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Opinion: On Puppetry and Fairness
- Updated: September 30, 2016
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.* * * Fans are, by nature, passionate and therefore fickle. Perhaps there’s something to be said for the way in which professional sports tease out a certain kind of mania in its fandom, but I’m skeptical that mixed martial arts fans, or any particular sports fans, are “worse” on the whole, or that particular sport’s fans are uniquely successful in dragging down the discourse around that sport. Fans of a particular sport may be different, idiosyncratic, but not abstractly “worse.”OK, now, having said all that … MMA fans are just the worst sometimes, aren’t they? Last week, I wrote in this same space about how UFC 205, when its lone title offering was Tyron Woodley-Stephen Thompson, was a fantastic high-level MMA card, but not one that matched the years of hype and symbol significant attributed to the first Ultimate Fighting Championship card at Madison Square Garden. Fast forward a week, and UFC 205 is probably the greatest MMA card ever assembled, at least on paper. With all due reverence to the outstanding, historic Joanna Jedrzejczyk-Karolina Kowalkiewicz clash that now graces UFC 205, those two women are not really why I’m writing in such superlative terms. It’s Conor McGregor and Eddie Alvarez. I appreciate that owing to McGregor’s star power, any action he takes in his career will have the largest audience watching and dissecting him at every turn, and more than that, due to his bombastic persona, he’s a natural magnet for criticism and disdain. I also appreciate that Twitter or my inbox might not be representative cross-section of MMA folks. Nonetheless, to see adults, theoretical fans of professional prizefighting, complaining that Alvarez-McGregor — literally, one of the most historically significant bouts in MMA history if it happened in a midwestern barn, nevermind Madison Square Garden — wasn’t “fair”? Like I said, MMA fans are not abstractly “worse” than any other fans of anything, but damn if these aren’t exactly the kind of moments that make you say “Man, MMA fans are the worst.” I would not have complained if we wound up with Alvarez defending against Khabib Nurmagomedov at either UFC 205 or 206, but it’s not like Nurmagomedov is being cheated out of a UFC lightweight title shot because he’s 23-0 and beat the guy Alvarez just lifted the title off of two-plus years ago. If you’re particularly concerned with how “fair” the UFC lightweight title picture is, consider that Tony Ferguson is 7-0 with five finishes in the same time span that Nurmagomedov has just one win, and even if Ferguson beats Rafael dos Anjos in the coming weeks, he still isn’t assured a lightweight shot. More than that, there are major potential benefits for Nurmagomedov bound up in Alvarez-McGregor, assuming Nurmagomedov can take …
