Another cultural contributor to our waning bravery is probably male–male segregation. As that University of Maine study showed, bravado displays are primarily a form of communication among males. Increasingly, though, those males are now isolated from one another—by the nuclear family, workplace specialization, and (paradoxically) improved communication technologies such as video-conferencing. The band of brothers has been dissolved, and our bravado instinct, thus deprived of its audience, is atrophying. It is no coincidence, for example, that modern displays of reckless courage are generally performed by adolescent and postadolescent males. True, this is partly a physical phenomenon attributable to the fifty-times increase in testosterone levels that pubescent males experience, combined with the lag in development of their prefrontal cortices (responsible for planning and goal setting). But it’s also probably a product of audience availability. The school, university, or entry-level work environments they inhabit are almost the last places in the modern world where men gather in appreciable numbers. The decline in young males’ risk-taking behavior from age twenty-five onward may not, in fact, be just due to falling testosterone, but also to reduced opportunities to form the male–male bonds that bravado is all about.
Yet for all that our cowardice may be culturally governed, doesn’t mean it won’t eventually write itself into our genes. Experiments in animal breeding, for example, have found that behavior can become genetically encoded in as few as two or three generations, and firmly fixed after ten to twenty. All that would be needed would be a selective mechanism by which bravery genes were dropped from the gene pool and cowardly ones retained. Is there any such selective mechanism? The answer is yes…and no. It is unlikely that sexually selective pressures for altruistic bravery will ease, since women demand it so consistently of their mates. (It’s also hard to see them changing in this—how could it benefit a female to breed with males who won’t protect their brood?) The selective landscape for non-heroic bravery—bravado—however, has been transformed. Not only is its raison d’être disappearing through the isolation of males from one another, it is also becoming lethal. Barred from our ancestral channels for displaying bravado (like facing down wild animals and undergoing ordeals), young men now do so through such frequently fatal means as train surfing and drunk driving. World Health Organization figures from 2007 show that car accidents are now the leading cause of death for men aged fifteen to nineteen worldwide. The fact that far fewer young females die in such crashes shows they are not just accidents—young male bravado is clearly a major cause. This being the case, it will take some pretty stunning advances in road-safety technology to stop bravado being literally smashed out of Homo masculinus modernus in a very short time indeed.
“But wait a minute,” I hear several outraged readers belatedly protest. “If we modern men are so cowardly, what accounts for the inexorably rising tide of male violence on TV and in newspapers? It takes courage to fight, so wouldn’t that prove we are just as brave, or foolhardy, as those males who have gone before us?”
Well, yes it would—if it were true. But is it?
Admittedly, in some ways it certainly seems to be. Consider combat sports, for example. Where once the gentlemanly sport of boxing brought fighting violence into our living rooms, now the supposedly deadly, barbaric sport of ultimate fighting does. This fighting style is considered so extreme that even Senator John McCain, no mean boxer himself, once called it “human cockfighting.” Yet how extreme is Ultimate Fighting, really? How would the code’s fighters fare if we introduced some real hard men into their cage: ancient and tribal brawlers like the original Greek Olympian boxers, say, or South America’s Yanomami Indian axe-fighters? And heck, since we’re making a night of it, why not throw in a solid undercard, too? Let’s rope in the ultimate fighting soldier as well, the U.S. Special Forces warrior, to go mano-a-mano with the original “black ops” experts: the medieval Japanese shinobi, or ninjas. Throw in, too, for good measure, a rumble between the would-be baddest terrorist on the planet, Osama bin Laden, and a horde of genuine, bloodcurdling horrors from the wastelands of the Asian steppe, Genghis Khan and his Mongols, and this is starting to look like a fight.
Be warned though, all those queuing for a front-row seat. Don’t wear white. Because by the time this is done we can guarantee you won’t be.
