UFC 82, Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio, March 1, 2008In the six-sided cage at Ed’s Rec Room in West Edmonton Mall — where the Ninja now stood, squared off against an equally pallid and shredded fighter — the system was indeed complex: two men, skimped out in shorts and thin, open-fingered gloves, surrounded by a mesh enclosure two metres high and seven metres across, ready to battle for three five-minute rounds unless someone gave up or got knocked out first.
There were many permutations to consider. He could knock out his opponent with a punch or kick or elbow or knee, or gain a submission via chokehold or joint lock or barrage of blows — standing or in the clinch or on the ground. And he had to defend against the same, without recourse to bites or headbutts or groin strikes or other forms of foul play. Every option seemed to present itself at once.
The Ninja — a.k.a. Nick Denis, a twenty-four-year-old biochemistry master’s student at the University of Ottawa — had tried to control for all variables. He’d scouted his opponent, a 145-pound fighter from Vancouver named Dave Scholten, by tapping into the sport’s obsessive online rumour mill. Then he’d hit the gym twice a day, five days a week, with an extra session on Saturday. He’d alternated cardio with jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai kick-boxing, sparring constantly with his Ronin Mixed Martial Arts teammates — three five-minute rounds of Muay Thai, then three five-minute rounds of boxing and wrestling, then three five-minute rounds of mixed martial arts. His coaches monitored everything, offering advice ranging from the precise (“Jab, cross, move, jab, cross, move”) to the sadistic (“Don’t throw anything that’s not meant to hurt the guy”). Even his diet was calibrated: whole grains, lean meats, protein shakes, a plantation’s worth of fruit.
When finally his bout had been announced, Denis emerged to a crowd of 1,500, their roars drowning out the crash of bowling pins and the dings of video games from the adjacent arcade. He’d wanted to ride in on a Segway, but was prevented by the stairs leading to the cage. The Ninja of Love was a scientist, sure, but he had a taste for the absurd. He’d dubbed his fighting style “snuggle-jitsu” and fought in tight spandex “mandies” instead of the usual long board shorts because, he said, “they’re sexy and give me special powers.”
Denis had taken part in fight cards outside his province before, forced across the Ottawa River to Gatineau, Quebec, by the sport’s illegal status in Ontario. But this was something new: a Western crowd, a Western opponent. A title fight for an $800 purse and, potentially, the attentions of Ultimate Fighting Championship (ufc), the sport’s biggest showcase.
Denis’s guiding theory through the first two rounds was that Scholten would try to go to ground and get a submission. So he stood in wait, striking and retreating when Scholten lunged in to wrench him down and, if that failed, deploying the ground guard he’d perfected in training.
Everything changed at the start of the third. With Scholten holding an edge, the exhausted fighters converged to touch left gloves, a sign of mutual respect. Suddenly, Scholten flared a disrespectful right hook over his extended olive branch. Boos rang out, and Denis stumbled backward, shocked. A dark look crossed his face.
He recovered quickly, dragging a charging Scholten to the ground. “Hit him for being cheap!” a woman yelled. Scholten gained a reversal, then both men scoured for thirty seconds for a free limb to contort or a patch of skin to punch, until at last Denis countered, stood, and gestured theatrically for his opponent to stand. The crowd bellowed its approval.
When Scholten rose, Denis stepped in with a left hook, then a knee to the head, then an uppercut to the jaw. Scholten’s legs gave out, and he made a desperate lunge for Denis’s feet. As an official with Edmonton’s fight commission looked on from a few metres away, Denis strolled away disdainfully. Scholten attempted to rise, but Denis fired a hard, spinning kick that brushed Scholten’s hair, leaving the Vancouver fighter looking deranged and scared. He gamely tossed a few wild punches, but Denis deflected them, grasping Scholten’s neck and scuttling him with two knees to the face. Scholten, crumpled on the canvas, accepted three right hands without complaint, compelling the referee to end the fight.
The scientist stalked to the centre of the cage, dropped to his knees, and thrust his fists to the air in triumph. Before him sat Scholten, punch drunk and propped up against the chain-link wall, red spilling from forehead to torso to yellow cage floor.
Caged ignorance. Human cockfighting. Ghetto-fabulous hooliganism. The list of epithets cast at mixed martial arts by those who find it animalistic and incomprehensible is a long and colourful one. Admittedly, if boxing’s formula of intricate variations on simple rules elevates it to the level of Sweet Science, mma can seem more like Interdisciplinary Imbroglio: an ungainly mess punctuated by moments of brutal clarity, whose organizing principles only its professors appear to understand. And yet it has become axiomatic in fight circles that boxing is on the wane and mixed martial arts is on the rise.
It may say everything skeptics care to know that the seminal moment in mma’s ascent wasn’t a fight on the order of a Tunney-Dempsey or a Liston-Clay, but rather the launch of a reality TV show. The Ultimate Fighter made its debut on Spike TV in January 2005, following an episode of Raw, the flagship program of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment ( wwe) juggernaut. The conceit was a spin on that of Big Brother: a houseful of aspirants stave off abuse and elimination en route to a six-figure contract with ufc.
