There were better bars, more worthy bars, deeper into the bowels of the market, but I was wearing spike heels and a dress so short it barely (maybe not even) covered my girly bits, and there was wetness bordering on snowness starting to fall, and our bellies were full of sushi and sake so we just wanted a dark corner to sit in and drink in and wait until it was late enough to go home and fuck.
These are all perfectly good reasons for accidentally watching UFC, I swear.
The cover charge at the door of a pub should have given it away, I guess, but I was distracted by the the 42:1 ratio of men to women and Andrew couldn't wait to get in somewhere (anywhere!) warm enough to remove my coat and get another look at my Grecian dress ("Grecian" meaning very low cut in the front and very very low cut in the back), or rather, the things falling out of my Grecian dress.
The UFC, if you have the good fortune not to know, is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which in theory involves a couple of scantily-clad mixed martial artists going at it until one of them just can't go anymore. If this sounds homoerotic to you: ding ding ding. However, the UFC seems to have some unspoken rule about not engaging anyone who is even remotely good looking, so if you're looking for the male equivalent of mud wrestling, keep looking. In fact, I would wager that mud wrestling involves more grace and more athleticism and possibly more testosterone than the UFC on any night. But maybe that's just me.
Supposedly, back in the glory days of the UFC, the only rules were no biting, and no eye-gouging, which led to brutal, bloody fights that John McCain likened to "human cock fighting", which apparently was a bad thing. Now there are more fouls than you can shake a stick at, which includes not shaking your stick and also: no head butting, no hair pulling, no groin attacks, no fish hooking, no spitting.
And they call that a fight? Come on! My six year old sister and I got dirtier than that on the concrete floor of our basement when we couldn't agree on who would be Barbie and who would be Ken.
The fighters enter the arena to the tune of their favourite CCR song, high-fiving the eager pre-pubescent crowd. Then while scowling menacingly (but not convincingly - if you want convincing, I refer you once again to my Mom's basement when someone has just eaten the last poptart) the fighter is undressed. The official rulebook states that a fighter's gloves must allow fingers to grab and grapple, but somehow they are unable to remove their own shirts. Someone in the entourage actually has the job description of Official Shirt Taker-Offer of the UFC. Shirtless (disappointingly), they climb into the ring, which isn't a ring, but an octagon-shaped enclosure called (brilliantly) The Octagon.
The fight starts and the bar is packed tight all around us, violating all fire safety codes and also the warning that keeps crawling across the bottom of the big screen TVs that says pay-per-view is for individuals only and it is expressly forbidden for public viewing, such as that in bars. Wings and nachos are being consumed in vast quantities and I appear to be the 1 in 400 not drinking beer. The two fighters in silk shorts dance around each other for much of the "fight", and action is so scarce that just lunging at an opponent is enough for the beery crowd to erupt in cheers and jeers. Andrew fails to find anything amusing in watching former high school bullies wail on each other, but I encourage him to take a closer look.
These are not the bullies, these are the outcasts. The official and exclusive beer of the UFC is Bud Light for a reason. These are the dudes that were picked on and swirlied and stuffed into lockers in high school. These nerds are getting revenge, and using the UFC to show that their tap-dance\karate lessons were not in vain. Through the miracle of steroids and spending every Friday and Saturday night in an otherwise empty gym, the dweebs have got their day.
