MMA Makes Boxing Look Brutal

The left hook that should have knocked out boxer Yaundale Evans in Austin, Texas, last Friday night caught him so hard on the chin that he was unconscious before his body even had a chance to move backwards, much less fall to the ground.

I say the left hook that should have knocked out Yaundale Evans because somehow the fighter managed to stumble to his feet before the referee counted to ten. Considering the force of that punch, it’s fair to say that Evans got up on pure boxers’ instinct. The end of the fight, which came only moments later, was inevitable: A few more blows to the head and Evans was down again—less dramatically this time, but to stay.

Fifteen minutes after Evans had been picked off the canvas by his handlers, a few reporters were hustled from their seats far from the ring in the low mezzanine section of the arena to a makeshift locker room. There, Evans’s conqueror, Javier Fortuna, held court with an air of confidence that can only come from knocking your opponent flat on national television.

My colleagues were all reporters from boxing publications, and they asked Fortuna boxing-aficionado questions. What’s it like training at such-and-such gym with such-and-such trainer? What weight class did the fighter hope to settle in at, and who did he hope to take on next? Would it be at 126 pounds or 130?

Not being a boxing writer myself, but curious about the differences between the sport and mixed martial arts, I wanted to know about that first knockdown. MMA has a reputation for common brutality (similar to boxing’s, before A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and others convinced the straight world it was both sweet and scientific), but the fact is when MMA fighters go out, the referee stops the fight; fighters aren’t given ten long seconds to recover their wits and start swinging—and getting swung at—again. This distinction is significant, I think. It lends MMA just the slightest air of moral dignity. So I was curious, was it clear to Fortuna that Evans was out of his feet? And was Fortuna surprised when the referee let the fight go on?

“Si si si si,” he replied. Fortuna is from the Dominican Republic and only speaks Spanish. His translator continued: “He thinks it was an abuse. It should have been stopped on the very first knockdown. He felt like the guy was extremely wobbly and he shouldn’t have continued.” When Fortuna said the Spanish word for “wobbly” he did a quick jig that was half drunken lurch and half stylish Caribbean dance.

The specter of MMA looms large over boxing these days. More and more, in magazines and lockers rooms, boxers are being asked to defend their sport against this growing phenomenon. Some do so by belittling the skills of mixed martial artists, or they claim there are no real similarities between the two sports, and thus no use in comparison. Others resign themselves to the current state of things, and dabble in both sports.

The promoter behind Friday’s ESPN fight card, former pound-for-pound great Roy Jones Jr., has a long, contentious history with MMA. He’s famously mocked some of MMA’s biggest names; he even offered to fight a few of them, though those requests were politely declined. In interviews, Jones described Friday’s event as something of a last shot at redemption and a new start for his beloved but ailing boxing, and his protestations leading up to the show were fight-game masterpieces of self-importance and paranoia.

“The sport is on the decline, and I’ve got to try to help it survive,” Jones said. “The commentators are killing our sport. In the UFC, if a guy loses, he can fight again. But in boxing, once a guy loses, he’s pretty much dead meat, because everybody talks about him so bad that you can’t get a network to ever show him again.” I wondered if that was why Jones had stuck the media so far from the ring—as punishment for the terrible things he knew we were going to write.

Jones was probably right to be wary. Boxing writers—like all sports writers, only more so—are notoriously cruel, ready to declare a young fighter’s career over in a flash. This is especially true when they’re writing about a young prospect who stumbles trying to climb the lower rungs of the ladder.

The main event of last week’s Friday Night Fights was supposed to be a coming-out party for one of those young prospects, the golden boy of Jones’ Square Ring Productions, Ukranian Ismayl Sillakh. Coming into the fight, Sillakh was considered by many to be a top ten light-heavyweight. His opponent, a Russian puncher named Denis “The Pirate” Grachev, was seen as little more than a sacrificial lamb, a number to pad Sillakh’s unblemished record en route to bigger names and purses.

Sillakh’s quick combinations and foot speed initially confused the Russian, but the golden boy spent the next four rounds dancing, either unable or unwilling to knock Grachev out. Grachev wore him down, artlessly taking three punches for each blow he landed, and when the end came in the eighth—a hard right stunned Sillakh, who then hit the ropes, and another right knocked him unconscious—the press corps began finishing off the one-time prospect they’d so recently celebrated. His career’s as good as done, they declared. He’ll never get a title shot now. I was beginning to see the sense in Roy Jones’s ranting.

That the Great Ukrainian Hope of Jones’s still-modest Square Ring stable lost to an unheralded brawler like Grachev must worry the champion-fighter-turned-wary-promoter. But worse: Grachev also considers himself an MMA fighter.

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