Opinion: ‘Real Sports,’ Hard Truths and Fuzzy Numbers – Sherdog.com

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MMA is a violent sport, and not always in the most sublime way. On
Tuesday night, HBO’s “Real Sports” probed that idea in harrowing
fashion, as journalist David Scott presented a feature on the
strong and septic presence of domestic violence in mixed martial
arts. Anchored by a sit-down interview with Christy Mack in which
she details her horrific beating at the hands of ex-boyfriend
War
Machine, the piece wasn’t new per se, focusing on
well-known recent incidents of domestic violence in the sport, but
it was damn necessary. MMA has many faces, many of them ugly at
that, but I’m not sure there’s any more disgusting than this.

This is a sport that needs to see its own reflection and reflect on
it. Often.

However, the minute I saw a Microsoft Office graph pop up on my
television screen, I grimaced. I didn’t grimace because of HBO’s
sobering findings: that mixed martial arts has a domestic violence
arrest rate of 750 per 100,000 men, as compared to 210 in the NFL
and 360 in the general American male population. Instead, my face
flinched because as soon as I saw the data, I knew the murky
methodology would unintentionally overshadow the vital discussion
that the segment had just amplified.

In general, I’m skeptical of domestic violence statistics, given
how routinely abuse victims decline to speak up or press charges
against their attackers. The underreported nature of these crimes
logically suggests to me that in actuality, these numbers should
uniformly be higher, regardless of whether they pertain to an MMA
fighter or a librarian. Yet, I find the 750 arrests per 100,000 men
statistic dubious for the same reason most other observers did.
“Real Sports” host Bryant Gumbel stated the data came from
reviewing “hundreds of current fighters, dating back to 2003,
focusing on Americans ranked in the top 200 in several weight
classes.”

This methodology is simply full of holes. Does that mean fighters
who were in the “top 200” any time in the last 12 years or just at
this moment in time? Whose “top 200” is this? Could it even be
something other than FightMatrix?

Why are only Americans important? Women are victimized all over the
world, by men of many passports and MMA is a fairly diverse sport.
Who is American, someone born in the country? Do naturalized
citizens count? Thiago
Silva is responsible for one of the most horrific acts of
violence against a woman we’ve encountered in this sport. What
country do they think he’s from?

Also, this is a news feature about domestic violence in MMA, not
specifically “when male fighters beat and terrorize women.” I would
never be so daft as to suggest that violence against men is just as
prevalent in and out of this sport, but it does exist. Go read
Clark
Bevans‘ request
for a restraining order against ex-wife and women’s MMA pioneer
Erin
Toughill. While you laugh and snort “Yuk yuk, beat up by a
girl!”, imagine an alleged drunk, pilled-up,
psychologically-frought 170-pound pro fighter attacking you on a
whim, smashing your vehicles, stalking you, threatening your
children, attempting to steal your medical and financial records
and physically assaulting anyone they perceived to be a romantic
rival no matter how insane the notion. This is definitional
terror.

According to the CDC’s landmark 2010
National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the
lifetime prevalence of violence by an intimate partner was 43.8
percent for lesbians and 61.1 percent for bisexual women (as
compared to 35 percent for heterosexual women). MMA has a vibrant
LGBT community. Something has to give.

Most importantly, comparing MMA, the NFL and the general population
is non-sensical given the structure of mixed martial arts itself.
This infographic did not refer to the UFC, Bellator, or any other
specific promotion, but the sport on the whole, a sport which does
not exactly have a stringent barrier to entry. Unless you happen to
be a true phenom, neither you nor I are going to walk on to an NFL
squad. Conversely, either one of us could get an MMA fight booked
on a local show by the time you’re done reading this column. HBO
claims its methodology focused on those “top 200” in “several
weight classes,” an attempt to appropriately control the sample and
adjust it to the “level” of NFL competition. But, we don’t know the
fighters, the weight classes, why only males, why only Americans,
so on and so forth. Even if these numbers were the truest,
legitimate representation of domestic violence in MMA, it would
seem “Real Sports” curiously arrived at the correct answer with the
wrong equation.

Naturally, I don’t begrudge “Real Sports” for doing original
research and presenting it in the piece. In the interest of
producing well-rounded reporting, it’s what’s appropriate. In fact,
HBO opted to push its “objective” statistical analysis rather than
relying on some of the sensationally inhumane details of the cases
it detailed, i.e. mentioning Josh Grispi
being charged with beating his wife, but not mentioning his attempt
to alledgedly have his pitbull maul her to death. However, at the
risk of sounding like your sophomore algebra teacher, in this case,
the equation is more important than the answer. This is a realm
where process trumps the product.

