Illustration: Ben Duffy/Sherdog.com
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.
The title of this op-ed borrows from multi-divisional standout and criminally underrated trash talker Gegard Mousasi who in 2009 called Paulo Filho, then a prospective opponent, “a little donkey who takes some steroids and starts thinking he’s a race horse.”
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Instead, I’m thinking about hindsight and the ways in which sports end up remembering -- and rewriting -- their own histories. MMA is a sport still in its infancy. Calling Nov. 12, 1993 the dawn of mixed martial arts is a little like calling Sept. 4, 476 the end of the Roman Empire: hugely oversimplifying but useful as a point of reference. By that count, MMA is almost 25 years old. While that may sound like a long time -- longer than many fans have been alive and longer than the careers of even the most tenured fighters -- it is a blip in sports history.
For perspective, the generally accepted start of Major League
Baseball is the founding of the National League in 1876. By 1901,
25 years later, the N.L. was the dominant but by no means only
force in baseball. The pool of available players and the fans’
attention were subject to constant competition from an array of
smaller rival leagues. Sound familiar? The competitor that would
finally claw its way to true parity with the National League that
year, ushering in baseball’s modern league system, had begun
calling itself the American League only a year before.
Significantly, some of baseball’s issues of the day would seem very alien to us while others would be hauntingly familiar. If you time-traveled to 1901 and asked a group of baseball fans who they thought were the 10 greatest players ever, Cy Young is probably the only name you would recognize, unless you’re a baseball history buff. If you asked them the most important issue facing the sport, they would probably say “contract breaking.” After all, the other big issues of Major League Baseball’s first quarter-century had been settled: whether black players would be allowed to compete (no) and whether alcohol would be sold at games (yes, grudgingly). Contract breaking was big news because Napoleon Lajoie, one of the sport’s brightest young stars, had just jumped from the N.L.’s Philadelphia Phillies to the A.L.’s Philadelphia Athletics over salary and had in consequence been barred by court order from playing baseball. The Athletics’ response was to trade him to Cleveland, where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s injunction couldn’t touch him. He went on to be so successful and beloved there that the team renamed itself The Napoleons after him. I’m not kidding.
American football provides a similar dose of perspective. The organization we now call the National Football League was founded in 1920. Fast-forward to 1945, and the biggest stories in the sport range from quaint to ludicrous by today’s standards. Protective helmets -- leather, without face protection -- were finally a league-wide requirement. The professional sport was still so nascent that most fans and many journalists believed the top college teams, such as Notre Dame and Army, would defeat any NFL squad handily. The most welcome news was that all 10 franchises would be playing that fall, after several years where multiple teams took the entire season off due to player shortages occasioned by World War 2.
This is all just to illustrate that, like our stick-and-ball games, mixed martial arts is still a baby twenty-five years after that alligator-filled moat failed to materialize in Broomfield, Colorado. One can make a case that MMA’s maturation has been accelerated by taking place in the fast-moving era of the Internet and social media, but I would argue that it’s comparable to the difference between a child born in 1950 and one born in 2010. Just because one kid has a lot more baby pictures doesn’t mean it’s growing up any faster.
While I don’t believe MMA would endure nearly two decades of boring outcomes before making rules changes to address it, as baseball did in the dead-ball era, baseball at least had codified rules and the ability to change them. Meanwhile, MMA is still completely unregulated in many places, barely regulated in others and consistently regulated nowhere. Remember Lajoie circumventing a legal contract and its consequences simply by moving from Philly to Cleveland? Crazy, right? Antiquated-sounding? Yet the Ultimate Fighting Championship routinely books fights here in my state of Texas if it knows a fighter is unlikely to be licensed or medically cleared to fight elsewhere. This says nothing of the kind of medically irresponsible matchups that Bellator MMA brings overseas or Rizin Fighting Federation’s Testosterone Legends Tour. If you’re looking for what future generations will likely see as our leather helmets, our Negro leagues, the evidence that 2018 was still the Stone Age of MMA, regulation is it.
Because we’re in this moment, living it, we have no idea which of the fighters swirling around our pointless, endlessly entertaining Greatest of All-Time discussion today will still be considered all-time greats in another quarter-century, which will be deemed “good for their time” and which will be forgotten entirely. We have no idea which of the issues facing this sport will seem relevant or ridiculous years from now. We don’t know how future generations of fight fans will look at MMA’s current PED mess, but it is a question that is becoming increasingly entwined with the G.O.A.T. conversation. Jon Jones and Anderson Silva, who are at very worst two of the five greatest fighters ever based on accomplishment, are both multiple-time PED offenders.
We don’t know how history will judge MMA’s “steroid era,” but baseball might give us some clues. After all, it is the oldest and most tradition-bound of American sports, the original source of the fabled asterisk. Quite literally a fable, by the way: There was never any asterisk next to Roger Maris’ 1961 home run total, only the equally insulting continued inclusion of Babe Ruth’s record next to his. Nonetheless, the asterisk is a perfect symbol of sports’ tendency to qualify greatness, especially when it threatens to relegate our heroes to obscurity. Ruth was so beloved that Maris wore an apocryphal asterisk for life, while Hank Aaron endured years of hate mail and death threats for daring to approach Ruth’s career home run record. By the time Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa began rewriting baseball’s record book, with Barry Bonds and the rest close behind, Aaron had ascended to the same mythical plane as Ruth, and the PED-enhanced exploits of the late 1990s and early 2000s were seen as an affront to both great men whose achievements had come without artificial enhancement. One imagines that Ruth would have found a kindred spirit in one of the greats of our sport and era: B.J. “I Did This on Beer and Hot Dogs, Georges” Penn.
While no asterisks mar the records of players like Bonds and Roger Clemens, the hall of fame -- in essence, the mind of the sport’s media and previous eras of athletes -- has given their entire generation the cold shoulder. However, while no admitted or convicted PED cheat has yet been admitted to Cooperstown, that shoulder has gradually begun to thaw, as several suspected users have been inducted in recent years. It’s an indication that baseball may be preparing to forgive its PED prodigals rather than face a hall devoid of so many of its most accomplished players -- an acknowledgement that while drug cheaters may have tilted the playing field, they did not betray the core proposition of sport in the way Pete Rose or the Black Sox did.
Our sport will find itself in a similar position one day. Twenty-five years on, the PED controversy will have worked itself out conclusively one way or another, and we will be left with the question of legacy. We will be left with the choice of acknowledging the accomplishments of known cheaters, blemishes and all, or having an MMA Hall of Fame -- please let there be one by then -- missing key figures of this era.
For now? As long as busted fighters can “just go fight in (name a place),” PED policy is still very much an open conversation. By all means, advocate for whatever you believe will make MMA into the sport you want to see. Just don’t rush to pin the asterisk on anyone’s accomplishments. History will decide whom to exalt and whom to forget, and we can only hope to be there for the argument.
