FS 93 – What Are We To Make Of UFC 261? (transcript) (Patreon)

By Sam (@StuffFromSam) 

UFC 261: Usman vs. Masvidal 2 has come and gone, and in many ways, it felt like a long week of Triller. Jake Paul was actually in attendance for this event and got into a verbal scuffle with Daniel Cormier. You also had PFL coming back the other night. As Triller had MMA fighters transitioning to boxing with no success against boxers, in PFL's main event, you had a former MMA fighter turned professional boxer returning to MMA to fight former UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis. Again, the boxer outboxed the MMA fighter, this time in an MMA fight.

These events felt surreal, just as Oscar De La Hoya's existence feels surreal. Triller took combat sports away from the paradigm of shoot or work to a new final form: trolling. UFC, on the other hand, brought back a full capacity maskless crowd for a super spreader event. It was not only odd to hear the crowd again, but now we are so much more aware of their racism.

It was three title fights, and amazingly, none of them were canceled. Champion Kamaru Usman fighting Jorge Masvidal was going to have a political narrative regardless because of Masvidal's support of Trump, the Alt-Right, Qanon, and more. What none of us expected was for champion Zhang Weili's title defense against Rose Namajunas to become the bigger story.

Namajunas, in my opinion, has been problematic for some time. But I have been cautious with my criticisms of her because she grew up in an MMA gym and was essentially raised by her coaches. She's even engaged to her head coach, Pat Barry. Depending on how their relationship is going, Barry is either head coach or assistant coach, or sometimes not a coach at all. In many ways, she's a victim herself.

But from her strange quasi-religious beliefs to conservatives she follows online, to the problematic and reverse racist ways she describes her past, to her nickname of "Thug," she's had a habit of benefiting from different cultures while at the same time attacking them. Right after the murder of George Floyd, she posted a Blue Lives Matter meme and suggested the problem was police lacking proper training rather than built-in racism. Black culture, especially at the beginning of her career, was how she branded herself, yet this was her response. Something else she has benefited from and still benefits from is the martial arts, and during the height of anti-Asian racism, she attacked Zhang Weili. She created this grand rightwing narrative of good vs. evil and proclaimed she was fighting for freedom. She's begun to walk some of it back, but it doesn't change that she still conflated Zhang Weili with the USSR, no different from how Colby Covington conflated Kamaru Usman with BLM. Unfortunately, much of MMA media let Namajunas run with her grand narrative and wrote nonsensical articles or gave nonsensical editorials through podcasts, interviews, video segments, and on social media while never mentioning the racism in the air. It was nonsensical because MMA media tends to be progressive to liberal, so they knew the energy sounded rightwing but couldn't figure out what was wrong with anything she said. (Not to mention overlooking Lithuania's checkered Nazi past.)

I can't help but notice that this animosity towards the USSR doesn't extend to Valentina Shevchenko, who's a good friend to Namajunas. I also notice the same crowd that booed Zhang Weili, a Chinese woman of color, and cheered Namajunas, a white American, are the same people who cheer Fedor Emelianenko when he beats Black Americans. This contradiction has a long legacy in combat sports. It's called The Great White Hope. Gerald Horne, in his book "Bittersweet Science," explains this racist and toxic masculine narrative in greater detail. But essentially, whiteness is more important than being American. This is why American promoters kept looking for white champions from anywhere to beat their Black champions, including looking even in Nazi Germany. For Zhang, since she is a woman in MMA, she will be more disliked than if she were a man.

Anticommunist and pro-USA sentiments quickly disappear when you see either Williams sisters facing a white opponent from Russia. Yet all of this perspective which is not only historic in sports but especially in combat sports, has been lost to much of MMA media, while they make Namajunas's mythical nationalism credible. Patriotism is often used to disguise white supremacy.

But here's the thing about US imperialism. It wins. It wins a lot. It won the battle over narratives; it won with their racist and selectively nationalistic booing, and it won when Rose Namajunas defeated Zhang Weili to regain the women's strawweight title.