Battle
On April 9, 2005, 2.6 million American cable-TV viewers were treated to a fifteen-minute spectacle of blood and carnage: the finale of Spike TV’s new reality show The Ultimate Fighter. Two young contestants—a Chicago personal trainer called Stephan “The American Psycho” Bonnar, and an ex-policeman from Georgia, Forrest Griffin—entered the cage to trade punches, kicks, and knee-strikes in an all-out brawl that left the face of the winner, Griffin, looking like a promo shot from Stephen King’s Carrie. Forrest Griffin would go on to a highly successful career in no-holds-barred martial arts (he later knocked out Brazilian fighter, Edson Paredao, in their “Heat Fighting Championship” bout after Paredao had fractured Griffin’s arm with a torturous “joint lock”) and Bonnar scored a fight contract, too, but the real winner was the supposedly brutal new sport of ultimate fighting. Within three years the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, would displace the National Hockey League championship as the fourth-most popular sports event in the United States, and attain a regular audience of over 4.5 million. The UFC today is a rolled-gold, blood-spattered American success story, and its president, Dana White, credits it all to the impact of that Griffin vs. Bonnar fight.
What makes the story truly remarkable is that just 10 years earlier the sport looked dead and buried. The original UFC had started in 1993 as a boy’s-own fantasy fight club pitting martial artists from different schools against one another to see who would win a real-life, no-rules street fight. But the apparently brutal mismatches that resulted—as when 176-pound Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter, Royce Gracie, battled 250-pound American wrestler, Dan Severn—led U.S. Senator John McCain to campaign successfully for the competition to be banned in 37 U.S. states (though the smaller Gracie, in fact, won that fight). The competition was even dropped from its cable-TV lifeline for almost 5 years. Under Dana White’s patient tutelage, however, it managed to rehabilitate itself. By introducing weight divisions, gloves, and rules banning strikes to the eyes, head, and groin, the UFC was eventually able to obtain licenses from almost every American state’s governing athletic commission. UFC fights now take place in 39 American states, and have not only returned to cable TV but have also spawned several imitators on major free-to-air networks.
What is the secret of the UFC’s phenomenal appeal? Fans of Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA as ultimate-fighting enthusiasts prefer to call it, insist it is the superb athleticism of the combatants. That MMA fighters are extremely fit is undoubtedly true: I myself once watched a 265-pound giant Tongan UFC gladiator, Australian-born Soa “The Hulk” Palelei, train for a super-heavyweight “King of the Cage” title fight, including running speed ladders that would have left many a sprinter gasping in his wake. (Some UFC training is, however, quite unconventional: at one point I heard a strange thump and looked up to see Soa, complete with green mohawk and tribal tattoos, smashing a sledgehammer repeatedly into a giant tractor tire.) Yet the UFC’s marketing tells a different tale. UFC fights are given apocalyptic names—“Judgement Day,” “Nemesis,” “Shootout,” “The Uprising,” and so on—which hark back to the competition’s original tagline: “There Are No Rules!” Such names clearly aim to invoke an inbuilt male love of uninhibited violence. Anyone who doubts that there is such an inbuilt love should read testimony from those English soccer hooligans who say things such as: “I get so much pleasure when I’m having aggro [a fight] that I nearly wet my pants,” and “For me fighting is fun. I feel a great emotion when I hear the other guy scream in pain.”1 The genius of the UFC is to cater to this instinctual delight by providing a legalized fantasy spectacle of men pitted against one another in caged fights to the possible death.
> Except that…nobody ever actually dies. Or even (Forrest Griffin notwithstanding) gets particularly injured.
I first stumbled across this intriguing little tidbit on that same research visit to Soa Palelei’s “King of the Cage” event. Soa’s fight had a solid undercard of seven warm-up bouts, ranging from featherweight to the heavyweights just below him, and I managed to sneak into the fighters’ rooms and interview every one, beaten or victorious, as they walked, limped, or were dragged in afterward. They were incredibly gracious to talk to me, considering the hammering some had just taken and the craziness of my questions, but the consistent refrain I received was that not one had ever been seriously injured in any MMA fight. Not even the guy I found mashing his purple, welted face into a handful of ice had anything to report—“Nah, mate, this shiner’s the worst I’ve ever had, and even it’ll be a memory by Sunday.” Considering the carnage I’d been expecting, this was a puzzle, but I thought maybe it was just because these were younger fighters, too green to have been really hammered yet. So I slipped into the heavyweights’ rooms to interview Brian Ebersole, a veteran cage fighter with more than fifty light-heavyweight bouts under his belt. Surely there would be tales of horror and maiming somewhere among those? I found Ebersole, whom I’d met earlier at the fight weigh-in, flat on his back, preparing for his fight by meditating (to keep his heart rate down) and smearing his face with Vaseline.
