Monday August 18, 2014
6:30 a.m.

Back at the 7-11 and having a coffee and squinting at the keyboard. I had a sense that I experienced a setback in terms of my vision. It’s a weird thing, but when I wake up in the morning, my eyes – even after a long night of restful sleep – are very sore. Both of them. And they water like crazy. I rub them and water squirts out all over the place. I’m not used to that. They never used to do that. (Cute little dark mouse running around the 7-11 this morning. Brave critter. He comes right up to my feet and sniffs around and then runs away.) Yeah, my left eye feels bad this morning. Even distance vision is affected. Everything is blurry through my left eye. Time for the ghost image check: pretty strong, but not as bad as it was weeks ago. There is a ghost image of the letter “I”, for example, but it is not completely separate. It overlaps. Used to be that I’d see two completely separate letters quite far apart. Now it is more like the second “I” is a shadow of the first. In a way, that my vision changes from day to day is a good sign. It stands to reason if this vision change was due to a stroke, it wouldn’t change dramatically from one day to the next and it wouldn’t come with secondary symptoms like soreness and tearing up. Makes me think that it could be environmental. Maybe there is something in my bedding, my room, or the hotel in general that is toxic. That wouldn’t surprise me.

And that’s probably the end of my thoughts this morning. I’ve got nothing else on my mind except perhaps the UFC. There was a UFC event on Saturday night. (A second mouse has appeared. Same coloring as the first but quite a bit smaller. Probably a member of the same family.) I have mixed feelings about the UFC these days. I first became hooked on that type of fighting because of its purity. The very first UFC had practically no rules, no time limits, and no weight classes. It was simply an exercise in determining who was the toughest dude regardless of their training. Over time, it became more of a sport with weight classes, rounds, time limits, and rules. That was inevitable, and I don’t mind that too much. But the more the sport has grown in popularity, the more watered down it has become. They are now trying to please the average viewer, and the average viewer is a moron. They just want to see two idiots stand in the middle of the ring and “bang.” Time and again, I’ve witnessed the worst fights I’ve ever seen and heard them described by even the commentators as the “best fight in the history of the UFC.” They think it’s a great fight simply because two guys smash each other in the face a lot and there is a lot of blood. To anyone that knows anything about MMA, the fact that you are getting hit in the face a lot means that you are the exact opposite of a skilled fighter. A skilled fighter would avoid your fists and take you to the ground to neutralize your striking and then break your arm or strangle you. But when a fighter does that, the crowd starts to boo, and they complain that is boring. If a great fighter does that a couple of times in a row, they now get cut from the UFC. The other fighters have quickly learned their lesson, and now they all avoid the ground game and just trade punches. It’s so stupid. MMA evolved as a reaction to the one-dimensional nature of boxing. And now they are turning into boxing but without the skill. Worse, they are turning into the WWE with manufactured hostility between fighters and gimmicks and storylines. It’s very depressing. It’s even worse than that because these days, we have social media, and the fighters themselves are heavily into Twitter, Instagram and all the rest of it. Social media and the Internet brings out the most brainless of the brain dead of society and brings out the worst in everyone. It’s a bad and stupid combination, and everything is only going to get worse. I heard a long interview with Dana White the other day. He’s the president of the UFC. He said that his goal is to make MMA the biggest sport in the world. That’s his only goal – to make everything bigger and bigger and bigger. That was disappointing to hear. I would rather have heard him say that he wanted to make the sport as good as possible and to develop athletes into the best fighters on the planet. But no, all he is interested in is making it bigger and more popular. What surprises me is that the media say the exact same thing. I listen to a few MMA podcasts, and the journalists constantly talk about ways to make the sport more popular and have it spread to new markets and new countries around the world. I would expect them to say the opposite or at least to have no opinion. Almost everything gets worse when it gets bigger. Think blockbuster movies. Think music. Try to appeal to worldwide masses and you are going to produce weak garbage. It’s just the way things are. I would be very happy if MMA remained very small and just the secret passion of a few select people.

