- The judges just score the match and sit outside the ring. They do not have the power to stop a fight. The referee is supposed to intervene.
- It's a common misconception that fight referees belong to the UFC. For fights, an athletic commission is responsible for refereeing. In most fights, this is the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
- The UFC has been quite vocal and registered many formal complaints with NSAC when a referee allowed too many punches before stopping a fight. There was that referee that I'll only mention by first name, so I don't get sued: Steve.
- It is my opinion that professional MMA fighters need some sort of independent organization that oversees their well-being and assures they get proper medical care. It should be funded from fight profits. Things like what's happened to Spencer Fisher should not be happening.
That's how you get kyokushin style tournament. The problem is people want the head to be part of it, even the fighter themself. It's just a tough sport considering human only live once
This sounds a bit like a distancing attempt.
Surely those referees follow the rules of UFC. So ultimately UFC is responsible no matter which entity enforces the rules.
I may be wrong, but I think it's the other way around. The commission sets the rules and hires the referees to enforce them. Dana White has be openly critical of certain referees and made it clear he'd fire them if he could. The UFC must follow the rules of the commission. I believe that's why some past fights could only occur in certain jurisdictions, and with modified rules. The unified rules of MMA are set by commission voters, not the UFC [1].
[1] https://www.ufc.com/unified-rules-mixed-martial-arts?languag...
"Unified rules of MMA" were developed at the state athletic commission level (NJ maybe?), but not everywhere implements them: https://www.mmafighting.com/2019/4/16/18358920/abc-survey-at....
The ending of one fight in TX had betting implications because of their odd rules. https://www.mmafighting.com/2022/6/21/23177038/texas-commiss...
The UFC has historically been wildly aggressively opposed to any sort of fighter organization or rights. I was a UFC fan for years but eventually faded away largely due to how repulsive I found the company's behavior, so there might be some recent developments I'm unaware of. I completely agree with you, but can't see it ever happening while the UFC has a de facto monopoly on the sport.
We had a guy join our gym and end up posting a hand on the wall the first night during a drill. He was out for a month. I have done the same on the floor with permeant results.
Recently there was an interview with Takrowlek Dejrat [1] and he talks about how defense was something that they spent a lot of time with first as kids training, which is different than this generation of fighters. Which I find to be true in my own training, I often feel like working on defense is something we only drill as an after-thought to offense.
Then there is a somewhat mutual respect and understanding between fighters that while they want to win they don't want to get injured cos back then people may be fighting weekly. None of this 3 month fight camp and skipping and ducking fights for years that people like Mayweather did.
And then I never quite understood why but once everything was rigged by gambling circuits it all became very clinch dominant.
Not to mention that the traditional scoring also does not favour muay mat (punchers).
Chatri wants to make martial arts more entertaining because no one wants to see people just pull guard in BJJ or grab each other's legs in Judo. And why should only practitioners of Boxing see these huge purses when Buakaw and Saenchai stayed essentially poor.
Also very traditional muay thai/boran fights were done with kard cheuk anyway which aren't much different from those 4oz gloves...
That's fair about kard cheuk being like the 4oz gloves, I've seen some fights with them, but like you said hands never scored as high, whereas One scores things equal these days iirc.
Not that Lethwei is the golden exemplary sport for preventing head trauma...
It's almost like there's an honour code that you aren't trying to kill each other and ruin each other's career.
I guess it's like very very hard sparring rather than the kind of bad blood fights you see in some western promotions. After all, you do get KOs in sports like TKD too.
There are def some of the older generation who lament about injuries or head trauma and having a short career. But then you look at the muay femur who specialise in evasion (like Jockey Gym) and they all had decently long careers
What's gonna matter most is how the athletes train, how hard they get hit in sparring. A very long professional career might be 30-50 fights, but that's thousands of hours of training. If you're spending much of that sparring hard, even if you don't get many concussions, the cte is going to build up
My thought was that since western boxing is limited to hands and standup, you’re going to go for headshots a lot more. You’re limited in your weapons. Muay Thai has a lot more options, and since punching scores less, you end up with a lot more shots to the body.
I only brought up the 4oz gloves in my original comment because I just don’t enjoy watching the style of lots of punching headshots as much. I feel like modern scoring and use of gloves that get through guards easily changes the style and encourages more punching to the face, which isn’t what I find artful in Muay Thai. My personal weapon of choice is going for knees.
And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism. My guess is you saw a topic about fighting on HN and couldn't wait to tell us all that you trained.
It's a pretty common thing. Sometimes highly technical music doesn't have that appealing an aesthetic to the average person, but to other musicians it's very impressive because of how hard it is to play, or how unusual it is on a theoretical level. There's lots of stuff in life that's like that. Isn't the appeal of most spectator sports partly buoyed by memories people have of playing those sports as kids or young adults?
I don't think it's hard to believe at all, nor elitist. Everyone has things they'll notice more details about because they have experience with them.
With 4oz gloves you don’t have as much to work with in your guard, so punches can slip through a lot easier. On the other hand they protect the hand less, so some fighters are more apprehensive throwing with them on. The small gloves definitely feel like they leave a lot more repeated damage to the face, whereas a clean headkick is probably going to result in a KO. Obviously neither are great if we’re talking about concussions!
I can only speak from my own experience, but I never enjoyed watching fights until I started training. Once I started training and began understanding the rule set, I started seeing what was going on. I don’t think that’s controversial, when you have experience in something your eyes are a little more open. Watching and training is for everyone though! Nothing elite about it all, just a lot of showing up and putting in the work. It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically.