“Hey, man, what’s with the Vas?” I asked.
“Protects the face from cuts,” he grunted. “The punches just slide off, and it keeps the edge of the glove from tearing your skin, too.” (MMA fighters wear lightly padded, fingerless gloves that allow their hands freedom to grapple and choke.)
Aha! Finally, I was getting somewhere. Incredibly, however, Ebersole also claimed his fifty-plus cage fights had left him completely unscarred.
“I’ve had a couple of sprains, but no breaks to speak of,” he shrugged.
“Not even a broken nose?” I pleaded. By this stage I was getting desperate.
Ebersole just laughed. “It usually cops some hits and bleeds a bit,” he said, turning so I could see its straight profile. “But this baby’s never even been bent, and I can guarantee you it won’t be tonight either.”
Sure enough, half an hour and three brutal, flailing rounds later, Ebersole returned to the rooms victorious—his face spattered with his own bright, arterial nasal blood, but the nose itself still proudly unbroken.
A review of the medical research quickly confirmed this puzzling find: ultimate fighting really is a ridiculously safe form of combat. A 2007 study of competitive-fighting injuries as reported by the emergency departments of 100 American hospitals, for example, found that martial arts resulted in far fewer injuries than either wrestling or boxing.2 (Competitive basketball, incredibly, has an injury rate seven times that of martial arts.) A mere 1 percent of those martial arts injuries were serious enough to require hospitalization. True, other studies have found a more equal rate—such as a 2008 survey of the 635 official MMA fights that took place in Nevada between 2002 and 2007, which found an injury rate of 23.6 injuries per 100 fights, compared to roughly 25 per 100 bouts in boxing3—but this disguises the fact that boxing injuries tend to be far more severe than those suffered in the ultimate-fighting cage. The 2007 American emergency-room study found that while almost 90 percent of boxing injuries were to the head and upper body (the most dangerous injury sites), less than 50 percent of martial arts injuries were to these areas. This seems to tally with the results of a 2006 Johns Hopkins Medical School study that found the knockout and concussion rate in MMA fights to be about half those of boxing bouts. This may sound, to some ears, a little strange: why should boxing with gloves lead to more head injuries than the bare-knuckle brawling of ultimate fighting? The secret lies in our misunderstanding of what gloves are for—they don’t so much protect the punchee’s head as the puncher’s hand, allowing him to strike that much harder. Former UFC gladiator Ken Shamrock confirms this, saying:
When fighting bare-knuckle, if you slam your fist again and again into the head or face of your opponent, all you will do is to fracture your hand. Trust me here. I have done this more than once.4
By way of further proof, the first result of the UFC’s introduction of light gloves in 1997 saw also an immediate increase in the (admittedly still low) rate of fights ending in knockouts.
It is probably this low incidence of knockouts, coupled with strict rules that lead to early referee intervention, that accounts for the virtually zero mortality rate in modern ultimate fighting. The UFC itself has never had a death in the octagon (the UFC’s ring), although boxing over the same period worldwide has seen more than eighty.5 True, there have been three fatalities in non-UFC MMA competitions, but each of these was in unusual and extenuating circumstances. American MMA fighter Douglas Dedge, for example, who died from brain injuries after a no-holds-barred fight in Ukraine in 1998, seems to have had a pre-existing condition, possibly a skull fracture, that caused doctors to strongly advise him against fighting.6 Similarly, a Korean fighter called Lee died in an event called “Gimme 5” in 2004, but from a heart attack rather than any injuries. The one confirmed death in an officially licensed bout, that of Texan Sam Vasquez in 2007 by subdural brain hemorrhage, was found to be probably caused by a collision with a cage post rather than strikes to the head (the Texan Medical Advisory Committee later recommended the adoption of standardized post padding). Another probable factor in the UFC’s so-far-nonexistent death rate is the use of choking and strangulation techniques borrowed from judo. Though these sound, and look, brutal (the triangle choke, for example, involves strangling the opponent by crushing his neck in the crook of one leg, thereby squeezing his carotid arteries and shutting down his brain’s blood supply), they rarely result in injuries other than temporary unconsciousness. A 1998 study in the Italian Journal of Neuropsychology, for example, found that long-time judo practitioners showed almost no later loss of brain function, compared to professional boxers, of whom as many as 87 percent did.7
Clearly, in terms of sustaining serious injuries, modern no-holdsbarred fighting is about as ultimate as sword fighting with cardboard sabers. Yet has mano-a-mano fighting always been this distressingly wussy? What about in days gone by—were deaths and injuries more common in ancient ultimate fighting?
