I watched Saturday's pay-per-view Ultimate Fighting Championship.Ultimate fighting started as an almost anything goes fighting contest in 1993, won by Royce Gracie who, as a Brazilian Jui-Jitsu champion, befuddled all those really big tough guys who knew how to punch, but didn't understand submission locks (eg, chokes, arm-bars that strain against one's joints). It was truly a technology shock, as an outsider with greater technique dominated stronger, bigger and faster men with tactics they did not understand.

Matt Hughes is the current welterweight (170 pounds/77 kg) champion, and fought Gracie Saturday at a sold-out Staples Center in LA (with Paris Hilton and other celebrities in the crowd). Hughes pummeled Gracie as expected. Current mixed martial arts fighters practice jui-jitsu as well as punching and wrestling, so Gracie has no edge anymore. The innovator has been destroyed by his emulators.

Currently there are several avenues for mixed martial arts fighting. The UFC, Pride (Japan), K-1, and the IFC is trying to start a new league in the US. Though there's lots of blood from punches with small gloves, there's probably less brain damage because boxing makes it too easy for a hurt fighter to stand on his feet and take too much punishment--a hurt fighter in mixed martial arts is quickly submitted. Muay-Tai boxing, in contrast, which is almost only in Thailand, generates several deaths a year according to some reports.

Interestingly, this new sport, mixed martial arts, is all still verboten in popular sports media. No report of the match made the ESPN or Sportsline.com websites, even though pay-per-view was over 500,000 at $39.99 a pop, and the contests are truly unscripted. My local paper never mentions it, and it isn't in magazines like Sports Illustrated. I think journalists are afraid of encouraging kids in engaging in this type of behavior on the amatuer level. It's understandable, but futile. Men fighting has been, and always will be, a supreme sport--men are hard-wired to fight each other. Boxing today is a joke, and wrestling is either too boring (collegiate, olympic) or merely adolescent entertainment (pro-fake-wrestling). Though practitioners in the US start their careers in wrestling and boxing, mixed martial arts is a growth industry because the fighters are truly the ultimate fighters.