The following piece first appeared on The Bloody Elbow Substack on Sunday, December 2, 2023. Subscribe for early access to more premium pieces and to support your favourite online karate magazine.
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This is not an anti-sports rant
I guess I’ll start out saying that sports, at all levels, aren’t without their positive qualities. I’m not here to make an anti-sports rant. Beyond the potential healthy lifestyle habits they can instill and the discipline they can bring, sports also help create community. If 100 people have nothing in common but their love of their team, they’ll still all stand and cheer together for a common cause.
That said, we can’t ever lose sight of the idea that sporting events, no matter how much money and prestige they attract, are only games and pastimes. Nothing brings that kind of reality into sharper relief than an event like the UFC put on this Saturday in Austin, TX.
As a celebration of ‘V Week’ (in memory of former ESPN broadcaster Jim Valvano), the UFC took some time during their latest fight card to highlight battles with cancer in the MMA industry. To do that, the promotion put together a pair of fabulous video packages highlighting Factory X coach Marc Montoya’s ongoing battle with kidney cancer and Elias Theodorou’s recent passing due to colon cancer in September of last year.
Both pieces were excellently delivered, giving somber and hopeful narratives in turn—about what it means to battle against cancer, as a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit and a remembrance of those we lose to the disease. It also came with some less nuanced packages, including fighters reading what seemed to be stock uplifting cue card statements, as well as a lot of the same pieces ESPN has been highlighting for the last decade or more.
The Theodorou piece hit especially hard during the event…
We miss you Elias
A story with very little redemption as we remember a relentlessly positive force in mixed martial arts, taken at just 34 years of age. Made all the more bittersweet considering that the UFC very clearly lost all interest in Theodorou’s career and work while he was still alive (cutting him after a single loss to then top-ranked Derek Brunson, despite an 8-3 UFC record).
Jumping away from that into an utterly meaningless middleweight fight between Zach Reese and Cody Brundage only drove home the feeling that what’s important in life isn’t watching this UFC card, or slamming a man into a trip to the hospital. On the one hand we’re being reminded of the fragility and joy of life, on the other we’re reminded of the absolute wild-man toughness and risks that people will take to do damage to one another for cash. These ideologies don’t marry.
I definitely don’t want to be the person that says sports can’t be a platform for serious topics, but I do think that sports can’t be a platform for serious topics without at least somewhat diminishing the sport.
Maybe that’s fine. After all, if the point is that we should pay attention to something like cancer because it’s terribly important, then finding a less-important-but-generally-popular place to put that message out ensures that people will both see it and understand how much more important it is.
Priorities
There are other arguments to make here as well, about how a lot of these big ‘awareness’ drives don’t necessarily do an efficient job raising necessary funding. How Breast Cancer Awareness Month, most notably, has been high-jacked by corporate interests and branding opportunities. But this certainly felt a lot less cynical than that and I don’t want to get way into the weeds here on the value and methodology of different forms of charity.
Mostly, when I walked into the event tonight thinking about what possible stories would emerge that could make for a good or interesting opinion, the obvious ideas were on Tsarukyan’s title hopes and feuding with Bobby Green, Mike Perry’s unexpected success as the star of bareknuckle boxing, or maybe even something just on how good it was to see Miesha Tate get back to the form that made her a champion in the distant past.
After several hours of sobering cancer talk, however, none of that feels worth the time. Life is short and we only get to go through it once. Reach out to your loved ones, spend your time well, look for joy wherever you can find it.