How to Spoil the MMA Result

Pick your poison

Avoiding a sport result in this day and age is darn near impossible. Any lazy interfacing with reality will deliver that gut-punch of information. The journey to a personal screening with all anticipation intact is fraught with danger.

This distress is mainly reserved for fans of sports put on at silly o’clock, GMT. Boxing or MMA fans who pay enough attention to the fight game to proclaim that things are ‘the fight game’, will know the struggle. Those hyper-vocal enjoyers of cotton-wool rugger or fatty-rounders might get it, too. Or any fans of the other sports The US of A made up because their country was founded with no first touch.

Most adult sleepovers give way to uneasy caffeinated sleep well before the first bell rings. If you’re lucky, some of the clamour might bleed through into an offbeat dream version of the encounter. Personally, one quite late night darkens my personality for a week or so, and then jades me a few percentage points long-term; interfering with my jolly genes and, in turn, dampening the spirits of my unborn children. They didn’t ask for this.

So, that’s how the sports fan finds themselves lying bolt-supine on a Sunday morning. Rigid with the awareness that the event has taken place everywhere, except in their field of vision. Opening your eyes, that’s the first mistake. That’s the exact kind of careless impulse that gets that which cannot be unseen burnt into retinas. If your Sunday vibe is not #mobilized #dread, then it’s game over. Note: those hashtags were the #grating #played #out #ironic kind of hashtags, not the click-y, result-jeopardising Instagram kind.

First, let’s face the biggest threat to an unspoilt watch – the machines. The average bedside table is a little cluttered with all of human knowledge. Within that heaving mass of promise and gloom the single most terrifying finding yet, is: who won. The Internet is out to spoil the result. It is said, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee only created it to get back at his jock brother. Keeping out of the know, is about staying mindful of every fiendish impulse to check on stuff for checking’s sake.

All my armchair quarterbacks, deck-chair corner-men & chaise lounge pitchers, it takes, but one lapse. All of the normal, bleak ports of call: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, may as well have the result in the URL. Everyone you follow is now a disseminator of classified information.

YouTube is a patchwork quilt of minefields, where all the rabbit holes come rigged with tripwires. The need to supplement life with extra sights and sounds is so routine. Hey, those specs of dust dancing in the morning air, could do with a gentle hip-hop backing track - BAM sniped from the sidebar. A picture tells a thousand words, all of them ‘fuck’.  

Hey, just stick a podcast on, so I can eavesdrop on my internet buds, instead of brunching alone like a damn recluse – BAM. An off-topic mention hits the eardrum. Hey, I'll just septuple-check the News, maybe resort to looking at the stuff I didn't resort to last time. BAM – snoop right into exact affairs you are currently avoiding.

When the result hangs in the balance, the phone doesn’t ring, it tolls. WhatsApp is an instant presaging service that dings yesterday’s harbingers right past the seams of your trousers. Ding. Each pleasing vibration could shatter the illusion of a live viewing. Ding. A nervy fan peaks at their partner’s messages, through a crack in a scrunched fist. Ding. Blinkering out the group chat, where the devastating news could sneak in with an innocuous beheading clip.

Next up it's those palpitating vessels for spoilers – the humans. That raw data is always just one well-meant blurt away. A mum’s sweet attempt to relate -  ‘did you see was-his-face won the was-his-cup?’ - is forgivable, with time. Others aren’t.

There’s the ‘Ooh I won’t say anything, but…’ camp, who imply everything with wounding clarity. “… ooh it’s not what you think.” Well, now, it is. Thank you for defrauding me of my surprise.” “..ooh it was amazing/shit.” Just leave my expectations to me.

Some marginal species-members get a sick pleasure from basking in the know. People who lord spoilers over others are just the pits (‘the pits’ is 1950s for ‘the worst’, so the worst in the context of a period where racism was the done thing). They flaunt that knowledge like it was earned over a lifetime’s study. The more enterprising wind-up merchants, sell a selection of fake outcomes. Each bogus result, now eliminated from the possible outcomes.

But, let’s say you eluded the result. Congratulations. Plonking down in front of a secluded screen is sheer bliss. All the hype has been preserved in this oasis in space and time, where the match plays out, as if it were happening just for you and you alone.

Ding. The phone brings up a notification, like a loyal mutt laying a bird dead at its owner’s feet. The first line of a notifi….. the ellipsis cutting in a few letters after your morning’s ruined. There’s no words, but I like to think cunt-phone phone-cunt comes closest.