to defeat.
Then I went back to reading the ESPN profile and learned that a lot of professional MMA fighters thought Slice was a joke who wouldn’t last two minutes in a real fighting ring. I couldn’t even begin to imagine a world where that was possible, not after what I had witnessed. So I once again set my squeamishness aside and starting watching any MMA videos I could find.
It didn’t take long before I stumbled upon footage of a stone-faced Russian Everyman who, in fight after fight, did away with his opponents with a bizarre calm. This man didn’t live up to any of my preconceived notions about cage-fighters. He had no tattoos. He didn’t seem to relish causing pain. He didn’t brag, he didn’t boast, he barely even seemed to speak. He appeared to be entirely free of muscles, his body covered in a thick layer of flab. After beating former UFC champion Mark Coleman’s face into a bloody mess, he cheerfully patted Coleman’s small children on the head, as if to assure them that he wasn’t a monster but an avuncular figure in tight shorts. I read stories about this quiet family man from a frozen town somewhere in rural Russia who trained by dragging anvils around the forest and spending hours purging himself in a ramshackle homemade bathhouse, and who sought religious guidance from a Russian Orthodox priest who looked like a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. And I became fascinated by his fights.
That sounds a lot like how Royce Gracie made people love NHB.