A few days ago I was sitting there with Instagram open on my phone, like you do when you’re procrastinating and hating yourself for it, and the algorithm served me up something it knew I’d be interested in. I hate when that algorithm is right — yes, I do want to watch old Barry Sanders highlights and Razor Ramon promos, and I hate that a computer knows that even before I do — but here, it got me.
What I saw was a video of UFC fighter Jordan Leavitt sitting in his car, talking about the question of whether or not MMA ruins people’s lives.
A friend of his, he said, had recently argued that it does, and pointed to those fighters whose lives seem to fall apart after retirement as proof.
“I’ve been pondering about that for a little bit, for a few hours, and I want to push back on this narrative a little bit,” Leavitt said in the video. “Because chances are, if you’re going to go all in on mixed martial arts, your life was already broken.”
Safe to say he had my attention right there. Over the course of 20 years covering this sport, I have gotten to know a great many fighters from all different types of backgrounds, but I ha ve often wondered what the common denominator is. What kind of person ends up in this world? What has to be going on inside their heads for them to choose fighting in a cage as a vocation?
So I called Leavitt to ask a some follow-up questions about his theory. He’s an interesting guy, “The Monkey King.” (I’ve interviewed hundreds if not thousands of fighters at this point, and he’s the first one to ever quote Karl Marx to me.)
The way he explained his outlook, it’s not that he thinks severely broken people are consciously going in search of an MMA career. It’s more like they’re looking for the kind of thing that martial arts and combat sports are especially good at providing, and they mistake their success at this for a career that will fix everything about them.
“In combat sports, you’ve got people who are self-medicating through martial arts,” Leavitt told me. “It helps them find purpose and helps them find direction. You can see daily progress. You feel like you’re getting better.
“And while you’re doing it, you’re not thinking about anything else.”
This, Leavitt said, is why he thinks people with histories of trauma and abuse might be drawn to fight sports. There’s an immediacy to the practice of martial arts. The cause and effect — if you lose focus, you get instantly punched in the face or choked out — are so visceral and instant that it can crowd out any other thoughts or feelings, at least temporarily.
(Hayden Hodge/Yahoo Sports)
The violence inherent in it, and the intensity of those feelings, can also seem like it’s exorcising demons in some ways. That’s why, as he said in his video, it draws so many “men who grew up wanting to beat up their dads and they couldn’t,” as well as “women who were abused and then find empowerment” through learning how to be the author of violence rather than the target of it. (The latter happens to be an almost verbatim description of what former two-time UFC champion Rose Namajunas has said first drew her to MMA.)
In short, Leavitt suspects that fighting attracts “broken people.” Fighting becomes a kind of coping mechanism. We often hear of fighters who kicked drug addiction by essentially replacing it with an obsessive devotion to MMA training. Leavitt is skeptical that replacing one addiction with another is a genuine solution, he said, “but I feel like often times in life, putting a Band-Aid over something is the best a lot of us can do.”
Talk to a few fighters and you might find that the drug addiction metaphor comes up a lot. I remember former WEC and UFC fighter Danny Downes telling me once that, even while he was an active professional, he thought of his MMA career as being pretty similar to a drug habit. It was exhilarating at some times and awful at others. He liked it but knew it was ultimately harming him. It scratched a particular itch, even if he always knew that eventually he’d have to find a way to quit.
One guy who’s experienced both drug addiction and MMA fame is retired welterweight Matt Brown, the owner of the second-most knockouts in UFC history. As he noted on social media recently, whenever someone asks him for advice about getting into an MMA career, his advice is simple: Don’t.
It’s not because he’s trying to crush anyone’s dreams, he said. It’s because he believes anyone who could be that easily dissuaded from it — anyone not absolutely obsessed with doing it — doesn’t belong in the sport to begin with.
“If you’re looking at it purely as a job, from a financial perspective, it doesn’t make any sense at all to become a fighter,” Brown told me. “I could have done almost any other job and, over the same amount of time, I would have probably made more money and been better off. But would I have lived the lifestyle I got to live? Would I have had the experiences I had, or f***ed the girls I got to f***, or been able to brag to my friends that I was a UFC fighter and gotten that respect? No, and that’s what I think is addictive for people. The lifestyle is addictive.”
