You ever try to explain the weird and occasionally wonderful world of MMA to people who have no knowledge or experience of fight sports? Ever hear yourself talking about it and realize how bizarre it sounds?
For instance, imagine trying to tell them what’s going on with Bryce Mitchell and Jean Silva at UFC 314 on Saturday.
Picture yourself explaining that this fight is getting more attention than it otherwise would because one guy professed an affection and admiration for Adolf Hitler, and the other guy has vowed to beat him up for being stupid. Just envision that. How you’d have to explain that Mitchell, who’s not totally sold on ideas like gravity and looks at a globe as a personal affront, is pretty sure that he’s been tortured in his sleep by demons and sexy ladies ever since taking this fight with Silva.
How you’d then have to follow up by pointing out that Silva has leaned into all this, mocking Mitchell at every turn in an effort to make the most out of a fight with the man who UFC CEO Dana White called “literally one of the dumbest human beings.”
Probably you would have to pause there, wouldn’t you? You’d have to specify that, yes, UFC executives are well aware of everything happening here — the Hitler apologia, the sleep demons, the flat earth stuff — and have tried to spin that straw into gold by presenting it as an opportunity rather than a controversy.
That’s the sales pitch in a nutshell. Don’t like Mitchell, who said he wanted to go fishing with Hitler and then tried to shield himself from boos by quoting the Bible? Here’s your chance to watch him get his butt kicked on live television. Maybe.
And the thing is, it works. This is a fight between one guy barely hanging onto the edge of the top-15 rankings and another guy still trying to break into them. In most other circumstances, this would be just another fight. Nobody here is, at the moment, a contender or a former champ or anything even close.
But it’s one of the marquee main card fights on an $80 UFC pay-per-view because there are stakes. They may be mostly personal and deeply weird — among the things Mitchell and Silva have publicly argued over is which one of them better understands the teachings of Jesus Christ — but those stakes exist and we are aware of them. We know that, while nobody ever wants to lose a televised cage fight, these two really, really don’t want to lose ...