HBO’s offering was not designed to be an exposé, as the sport’s
problems with domestic violence were already unfortunately
well-known to fans. It was meant to be a provocative primer for
those not “in the know” about MMA’s repugnant side and for
diehards, a piece to encourage reflection on the culture that
supports and suborns domestic violence. The problem is that these
imprecise statistical claims, while not offering anything
intellectually substantial because of the shoddy methodology,
undermine the crucial, conscious content of the piece, even if it
shouldn’t.

True story: my senior year in high school, a shy, nerdier gentleman
in my Global History class gave a particularly rousing 10-minute
speech about the Wright brothers and the political difficulties
they experienced in developing the airplane both in America and
Europe. I had never heard this kid speak, yet he was a passionate,
articulate orator. I loved his presentation and the sheer amount of
old-school research that went into it was obvious. He deserved to
be celebrated: for everyone to leave the room and share something
fascinating they just learned about aviation history.

Instead, I realized after class that the gentleman’s fly was down
during the speech, to the extent that his boxers were peeking out
of his pants. Apparently, his undergarments had magnetized the
entire class. I was seriously the only human being in a room of 30
who retained anything he said, all because his zipper was down. It
was an important moment for me, realizing that well-crafted,
thoughtful content can be ignored or impaired by even the slightest
oversight, intentional or not.

Witness
this Huffington Post article, predictably titled “HBO
Investigation Finds MMA Fighters Commit Domestic Abuse At Rates Far
Exceeding NFL Players.” This story makes it to the U.S.’s most
popular political site and news aggregator, but it’s entirely
hinged on the briefly-referenced, poorly-conducted in-house
research. In turn, it creates an entirely false narrative and
ridiculous discussion: the comments section is overrun with inane
conversations comparing War Machine
to Ray Rice, morons hypothesizing that fighters and football
players are abusive because of roid rage and classic “Duh! This
shouldn’t even be legal, it’s not a real sport!” foolishness.

The inclusion of questionable data also refortifies the age-old “us
vs. them” mentality in MMA. Historically, MMA fans have been
defensive about everything. Fans used to have to defend the sport
from human cockfighting rhetoric on a moral level (“How barbaric! I
heard they die in the cage!”) and more recently, they’ve become
accustomed to defending the sport as a matter of taste (“Ew, you
like that? You own any Affliction shirts?”). Outside of the graph,
the reporting was spot-on, yet the nature of the data was dubious
enough to spark outlandish conversations of the report being a “hit
piece.”

The lack of quantitative rigor (or perhaps misplaced quantitative
rigor) isn’t just a red herring either, it’s a lightning rod for
idiocy. When analysis such as “MMA fighters are over three times
more likely to beat up their spouse!” is offered up without a
thorough, buttoned-up approach, the lame-brained are empowered to
be dismissive. “Oh, where’d you get these numbers? What a joke. MMA
isn’t more dangerous than the NFL!” All of a sudden, we’re right
there again, racing downhill to conversational rock bottom,
confronting with unintended strawmen, rather than the true and
disconcerting underbelly of the sport.

Shoddy graph aside, I’m thankful HBO, “Real Sports,” David Scott
and his interview subjects told this story. Domestic violence in
sport is an issue only now getting more serious cultural
examination and so far, that conversation in the mainstream hasn’t
included prizefighting, in spite of the obvious component violence.
MMA will always draw hoards of athletes from social turmoil,
attracting the most brutal and broken individuals who feel they can
turn their penchant for violence into a paycheck. Simultaneously,
we still inhabit a sport where promoters rush to forgive and
promote athletes that abuse their partners, where those abusers
themselves still believe it is acceptable recompense to plead no
contest in court and then talk about “being in the past” and
“moving on.” These are circumstances that dictate this be a
necessary and routine conversation in MMA, as painful as it might
be. Without it, there’s no hope for those complicit to ever realize
the extent of their damage or ever make any meaningful changes as
people.

When we talk about domestic violence in MMA, we must ensure that’s
the conversation we’re actually having. No matter the gravity of
the topic, it takes just the slightest slip-up — one set of
suspect statistics, one unzipped fly — to contaminate the
conversation and destroy its ability to philosophically, morally
engage its subjects.

I don’t know what the “real” numbers are, how the NFL and MMA
“really” compare as far as domestic violence arrests go. What I do
know, though, is that the “real” numbers should not be this sport’s
primary concern at this moment. MMA shouldn’t be bothered with
being “better” than the NFL, because right now, MMA needs to look
long at its own reflection and start being better than its ugly
self.