Matt Brown, left, punches Robbie Lawler during a welterweight mixed martial arts bout at a UFC on Fox event in San Jose, Calif., Saturday, July 26, 2014. Lawler won by unanimous decision. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
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Brown also suspects that, aside from a few notable exceptions, fight sports tend to attract a different caliber of athlete. Those people who are gifted enough for more mainstream sports like football or basketball or baseball, their talents are typically discovered early and refined by established structures like school or club sports programs. There’s a support system built into those worlds. There’s a clear path to follow and guard rails to keep you on that path, at least to a point.
Fighting, on the other hand, is more like something that a troubled youth finds his way into through a series of anti-social behaviors. Turning it into a paying gig, Brown said, is something that usually only appeals to those who have very little money to begin with and aren’t opposed to shedding blood in order to get a little bit more.
“I think a lot of people come into this with no plan, and certainly no long-term future plan,” Brown said. “That’s a certain kind of person right there. They’re not thinking five years down the road, and I didn’t either when I got into this.”
But getting into this line of work is one thing. Getting out is something else.
Some do it because they have to. Either no one will pay them to fight anymore, or their bodies simply aren’t up to it. Most come to the decision through some kind of risk-versus-reward calculation, comparing their odds of success with the payout on offer, all weighed against their own personal desire to keep getting hit in the head.
That was the calculus Brown went through, he said, especially when he felt his passion for competing beginning to wane as he approached the age of 40.
“That’s the other f***ed up thing about the whole situation, is toward the end of your career, that’s when you start making more money,” Brown said. “You’ve been around for a while, people know you, your pay has steadily climbed up. Justin Gaethje’s in that situation right now where, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but it seems like he’s ready to retire. But he’s also the most valuable that he’s ever been in his life.”
But what about those who show up as broken people, then spend a decade or two channeling their frustration and fear and trauma and angst into the business of fighting for money? What becomes of them when they finally exit the sport? Are any of them better off as a result of the experience?
That’s where it gets really tricky, and for a few different reasons. For one, it requires us to make certain assumptions about the road not taken. We might think 15 years of pro MMA did a number on someone, but how do we know they wouldn’t have been even worse off after 15 years of some other, entirely different life? Obsessive training can break a body. So can total physical neglect.
For another thing, there are those who will tell you that they got something very valuable out of this, even if they didn’t know they were searching for it.
I remember women’s MMA pioneer Julie Kedzie saying she knew it was time to retire once it felt like she’d worked through her issues via fighting. She was better off mentally and emotionally, but with that came a certain cooling of the internal fires that had fueled her as a fighter. It felt sometimes, she said, as if doing well as a person and doing well as a fighter might be at odds with each other. As if maybe this sport was not made for well-adjusted humans.
Then again, as Leavitt pointed out, it’s not as if there’s a clear distinction between the broken and the unbroken, either in or out of fight sports. Maybe MMA can help some people channel their trauma elsewhere and maybe it just distracts them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any worse off than those people who are sitting on the couch while they’re in the gym.
“I think that if you take the average person on the street, they’ve got their own stuff they’re dealing with,” Leavitt said. “Are fighters broken people? Maybe, but so are a lot of people. With fighters sometimes it’s more visible, but I don’t know if that means it’s more pervasive. … I think all of us sell our body and our time and our effort to survive.
“I think what people relate to about fighters is the suffering,” Leavitt continued. “We all understand that suffering is what’s standing between you and the good things. Fighting is a metaphor for life in that sense. You have to suffer to be good at this, and then even if you win, it’s not a fun experience. You just look back on it fondly. There’s something about that that’s innately understandable. But for the vast majority of the people in it, fighting is a world you pass through.”
The version of yourself that emerges on the other side, that might be more important than the blend of emotional injuries and obsessive interests that made you take it up in the first place.