Ultimate Street Fighter ensures my mate is gone in 30 seconds
by Brendan Coffey
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WE ALL love a knock-out, except when it’s someone you know. The strange experience was one that I encountered on Friday night when I went to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight night.
If you’ve seen UFC on the television you’ll either love it or hate it. Love it because it is a legitimised fight club in which the fighters push themselves beyond the limits allowed in most other physical contact sports.
It’s like a combination of boxing and kick-boxing except you can grapple and wrestle to a point where legs get locked into holds where they look like they’ll snap in two.
The last fight – and the main event – of the night lasted no more than 20 seconds when that very thing happened to the lesser looking male of the duo at the top of the bill.
He limped from the ring having tapped his hand furiously to indicate submission. His face was contorted into the kind of anguish only seen in a child when they experience pain for the first time and they think it might kill them.
This form of mixed martial arts is not my cup of tea – I don’t understand what’s going on most of the time and the rest of the time I’m wondering why the hell I’m watching masochistic males pummel each other to the point of submission.
Twelve months ago, I watched my first fight night at a parish hall venue in Donaghmeade. This tatty GAA hall in Whitehall isn’t much better but then this sport is about atmosphere; atmosphere and the primal rush of blood when you see one man take down another man.
The second last fight was the one I was interested in. The previous ones were interesting but too often they descended into static grappling contests that didn’t seem to achieve anything other than a stalemate in which neither fighter could score points.
And most of the time our amateur guesses at who had won the contest proved wide of the mark. At least in boxing you can see when a good punch has landed or when someone is really hurt. In this game there is no such thing as displaying pain. If you do you’ve lost.
I feared for my friend when I saw the opponent that he faced. My friend’s entrance to the ring was tame and when he got to the corner he waited patiently for his opponent to arrive. In a sport that depends hugely on atmosphere, his corner looked far too quiet and reserved.
By contrast his opponent took an eternity to make his way to the ring, taking every psychological advantage he could as he delayed his arrival until the very last minute.
This was no ordinary fighter. He had delayed his entrance because he was going to make sure he was worth the wait. He was shaven-headed and dark, wearing purposely ripped shorts and a facial expression of steely-eyed calm that could only be hiding a serious venom.
Continuing his display of continental confidence, he took a bow to each side of the hall and clasped his hands together before kneeling in prayer. Not content to just look like a character from the old computer game Street Fighter, he was adding a little spirituality to his ninja man display.
It suited the venue, it was pretty tacky but just as much as an Irishman can only despise such lavish displays, you feared that this was a prelude to a mauling.
Within 30 seconds two doctors were rushing to the ring. My mate had gone cold before he even felt the weight of his backside on the canvas.
He landed one good kick to the head and then his night was over before he knew it.
Street Fighter landed a series of kicks to the head that took my mate across the diagonal of the ring and left him limp as he crashed into the opposite corner, cold and unconscious.
It was frightening for a while. This is a sport of submission and knock-out blows but that doesn’t mean you expect it to happen to someone you know. You’d never watch at all if that was the case.
After the doctors and the Red Cross had tended to him and supplied him with enough oxygen to bring him round it was clear that there was no serious physical damage though it’s hard for any man to recover from a body blow like that.
“I might just take up tiddlywinks,” he said afterwards, sporting a vicious bruise above his right temple.
The thing is, you’d never play any game if you contemplated losing.