With all her misguided beliefs aside, Namajunas is very good. Frankly, I expected her to be the favorite going into this fight. The fight lasted a little over a minute. Namajunas used her circling, and Zhang responded well by turning with her, much like Teófimo López did with Vasyl Lomachenko. Zhang was landing more initially, not just with kicks but also with punches. She landed 12 of 14 strikes, whereas Namajunas only landed a couple of jabs. Zhang landed an inside low kick. Namajunas responded by initially feinting low, where Zhang pulled her lead leg back, but which left her unprotected for what was actually a high kick. Was this luck? No. This was skill. Zhang had an automatic response because she's so used to opponents answering back to low kicks with their own low kicks. She acted without thinking. 

Once she fell to the ground, I couldn't help but think how fragile and vulnerable Zhang looked after that kick. A counterpoint to the image many Americans have in their heads, of a dehumanized Chinese experimental super-soldier. No, she's a person who we just saw at her most human moment.

There's a famous clip of Saenchai sparring Zhang Weili. In the video, Saenchai would fake low to go high with a kick and it kept hitting Zhang. He would pull the kick to not hurt her, but it kept happening. To Zhang and probably to us the viewers, we assumed this was the God-mode of Saenchai, which it partially was. But what makes him so great is he can hone in on his opponent's weaknesses, and this is a weakness for Zhang. She has a pattern of being faked out by question mark kicks and probably does not spar with enough different types of people who give her different looks.

For Namajunas, her creativity along with her sense of range is impeccable. Zhang thought she was far enough away to avoid being kicked in the head, which is also why her arms were out of position. Namajunas knew she was in range. And she won.

Anyone who is on the Left and anti-imperialist is used to losing. But we aren't going anywhere. And though Namajunas believes she is free, unfortunately, she isn't because she's a UFC fighter. She's been in the same relationship with the same man since she was a teen. She tried to retire from MMA, but she realized she couldn't because she didn't know how to make money other than by fighting and because everyone around her needed her to fight. She said she was returning to fighting because she felt like she had no other choice. So I get why freedom is so important for her because it's something she lacks. But the sleight of hand within US imperial capitalism has been to project your lack of freedom in a capitalist hellhole onto others, to blame others for your inability to live the life you want. Namajunas felt her family had been oppressed and instead of using that intergenerational experience to speak up for Black people and speak out against white supremacy or against anti-Asian racism, she continues the oppression cycle because for her there exists no alternative path forward. This is the realism of living at the core of US empire. 

In the main event on paper, Kamaru Usman baptized Jorge Masvidal. The fight only lasted a little over two rounds. Usman, even in round one, looked to not only be in control of the striking exchanges but turned each clinch exchange into a takedown. However, towards the end of the round, Usman began to get too excited and overswung his punches which gave Masvidal opportunities to come back in the fight. Trevor Wittman, who is also the coach for Namajunas, was able to calm Usman down, and Usman put Masvidal away in a little over a minute with what one Southpaw listener called an anime punch. He made it look easy. This would make Usman not only the welterweight champion but the lineal BMF champion.

Does Usman have fast punches? No, they wouldn't even be on the quick end. Then why do they land? Why did it land on the experienced Masvidal even after hitting Masvidal on the chest with it just before the KO? As MMA and boxing coach Jason Sargus pointed out to me, because they are straight. This sounds minor, but straight punches are hard to see because of how our eyes work. Imagine a car traveling across your screen. Would you be able to gauge distance? Sure. Imagine the same car coming towards you. Would you be able to gauge distance just as well? No. When a punch is straight and true, it doesn't need to be fast because we can't tell the fist is coming towards us.

Whatever Wittman is doing as a coach, his results speak for themselves. Especially in terms of the jab and footwork. It's interesting to note that Wittman had one fighter who was booed in Usman by the same crowd that cheered Namajunas. He had one fighter who was the enemy of the racist crowd and one who was a darling of it. Though we didn't see Christ consciousness put into unconsciousness, we still got to see the baptism of Street Jesus.

