Commentary: Ultimate fighting lacks style, skill

Having spent the better part of my writing career chasing the real-life Rockys and the other assorted crooked-nosed, “Guys and Dolls” characters who live under boxing’s big tent, I am an incurable, die-hard lover of the Sweet Science.

I learned the basics of boxing in a cramped and damp basement, with my father raising my left arm just so, as he schooled me on the fine art of the perfect jab, then adjusted the right hand to instruct me on the blunt authority of a well-placed overhand right.

I have been in a Montreal diner listening to Sugar Ray Leonard consider his inner macho instincts and lounged in an ornate Las Vegas living room as a tortured Mike Tyson deconstructed his dark side. I have toured the Catskills in search of Roberto Duran’s stone hands, and nursed a few hot cups of coffee in various hotel penthouses listening to the promoters Bob Arum, Don King and Rock Newman explain why they were more artists than charlatans, more captains of industry than thieves in the night.

Boxing is a writer’s sport because it is filled with so many colorful characters with colorful and fatally flawed lives who will sit with you for hours telling you all about themselves. I have loved every minute of chronicling their stories.

But now I’m worried that the Sweet Science is in trouble and will be replaced by another blood sport that is not nearly as sweet, and about as scientific as a dark alley brawl.

Ultimate fighting, once aptly called “human cockfighting” by Arizona Sen. John McCain in its wild and unregulated years, has gone mainstream and is threatening to replace professional boxing as America’s favorite combat sport.

I understand why. The biggest sporting event of the Memorial Day weekend was arguably Saturday night’s pay-per-view mixed martial arts spectacular, the Ultimate Fighting Championship between the UFC’s reigning superstar, Chuck Liddell, and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Somehow, UFC and all its mixed martial arts spinoffs like the International Fight League or the World Combat League have transformed themselves from caged, dangerous, uncivilized, near-murderous battles between modern blood-lusting gladiators and mercenary barroom brawlers into marketable alternatives to boxing and the scripted show of pro wrestling.

When Chuck Liddell, who lost to Jackson via a first-round TKO, got a cameo role on HBO’s hip television series “Entourage,” then made his way onto the cover of the edgy ESPN The Magazine, that was not a surprise. But when ultimate fighting gets some love on the cover of the far more mainstream Sport Illustrated (“Too Brutal or the Future? Ultimate Fighting: America’s Fastest Growing and Most Controversial Sport”) and a front sports page feature in the New York Times (“From the Edge of Madness To Fighting’s Mainstream”) this week, it’s time to admit that something big is happening in the fight game.

What’s happening is a perfect storm of circumstances that have propelled ultimate fighting ahead of boxing and pro wrestling. Because boxing has fallen on hard times with so few marketable boxers, bad fights, pay-per-view rip-offs and the decline of Mike Tyson from ticket-selling superstar to a convicted felon, mixed martial arts – aka, ultimate fighting – is plucking off dissatisfied customers. The most obvious reason for boxing’s decline is boxing itself. But there’s something a bit more fascinating afoot as well that goes a long way in explaining why ultimate fighting has become so popular.

There is something disturbingly appealing to the current culture about a sport such as ultimate fighting, which lacks much of the style and skill of boxing at its highest form. This flight-club culture seems to appreciate unhinged violence inside a caged octagon, with all its near-bare-knuckled, kicking and gouging brutality, to the skillful art of avoidance and the subtle brutality of boxing at its most artistic level.

But I get it. I understand. I know that ultimate fighting is the new rage, and it has been gussied up into a more palatable form of athletic entertainment. Just don’t try to debate me on the beauty of ultimate fighting at its best over ultimate boxing at its best. Watching Sugar Ray Robinson practice his craft was like watching a brilliant dancer with a bad attitude. Watching an ultimate fighter practice his craft is like watching a bad Patrick Swayze movie.