Mixed mayhem in Vegas

The only time I've ever been to a mixed martial "arts" card, I left before night fell.

It was an amateur outdoor show put on by God knows who, and I went for the reason I usually went to quirky events put on by God knows who in those days: Because I thought I could get a column out of it.

I did. Wrote mostly about the atmosphere, because the "art" was mostly pairs of guys with a very high tat quotient rolling around on the mat punching each other in the head. The audience, too: Very high tat quotient. Also some kinda scary folks, which is why I left before it got dark.

(This is doubtless stereotyping at its worst, I'll admit. First of all, everyone except me has tats now. CEOs have tats. My sister and my nieces have tats. This does not mean they're about to shiv me if I look at them sideways.)

(Also, I'm pretty sure all those scary people were not actually scary people. They just looked scary. And bad-ass. And possibly armed with shivs.)

Anyway ... I came away thinking not very much of mixed martial "arts." It just looked like a glorified street fight to me, only with tickets and T-shirts and other promotional gear.

I still think it looks like a glorified street fight. Even when professionals like Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor engage in it.

That happened last night in Vegas, and people who know way more about MMA say it was a brilliant fight. McGregor you know because he fought Floyd Mayweather and he's the consummate self-promoter, yapping and yapping and yapping until you just want to tell him to shut up already (but not too loudly.) Nurmagomedov is less known but more formidable, which is why he remained unbeaten by choking out McGregor in the fourth round last night.

(Which was both a fitting end for a guy who never shuts his mouth, and more fodder for my MMA-is-just-glorified-streetfighting position. I mean, choking a guy out is the kind of thing that happens in a streetfight. Or, you know, when Dick the Bruiser and Baron von Raschke got together.)

And if you're wondering here what my initial anecdote was leading up to, other than the Blob rambling on pointlessly like always, it was what happened immediately after Nurmagomedov choked out McGregor.

He attacked McGregor's jiu-jitsu coach.

After which some of his goons (oops, sorry, "team members") jumped into the ring (oops, sorry, Octagon) and started pounding on the still-prostrate McGregor. After which McGregor's goons  started fighting with Nurmagomedov's goons and the whole thing devolved into a good old-fashioned ... well, streetfight.

Various goons were arrested. UFC president Dana White said he was going to punish Nurmagomedov bad, really bad, although secretly he probably was loving the goonery, because it likely was going to put the UFC front and center  on a day when White's sport was competing with college football and the baseball playoffs.

The whole business, it turns out, was the by-product of bad blood between Nurmagomedov and McGregor that smacks hugely of the choreographed plotlines of professional wrestling.  Not too long ago, McGregor threw a crowd-control gate at a bus containing Nurmagomedov and some of his goons, a move straight out of the WWE. In the run-up to the fight, he accused someone in Nurmagomedov's camp of being a terrorist. Hence what happened last night.

Where all that was missing were the folding chairs and heaving McGregor out of the ring/Octagon onto a strategically placed table.

Now that would have been arts-ful.

Excuse me. "Arts"-ful.