Curiously, there was such a sport in the Western tradition, and it even went by a very similar name. In 648 BCE a no-holds-barred combat sport event called Pankration “All Powerful” or “Anything Goes,” was introduced to the Greek Olympic Games, eventually becoming so popular that it was turned into the games’ finale. The Pankration was a brutal striking and grappling fight with no time limits, no weight divisions, and just two rules: no eye gouging and no biting (the Spartans, true to form, permitted even these). Everything else was allowed—breaking limbs, strangulation, fish-hooking (inserting fingers into orifices and ripping), and the wrenching and breaking of fingers and toes. (A Greek vase dated to 520 BCE, for example, clearly shows one pankratiast kicking another in the testicles.) A careful reading of Greek literature shows that, as far as Pankration was concerned, the “ultimate” tag was, in this case, completely justified: ancient pankratiasts really did often pay the ultimate price for entering the arena.
A volume of Olympian Odes by the sixth-century BCE Greek poet Pindar, for example, records that “very many [pankratiasts] died in the contests.”8 A more specific reference is found in the later works of Philostratus, who records a letter from a trainer to his pankratiast pupil’s mother, telling her that “if you should hear your son has died, believe it.”9 The great first century Greco-Jewish philosopher Philo agreed, writing that “many times [wrestlers and pankratiasts] endured to the death.”10 Philo even cites the amazing tale of two pankratiasts who attacked each other so ferociously that both died simultaneously. This is possibly exaggeration, since Philo doesn’t claim to have witnessed the fight himself, yet there is one undeniably genuine instance of a p
ankratiast dying just as he secured victory: the case of Arrichion, a three-time victor in the Olympic Pankration, who won his third crown by surviving strangulation just long enough to dislocate or break his opponent’s ankle (the sources here are unclear) but then died. Judges crowned his corpse the winner. Given that all these references were to deaths that took place at the actual Olympics (which, though famous, were just one of a multitude of Greek games at which the Pankration was fought), it seems likely that the mortality rate in ancient Greek ultimate fighting was very high indeed.
Perhaps the final proof of its lethality, though, is the feared pankratiast Dioxippus, who in 336 BCE won by default since nobody dared even to get into the arena with him. Clearly, would-be competitors understood that losing to this champion meant not just defeat, but probably death.
Incredibly, however, Pankration was not even the most lethal ancient Greek Olympic combat sport. That honor, as in modern times, goes to boxing. One competitor in both Pankration and boxing, Kleitomachos of Thebes, for example, asked Olympic officials to hold the boxing after the Pankration, since he had a greater chance of being wounded or killed in the former than the latter.11 Once again, the ancient Greek literature confirms his concerns were only too well founded. Four definite references to deaths in Greek athletic boxing have come down to us (the true number was certainly many more), some of them stunningly gruesome. One work by Greek writer and geographer Pausanias, for instance, describes the victory (but then disqualification) in the 496 or 492 BCE Olympic Games of the boxer Cleomedes, who killed his opponent, Iccus, by driving his hand into his stomach and disemboweling him.12 This sounds incredible, but ancient Greek boxers were, in fact, allowed a variety of lethal, bare-handed chops, slaps, and strikes forbidden to modern fighters. There is also evidence from Asian martial arts that such a feat is possible: tae kwon do masters maintain that a “spear-hand” thrust, followed by savage grasping and tearing at the impact point can rip skin and muscle.13 Another possibility is that Cleomedes penetrated Iccus’s chest cavity, which is much more easily ruptured. But perhaps the final proof of Cleomedes’ gory feat is the fact that the very same thing happened again a century later (this time at the Nemean Games) when a boxer called Damoxenus killed his opponent, Creugas, in a penalty punchoff after a grueling, day-long struggle, with another disemboweling spear-hand to the gut.14 The deceased Creugas, like Iccus before him, was posthumously crowned victorious, but this, too, demonstrates how lethal Greek boxing was—Cleomedes and Damoxenus were stripped of their crowns not for killing but for foul blows.
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