MMA on The Daily Show

Sorry, I meant to put this up monday night, but my internet crashed.

I was watching the Daily Show and John Stewart ran a segment on MMA. Thank god he didn't call it Ultimate Fighting.

Anyway, I've been a fan of the Daily Show for a while, after all, there's really nothing else on when I'm trying to go to sleep at 11.

The show is, generally, a satyr, but he asked some questions that I thought were pretty interesting.

His first question was "Why an octagon?" Obviously, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but that's what he meant.

There are alot of reasons, but in order to keep this post short, I'll just focus on the main one.

When people think about something, they want it to be something that they can recognize, something that they can remember and easily associate with the sport, but still differentiate it from other organizations. This is one reason why Royler Gracie and the other original founders of the UFC chose to avoid using the traditional boxing ring that organizations like K-1, Pancrase and PRIDE did.

They refrained from it being a square, because then it would have just been "The Cage." Frankly, square cages are already heavily associated with professional wrestling. That was definitely an association that the UFC wanted to avoid, because they wanted to emphasize that their organization was not staged.

They wanted the cage to have an even number of sides and corners so that, like a professional boxing ring, the corners would be directly across from each other and you would not have a weird effect where the fighters would not be looking at each other between rounds (or before the fight).

So what has more sides than a square, an even number of them and is a recognizable shape. An Octagon.

Let's face it, it's pretty easy to rule out a decagon or a sextagon.

John Stewart's second question was a little bit more important, in my opinion, because it involves the actual purpose of the sport.

"Boxing, wrestling and karate all have rules, and a tradition. When you mix them all together, don't you lose that?"

Obviously, I'm paraphrasing again, but the point is there.

Anyone who takes this stance doesn't have a grasp on the martial arts, that's not a potshot at Stewart (I think he's hysterical), but it overlooks the purpose of martial arts in general.

Martial arts, as styles, were designed for a single purpose: self-defense. When you overlook that, and many styles have in light of their own forms of competition, it loses its purpose and its abilities.

The purpose of the original UFC was to see what style was the best. The Gracies made a point by funding it and winning it, but they also made a point about sports like Karate and wrestling and boxing. While they might be great sports, these guys aren't fighters.

Mixed-martial arts was originally founded to return to the purpose for which the styles were intended, as a simulation of real combat. Combat might be different on the street, but the point of MMA as a sport is to try to recreate a combat situation to see who the better fighter is, not who the better athlete is.

MMA is the greatest sport in the world, as far as I'm concerned, because it's not about box-scores or records or any of that beaurocratic crap that is ruining boxing and is trying to kill collegiate wrestling. The point of MMA is to be the better fighter. Period.

Any martial artist who says that MMA is an abomination is not a martial artist, because he is denying that he studies martial arts for self-defense and the discipline that such a commitment entails.

Maybe MMA doesn't have the tradition and the belts and the stringent regulation and honor system that martial arts have, but the fact is, without MMA, martial arts have no way to excersise their purpose in competition. All they have is a way of pretending that they are capable of real combat, and that's not what the martial arts are about.