Recently, I’ve gotten interested in some competing promotions to the UFC. I never paid much attention to them before. One of them is called Bellator. They started off with a pretty good model. They based their organization on tournaments. They would have a champion in each weight class and then they would have an elimination tournament to see who was the best fighter and the winner of the tournament fought the champion for the belt. It was a system based on merit. The UFC doesn’t do that all. They simply put together whatever fights they want. And it is based as much or more on a fighter’s popularity or name recognition as it is on their fighting record or ability. So fighters try very hard to become popular. They get on Twitter and YouTube and do crazy things and try to get their name in the media. That’s how they get a title shot. At least in Bellator, you have to win a tournament to get a title shot. It’s a meritocracy, which I approve of very much. Of course, most people hate the tournament structure of Bellator. And from what I can tell, the tournaments are slowly going away. People don’t like them, and Bellator isn’t making enough money.

The MMA journalists surprise me very much, as I said. Not long ago, the UFC purchased a competing promotion called Strikeforce. Strikeforce was the UFC’s biggest competitor. Everyone went on and on about how this was great for the sport and how the UFC was going to run Strikeforce as a second promotion and fighters were going to have more choices. I’m no genius, but even I knew that was nonsense. The UFC did exactly what I expected they would do. After they bought Strikeforce, they absorbed their best fighters and then closed it down. A few years ago, the UFC bought the huge promotion in Japan called Pride. The same thing happened there. They just shut it down after they bought it. And why not? Get rid of the competition. It doesn’t take a business master to see what they are doing. So why did all these MMA journalists blather on about how great it is for the UFC to buy up the other promotions? They’re not idiots. Or maybe they are. The’re blind, certainly.

Another huge and frustrating problem in the UFC is the large number of injuries. I’ve never seen anything like it. Their fighters get injured in training constantly, so fights are routinely postponed or cancelled. And they have champions sitting out for up to two years with injuries. It’s crazy. It just happened with what was going to be the biggest fight in years – one between the light heavyweight champion Jon Jones and a strong wrestler that just moved down from the heavyweight division, Dan Cormier. Jon Jones was supposed to have a rematch with the Swedish fighter Alexander Gustafsson. Gustafsson is the only fighter that came even close to giving Jon Jones a challenge. But then Gustafsson got injured in training. So the fight was cancelled and Jon Jones was to fight Dan Cormier instead. Everyone was going insane for this fight. And then a week ago, Jon Jones was injured in training. The fight is now scheduled for January. The injuries and cancellations never end.

The Jon Jones saga has been interesting. There is no question that he is a good fighter. But there is equally no question that he makes it really hard to like him as person. I find it intriguing and a bit frustrating because I see no reason for it. He started off as something of a Golden Boy. Just before one of his first fights, he ran down and captured a mugger that had just stolen a woman’s purse. He was an instant hero. He proved himself a phenomenal fighter, and he was soft-spoken and nice and everyone loved him. Then he morphed into a rather unlikeable person. And it isn’t a game. He isn’t playing a role in order to sell tickets. I recently went to his Instagram page and was horrified to see these stupid little videos that he puts out all the time. They look like something a serial killer would make – just his giant face looming into the camera on his smartphone as he sings some stupid song or says something moronic. Apparently, he puts up videos insulting other fighters and then he deletes them immediately – just to annoy people further. He lies and distorts and insults with a fake humble smirk on his face. I find it astonishing because it is so unnecessary and such a waste. Here’s a dude in his early twenties that has the entire world at his fingertips. He is referred to as the best fighter in the world. He has more money than he could ever need. He has everything. Why, then, be such a jerk? It’s weird. Why make it so that everyone boos you when you go out to fight? It’s such a waste. I can understand it if you are a mediocre fighter but have a flashy personality. Then you can do all these stupid things so that people hate you and they want to see you fight so you get beat. It’s a way to become well-known and get fights and make money. But Jon Jones doesn’t need any of that. He’s one of the greatest fighters ever in the UFC. Everyone wants desperately to love him. All he has to do is answer questions in interviews, sign some posters, pose for pictures with fans, and fight. But he goes out of his way to be an a jerk – a real jerk, not a fake one. Such a waste.

I like the sport of MMA very much, and it annoys me that there are so few fighters that I can truly feel good about. So many of them are rude and disrespectful and just plain dumb. And they are all being caught taking steroids now, which strikes me as insanely stupid. Over and over, I start to like a fighter, and then they turn into morons or are busted by a drug test.

Tags: Dan Cormier, Jon Jones, MMA, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, UFC