We celebrate too much, sometimes, the failures of our heroes.
This point was brought home to me last night by the Twin Towers of American sports media - Sports Illustrated and ESPN. I have an SI subscription. I couldn’t tell you exactly why; the issues tend to sit around unread for a few weeks before I finally get to them. When I do, the first thing I do is comb through for anything fight-related - an upcoming boxing match, a wrestler mentioned in Faces in the Crowd, the rare MMA fighter featured on the Pop Culture Grid, or even the rare full sized article - then football, then basketball, and then, if I’ve very, very desperate for reading material, whatever else is between the covers. The April 14th issue, which focused on the NCAA basketball finals, had one of those rare full sized articles. It wasn’t about Floyd Mayweather and it wasn’t about some young wrestler you’ve never heard of. Unusually for SI, it wasn’t even about an American.
It was about a Brit. A British MMA fighter, of all things. Not the rising British MMA scene, not UFC prospect Michael Bisping or soon to star on CBS James Thompson. No, instead it was about (arguably) British MMA’s greatest public embarassment - Lee Murray. His career is addressed, and his devotion to training, but that’s not what the article is really about. It’s about one of the most stunning robberies in history. Murray and his associates, many of them fellow fighters, got 53 million pounds, or about $100 million. Then they absconded to Morocco, where Murray holds dual citizenship and a nation which forbids extradition of its nationals. Of course, Murray’s history of non-professional violence caught up with him there, too, and he sits in jail while the Moroccan and British governments argue over who gets to sentence him to something.
Murray’s story is a crime story; it’s sports related only because of Murray’s other profession. ESPN2, though, had a story of pure sports, and a story of pure loss. In south Florida sits Brandon High School, nondescript enough except for one spectacular thing. The school’s wrestling team, as of the 2007-08 season, had a winning streak dating back to the mid 70s. It spanned 440 meets - a record for any high school sport, besting the old record by over 150 contests. The Streak, they called it - both the record and the program about the record. ESPN2 spent two hours showing BHS’s ‘07-’08 season. The team won early meets by ridiculous scores - 65-2, 66-6, 75-0. Then came the Graves.
The Graves was a mid-season tournament conceived by the Brandon High wrestling coach for one reason - to end the streak. Local competition simply couldn’t challenge his team, so he opened it up to anyone in or out of the state of Florida. For decades, no one who showed up could manage the job. This year, someone did. And ESPN showed it to the world.
Imagine that. You’re a seventeen year old kid. You excel in a sport with no promise of monetary gain. You’re never going to be LeBron James or Peyton Manning, and you know that. Your sport might get you to college, but it won’t get you further. In the meantime, though, you’re a local celebrity. You are the caretaker of a legacy with a lifespan that doubles yours. It was carried by your older brother, even your father, before you. Thirty four years without a loss. The record is celebrated throughout town - at the local garage, in the newspaper, even in church. The coach has teenage girls wearing t-shirts with his face on the back; a grizzled, middle-aged Justin Timberlake.
And you just lost that. Furthermore, ESPN just showed it to the entire country, and to significant portions of the rest of the world. How do you feel? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Too often in sports, we remember competitors’ losses rather than their victories. The New England Patriots won eighteen consecutive games last season, an unprecedented feat, but lost in arguably the greatest Super Bowl upset of all time. The accomplishment is now portray as some sort of tragicomdey, as if eighteen times some other team rolled over to set up the Patriots for a great fall at the end. No match of Dan Gable’s legendary career is talked about as much as his final collegiate contest - the one he lost. In years to come, it’s a fair bet that the same will be true of the Olympic career of Aleksander Karelin. In MMA, we talk about Royce Gracie’s defeat at the hand of Matt Hughes and Kazushi Sakuraba more often than his tournament victories. Is this because the defeats are more recent, or because they satisfy something in us?
Do we, the ones who watch, get some sort of glee in the failures of those who do? Perhaps. Many fans seem to show up in the hopes of seeing something bad happen to someone, rather than because of any interest in seeing athletic competition or of a genuine rooting interest. Truth to tell, I haven’t been to a live event in six years, despite living in an MMA hotbed. In eastern Iowa, I could see live MMA every weekend if I had the money and the time. I don’t, partially because I don’t have the money or the time. Mostly, though, the crowds I saw disturbed me. My first live show featured a riot in the crowd. My second had a spectacularly drunk gentleman offer to fight security, in the person of Andre Roberts. Since then, I’ve seen people boo ground fighting (”No wrestling!” they scream, like drunken Heath Herrings), and cheer as a young Robbie Lawler pummelled an overmatched and punch-drunk amateur in a bout that should’ve been stopped much earlier.
MMA’s a brutal game, and I’m kidding myself if I pretend it’s not. The brutality is integral to it. It is what brings out every positive quality of the sport. The technical wizardry is all the more impressive for having been performed in the face of personal danger. The athletic prowess, likewise, amazes all the more for being demonstrated under the most grueling conditions. Courage, well, courage can, by definition, only be proved under the harshest duress.
As fans, though, we have a responsibility to not add unduly to that necessary brutality. We should be celebrating victories, yes, and honoring defeats. It is unseemly, though - no, it is inhuman - to celebrate defeats the way many of us do. It is one thing to criticize a fighter for a poor performance, to cite poor preparation or lack of will as the reason for defeat. It is quite another to actively root for that fighter’s ill health. It is one thing to admire a fighter’s willingness to endure punishment, and another entirely to encourage the Nate Quarrys and Kazushi Sakurabas of the world to continue to fight long after they should have retired. We owe them better. We owe the sport better. We owe ourselves better.
Oh, and if Eric Grajales is reading this, I’d like to remind him that Iowa has a very nice wrestling program that he’d fit into perfectly.
