The 6 Least Sportsmanlike Moments in MMA

A lot of uneducated people look at Mixed Martial Arts as a savage bloodsport between two lunatics. Now normally, I'd argue against this point. After all, anyone who says that violence never solved anything is probably a pussy and causing problems. However, in this week's column I wanted to give the uneducated people and the pussies a break. I wanted to try to see things from their point of view. So I've gone through 20 years of modern gentlemanly combat and found six moments of conduct most ungentlemanly. From post-fight riots to neverending chokes to sucker punches, these are the moments that prove your girlfriend right about this horrible, inhuman karate whatever.

UFC 43: Meltdown

For the first two minutes of this fight, Frank Mir dominated Wes Sims. He was so all over him that it looked like Wes Sims was losing a fight to his own douchebag-faced sweater. Then, as smoothly as if he was posing for a Jiu-Jitsu instructional book, Mir sat on Sims's chest and pulled him into an armbar. Sims had to escape by muscling Mir's entire body into the air and dropping him on his head. Now dropping someone on the top of their head is kind of illegal, but that's not the unsportsmanlike part. The unsportsmanlike part comes when Wes grabs hold of the cage with both hands, which you can't do, and starts furiously stomping on Frank Mir's face. Which you flagrantly can't do even if it's always wordlessly begging for it. It was so illegal that Wes might as well have thrown blinding powder or pulled out a photo of Frank Mir's kidnapped daughter and said, "She's strapped to a bomb that's set to go off when anyone named Wes Sims loses a fight!"

When the referee disqualified him for face stomping, he seemed more annoyed than angry. Almost as if he was explaining to a diabetic child for the fifth time that he's not allowed to drink jam. Wes Sims responded by making a face stupid people make when their mothers drink during pregnancy and walking away with his hands raised. It's possible he simply didn't know what he'd done, like when he snaps the head off one of his rabbits. To this day I don't think he realizes he lost the fight. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if that entire fight he thought he was playing laser tag.

Watch the fight!

WEC 20: Cinco de Mayhem

This started out as a pretty good back-and-forth match until a punch from Brian Olsen knocked all the goodness out of Mike Kyle's heart. Brian Olsen wasn't aiming for his conscience, but he hit it and knocked it out. Newly awakened Dark Kyle responded by ramming a knee in the general direction of Olsen's crotch and then hip throwing him onto the mat. The night demanded that Mike Kyle make the kill, but after several dominant positions with no effective offense, it was clear he wasn't going to be able to do much of anything. It was a stalemate, like a Democratic Congress trying to get to third base with a Mormon horse--nobody is going to be doing anything to anyone until someone decides to throw ethics out the window. So Mike Kyle did. He jumped to his feet and kicked Brian Olsen in his neck while he was down. It actually blurred the line between disqualification and felony assault, which should have been impossible in the middle of something called a "fight."

The referee dove in to stop the fight, but Mike Kyle didn't care. He's of the school of thought where if you get caught stabbing a hooker, you might as well steal her wallet and tell the police that her meth is yours. So as the referee pulled him off, the already disqualified Mike Kyle kept punching and punching Olsen's unconscious head. I suppose when you're clearly going to end up in prison some day, it's never too early to send a message to the other inmates.

UFC 6: Clash of the Titans

Tank Abbott is the kind of guy you'd expect police to find alone in the center of a wrecked biker bar before they called for immediate backup. He looks like the shitty character from every fighting video game who'd somehow reverse-Tron'ed into our world. His face makes it clear that he hates everything that isn't ZZ Top or alcohol poisoning. He bench presses 600 pounds and wore gloves into the Octagon back when you didn't have to. This implied that he knew things about punching skulls that the rest of us didn't. People put on a diaper before they make eye contact with him.

In his first UFC fight, Tank's opponent was 400 pound John Matua. John Matua practiced something called Kapu Kuialau, the "Hawaiian art of bone breaking." If you're familiar with the skeletal structure of the Polynesian people, then you know that's fucking crazy. Hawaiian's have such reinforced bones that even their women solve every problem with a headbutt. The automotive industry uses Hawaiian bones to test high-speed impacts because they're cheaper than titanium, and that's why every Ford Escape is haunted. All I'm saying is that on paper, John Matua was looking alright.

When the fight started, Tank and John went at each other like six grizzly bears versus a river full of salmon. I figured you'd have to do some weird shit to break Hawaiian bones, but I had no idea it would involve so much slipping and slapping. Fifteen seconds into the two great beasts' graceful dance, Tank grabbed Matua by his T-shirt and hit him with a right hand so hard that train accidents thought their father had finally come back home. It was such a terrible injustice against faces that Bono's orbital bone wrote a song about it.

When a person gets knocked out, strange things happen. Sometimes you wake up quickly and have no idea what happened. Sometimes you stay unconscious until the A-Team is done saving everyone in your illegal sweatshop. In John Matua's case, his brain got confused and told every part of his body to go jogging in a different direction. So he hit the ground stiff and twitching. Tank Abbott, with the class one would expect from central casting's idea of a prison movie extra, looked back at the body and mocked his seizure. Mocked his seizure. That's the kind of thing that makes Satan shuffle the papers on his desk and say, "Shit, I don't even think I have a form for that."