How to Get your Dad into MMA
Spoiler: there's more chance of you becoming the champ.
Dads are creatures of simple pleasures.
Mostly, Dads just want to sit un-fucked-with in their chair, and watch their sports. That same chair that they jostled angrily through the deceptive frame of the living room door. The same sports they had watched long before your refilling nappy decimated their free time.
Nothing satisfies the household Dad more. Even though a dad doesn’t show any of the normal signs of satisfaction - it’s in there, alright.
Each season brings with it a new sport. Different-shaped blokes trying to move different-shaped balls into different-shaped areas.
If there’s one thing Dads, really don’t like it’s Mma. Not your Mm’a’. I know, they’ve had their differences, but the years have healed that sandy indiscretion in Skiathos, for the most part.
MMA stands for Mixed Martial Arts, and dads stand against MMA. If you don’t know, MMA is a sport where the best fighters at fighting in the world, and maybe in human history, compete in hand-to-hand-to-foot-to-knee-to-elbow combat.
** Quick description of MMA, if you have haven’t seen it - appendix **
The mention of MMA makes a dad clam up with old-timey stubbornness. Dads get a misty-eyed you’ll-understand-when-your-older expression, then un-divide their attention back to the cricket.
This here mixture of Martial Arts is the most impressive, unpredictable and exciting sport on God’s greying earth. But, dads just can’t wrap their head around, a foot wrapping legally around a head.
MMA fighters need freak athleticism, incomparable mental and physical toughness and a plain unreasonable variety of skill. All dad-approved sporting attributes, in any other context. But, dads, see more skill in a 180 at the ockey than a 180° roundhouse in the octagon.
Where does the dads views on “cage-fighting” come from, then? Probably, some combo of the first line of an article they scanned on a grumbly commute; and a Van Damme film shite enough, that it was a contributing factor in your conception.
Dads are proudly ignorant about MMA. They could not care less. Even if they reallocated the attention they give to the League 1 relegation battle to caring less, they couldn’t.
These are the very same dads who, over a winter’s afternoon, become a living-room authority on skiing-but-with-muskets. The exact same dads, who can spend a week straight watching old men mulling in older trousers.
Anyway, here are a few hopeful counters for verbal sparring with dearest papa.
It’s New
MMA is a young sport. In dads’ minds, MMA was stored away next to slamball and slalom in-lining in a box marked nonsense. It may as well be virtual synchronized hoverboarding, for all they care. Remember, all their total, combined care amounts to exactly none - they don’t care.
Convincing your dad to watch MMA is the sporting equivalent of asking him to tap his Croc-shod foot to some mumbly contemporary rap. In a dad’s ears, rap music started and died with the Sugar Hill Gang. And the cut-off for registering a new sport, sadly, was the turn of the 20th century.
If the average dad’s accumulated sporting knowledge was written down it would stretch from Shrewsbury FC to Hereford, the longest distance between 2 rivals in the football league, don’t you know? You don’t, do you - but I’ll tell you who do - the Dads. Understandably, retraining as a spectator so late in their career isn’t appealing to a dad. Let alone learning, a sport, that’s basically 8 sports jumbled together.
“Bunch of thugs….”
The mindset of an MMA fighter just isn’t comprehendible to you or me, and especially dads. If you happen to be a Blackbelt-ed, undisputed two-time father, sorry – please, don’t use my fading panic to rock your 2 little, burly angels off to sleep, as you triangle choke me out.
Given the choice of biological responses, most of us are more ‘Team Flight’, than ‘Team Fight’. When some puny teen pushes in front of us in McDs, most of us think better of risking a full-scale contretemps - then think about it, all day.
This cushy chunk of history and land has given us a nice buffer from getting face-punched. These fighters still have a part of the human condition that we had mollycoddled out of us a whiles back. There’s something different in these men and women. If you went back in time a few generations, before you had a chance to relay your waaay ironic time-tourism itinerary to your great 5 granddad. He would stick a nut on you, and then fashion a breastplate out of your time machine door.
We, we cosy many, just sit around appreciating our own farts and cursing the time it takes ice cream to thaw. MMA fighters experience fear and glory at stakes we, the average schmoe, will happily never know.
Look it’s not for us. We just have to make do, with anonymously settling our grievances in blog posts. But you have to respect their choice to do it. It’s a privilege we have the opportunity to admire it.
“It’s bloody violent and bloody bloody.”
Alright, Dads. It is violent. There’s no getting around that. No doubt, sometimes it is difficult to stomach.
But, you do like Boxing, don’t you, dads? The noble art of pugilism is different, though. Boxing is a gentleman’s pursuit, you see. Safeguarded by the Queensbury rules and a bit of cowhide, boxers are free to stave each other in, respectably. Dadkind can enjoy two dudes plugging jabs into eye sockets, like there’s no tomorrow. When we all know the long-term health consequences of boxing.
With all those pointy hinges legal, there is a definitely lot more raspberry jam leaking from people in MMA. There is an argument that the bigger gloves in boxing lead to more concussions. Either way, it’s incredibly dangerous and long-term health issues are a sad reality of the game.
The Ground Game
It’s a hard sell. The fact that MMA allows strikes to a grounded opponent, doesn’t sit well with dads. The fact that you can even sit on grounded opponents, and, well, leisurely tenderize them. That will have a Dads’ jowls audibly clapping with disapproval.
Dads are firm believers that you let a man get to his feet, so you can do the noble thing and punch him right back off ‘em. Then, you repeat, until the man can’t see.
The sight of a trapped fighter enduring a systematic beating on the floor is sickening to watch. But, probably, marginally more difficult to experience first-hand, and the following thirty seven. If the fighter is truly helpless, the fight should be stopped. If not, you have to respect their decision to do the thing they love.
To dads, the ultra-effective, submission martial art of Ju Jitsu, registers the same as scuffling on the couch with a sibling. If your dad’s first over-the-newspaper glance at MMA is a scramble of attrition on the ground, that will be the end of his non-existent interest.
So, if picking a fight to ease your pops into MMA. We want a pretty upright, not too bloody one - but, yeah, good luck with that.
**Despite what dads will tell you, MMA isn’t a street fight. There are a few, sensible holds barred: no bollock-punts, Glasgow kisses or pupil pokey-pokes, and a few other fiddly bits.
There isn’t enough bloody hours in a life to truly master all of the martial arts, let alone mix them. Most fighters have their stats bar maxed out in one area, almost like their own superpower. There’s your snazzy kickers, bodyslamming wrestlers, lardy knock-out artistes, strangle-merchants, 8 limbed bow ‘n’ knees guys and even Homer Simpson-esque damage-absorbers. The MMA fighters need an be able to defend against everything. Pitching these different skillsets against each other is fascinating.
What with light gloves and hard shins a KO is only ever one impact away. If a striker makes one misstep, a granite-boned wrestler is straddling them for 5 minutes. If a wrestler gets jumpy, a Ju Jitsu wizard sits on their back like a lethal rucksack, waiting to choke them out. Anyone is susceptible to a good old fashioned kick in the face. Every style, every body type has its drawbacks, and its own strengths.