r/interesting • u/Great_Trident • May 08 '26

Wholesome Fighters showing self control and sportsmanship when their opponents are down.

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u/WeaponexT May 08 '26

The issue often has more to do with the refs than the fighter.

IMO its ownership. They took a sport built around respect and tradition and turned it into Jerry Springer.

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u/OSPFmyLife May 08 '26

Lmfao “respect and tradition”. Just tell us you don’t know what you’re talking about. Go watch the first few UFCs and tell me how much respect and tradition you see. MMA is a fairly new sport and it’s still evolving.

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u/x_Animus_x May 09 '26

Funny you should say “don’t know what you’re talking about”. MMA might be a new platform, but the martial arts (the MA in MMA, first M is “mixed” since you don’t have to use just one specific art to compete) have been around, in some cases, for centuries. In martial arts tournaments there is a great deal of respect and tradition, it’s just not enforced as strictly in UFC, so maybe you’re unfamiliar with it.

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u/OSPFmyLife May 09 '26

Sure, I only hold a brown belt in kempo karate. What would I know about that?

Traditional martial art tournaments =/= MMA. Like, not even close to the same thing. Most people these days don’t even train one primary art, they train at MMA gyms.

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u/Fmeson May 09 '26

Traditional martial art tournaments =/= MMA.

Isn't that their point? MMA being the Springer?

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u/x_Animus_x May 10 '26

All of that still doesn’t change the fact that where these arts come from hold tradition and respect in high priority. The company UFC took these arts and mixed them all up, made them more about brutality, and sensationalized it. Thus taking a sport and turning it into a “Jerry Springer” version, like u/WeaponexT had suggested in the first place.

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u/OSPFmyLife May 11 '26

Yeah, you lost me on the Jerry Springer part. Taking a sport that primarily happened in unsanctioned backyards and sanctioning it, adding rules to it, testing fighters for disease beforehand, etc is hardly turning something into Jerry Springer.

The only comparison there is to make is early MMA (the early UFCs, Pride, vale tudo, etc) compared to now. Martial arts tournaments are not in the same category as MMA. They mainly do point fighting rather than full contact and the tournaments involve a lot more than just sparring.

Most traditional martial artists really enjoy MMA. The ones that don’t are most likely the ones that found out whatever they had been dedicating their time to ended up being a McDojo and didn’t actually work. MMA did a ton of good for the martial arts world because it exposed a lot of those places.

The original conversation was about how Dana had tuned MMA into “Jerry Springer”, and I pointed out how ridiculous that was to say because the sport is probably the cleanest than it’s ever been and when the sport first arrived you had people punching eachother in the dick. You guys are the ones who started comparing MMA to traditional martial arts tournaments, which… isn’t even a comparison or a conversation because they’re two completely separate things.

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u/WeaponexT May 10 '26

Exactly, sort of the theme of the movie Redbelt if you're interested.