The other title fight which was overshadowed by the narratives for the main and co-main events was the women's flyweight title bout between Valentina Shevchenko and Jessica Andrade. Just due to the style matchup, this WAS supposed to be Shevchenko's biggest test at flyweight. However, this ended up being a bad style matchup for Andrade as Shevchenko ragdolled Andrade until she finished her with ground strikes in round two. Shevchenko is simply the best at women's flyweight and seems just as dominant as Amanda Nunes in her divisions.

In the first fight of the main card, you had Jimmy Crute vs. Anthony Smith. Smith did well with his jabs, as Crute did well with his low kicks. However, just one low kick from Smith was able to injure Crute's leg. Amazingly, Crute was still able to take Smith down and control him for the rest of the round. When he got back to his corner, it became clear that he was not going to be able to use that leg, and the fight was halted. It was truly a bizarre injury where Crute's foot was completely limp.

However, though Crute lost due to injury, his ability to finish the round showed he already has veteran savvy and an ability to improvise. Though Smith won, the way he was controlled on the ground by an injured opponent shows that being kicked and taken down are weaknesses he may never be able to shore up this late into his career.

In the second fight of the main card, we had a rematch between Uriah Hall and Chris Weidman. They first met in Ring of Combat, where the winner would go on to the UFC. That ended up being Chris Weidman. In the UFC, Weidman made his name by beating Anderson Silva. Something Hall also recently did. Weidman fought Silva again and broke his leg in half by checking a low kick. Though Anderson Silva continued to fight after this injury, he was never the same and is now no longer in the UFC.

Weidman is around the same age Silva was when he broke Silva's leg. 17 seconds in the very first round, Weidman threw a low kick just like Anderson Silva once did to Weidman. Hall checked it and broke Weidman's leg exactly the same way Weidman had broken Silva's leg.

These were two back-to-back leg injuries in the first two fights on the main card.

In the prelim headliner, Alex Oliveira was spamming Randy Brown with leg kicks as well. Once dropping Brown with a low kick. It looked bad for Brown until he was able to land a counter hook against an Oliveira low kick. Even from the prelims, it was a bad night for leg kickers and legs in general because we even got to see a rare straight ankle lock finish in the UFC.

Middleweights Brendan Allen and Karl Roberson fought for 4:55 seconds. Roberson is notoriously bad on the ground, and it is every opponent's game plan to take him down and submit him. The two exchanged on the feet until Allen was able to tie Roberson up and take him down. Roberson got up, but Allen was able to take him down again. With less than a minute left, instead of defending or recovering guard or even trying to get up, Roberson got underneath Allen, who is a BJJ black belt that has a submission win over Kevin Holland, mind you, and went for a leg lock. Everyone who knows Roberson and his weakness collectively facepalmed. I said out loud, "What are you doing, Karl?"

But Karl couldn't hear me. And as he fumbled for a leg, Allen smiled and went for his own leg lock, finishing Roberson with 5 seconds left in the round. After the tap, Roberson himself facepalmed. Allen was surprised not only that Roberson went for a leg lock but that he stuck with it even after Allen secured the superior position. But that's the thing about inexperienced grapplers; they only think submissions. This is why Roberson has some submission victories on his record. This is also why he gets submitted so often. He knows submissions but lacks any of the connective tissue that defines a complete grappling game.

Speaking of connective tissue, I highly encourage people to watch the prelim matches on UFC cards along with some of the other organizations as they are the connective tissue of MMA. They are, for me and for a lot of hardcores, the best part of MMA. Fighters are workers, and like any other worker, they are exploited. Yes, even Rose Namajunas.

This is why prelim fighters and even fighters in other organizations are the real working-class combat sports workers because they are the ones who are still working regular jobs like us but still fighting. This is also where you'll see all the new prospects, where you'll see all the new techniques before they work their way into the UFC, this is where you'll see rising teams and smart new coaches, this is where you'll see MMA without any of the hype. Less than 1% of MMA fighters will be UFC main eventers. Then you don't get a taste of what MMA is really like by only watching UFC main events. You can only see that in the prelims and in the shows outside of the UFC hegemony.