Old people complaining about lack of defensive training is universal in most sports.
But I disagree that gloves only protect the hands, as gloves protect the face and head too. There is more volume in my guard in larger gloves that allow me to protect from head attacks while wearing larger gloves.
Anyway, if you watch fights from other promotions that have more traditional Muay Thai rules (even if it is still entertainment Muay Thai), you see a lot more attacks to the body with kicks and knees. I just find the more traditional style to be more artful.
One could also say the encourage to have excellent boxing, offense and defense rather then putting a premium on everything else giving the defender pads to hid behind. You actually have to be good at dynamic defense, using head movement, footwork, clinching, hand fighting, distance and so on.
Combine that with the large ring and you have a more dynamic fighting sport. I do wish they would not separate clinches so fast as that is a vital element that makes MT different and interesting. But generally they have been striking a decent balance there, it depends a lot on the ref.
A lot of traditional MT is just two guys hiding behind gloves while spamming low kicks against each other while standing in the middle of the ring.
Its just a reality of the world that in actual fights punching people in the head is effective, so by that measure One MT looks more like an actual fight rather then ceremonial combat sport.
I do agree that the gloves protect the face, but mostly because you can use them defensively, not because of the actual padding on the hands itself.
Of course, one can have preferences what is more enjoyable to watch. I think One MT is a amazing striking competition.
> They are trying to draw an MMA crowd and often even pass out KO bonuses to encourage that style.
I am not disagreeing that, that is what they are doing. Having a promotion that deals in many different fighting styles they also have to differentiate, where the retained the large gloves and MT where they have the small gloves.
Bonus for KO are a pretty logical intensive, to make sure fighters want to win, rather then run out the clock when they are ahead in points. Also it makes it hard to do lots of illegal things regarding buying or influencing the refs. Something that we know was common in lots of combat sports for the last couple 1000 years and in MT too. Of course that has a lot of issues too.
I totally understand that people want to watch a fight that is more true to what would happen on the street. Clearly all the bouts on One are filled with super talented people and all these fighters deserve to make more money than they were making even a few years ago if they can. I just have a lot of aversion to it and don't find it as beautiful as watching, say, old Karuhat fights.
I wasn't trying to suggest that, being partly ritualized doesn't mean that these were not incredible fights and athletes. And MT was far ahead of almost everything else in terms of how 'real' the fights were.
Some extra awareness will hopefully help
I know that this would ruin multiple billion dollar industries as we know them (boxing, MMA, gridiron football, more), so nothing substantive will change, but in my opinion there's a grotesque conflict when we're paying people to put up with TBIs, broken bones, et cetera.
There are sports where violence and injury are clearly not the goal but aren't negligible, such as racecar drivers and baseball pitchers, and I don't know how to approach those -- but violence as sport seems far more clear cut.
There certainly are sports that ban head strikes. Certain forms of karate, for instance. Fight fans _like_ seeing heads get punched, and they like seeing knock outs. There's not currently a very big market that wants to see fighting without head strikes.
I think that's a huge symptom of my point. You can strip out tackles from football and make MMA way safer, but the large MMA competitions are popular because they're closer to two people doing whatever they can to win a fight than something more restrictive, like karate or wrestling. As you mention, the fans will be pissed at safening the sport, and I'd almost bet money that the vast majority of the fighters would be pissed as well -- just like I've seen plenty of coworkers and workers in other industries get angry at OSHA regulations, even the ones that are as ridiculously straightforward as labeling the bottle of formaldehyde so someone doesn't spritz it around a clinic.
Full contact but restricted martial arts also exist and mitigate risks by limiting the range of allowed techniques. Some of them do it in different ways than others. Judo is full-contact but disallows strikes, which makes it massively different than something with strikes. Semi-contact karate avoids the full-contact part, which makes it different in a different way.
Full contact practically always comes with risks, and full contact with fewer restrictions comes at much greater ones. Spectator expectations or other parts of culture may encourage the athletes to take risks and go to greater lengths than they otherwise would. But it's difficult for me to agree that modern society should have no place for sports that mentally healthy people actually want to participate in just because it comes with a risk of physical injury or intentional roughness. If they wanted to participate in a different sport, they'd have options.
In the end it's of course a matter of where to draw the line. Rather few people would nowadays want to allow fights to the death even if the participants wanted that. (Although, in reality, I don't think such a sport would get that many willing and actually voluntary participants either.)
I think if someone seriously injured themself doing parkour or base jumping (or bare knuckle boxing) there's an implicit assumption that people partook in that activity knowing the risks whereas with a professionally recognised high stakes sport (where the athletes may also have contractual obligations to perform) then there need to be higher standards and awareness.
For instance why is head trauma more of a problem in NFL than rugby when rugby players don't even wear helmets
I'm also wondering if that's partially connected to exactly the fact that they don't wear protective equipment. In many cases it's of course definitely helpful to have protection, but since it can also make the risks less obvious, using heavy padding might also encourage heavier contact. If, on the other hand, none of the participants are under any illusion of safety, that could discourage recklessness and perhaps even encourage a sense of mutual respect.
Helmets generally don't offer that much protection from concussions. They do reduce the risks of other serious head injuries such as fractures, as well as more superficial injuries, but if helmets make people think they can take heavy contact with abandon, that might increase the number and severity of concussions.
The most common preference is somewhere between a Captain America movie and a John Wick movie, I think.
Folks who can't stand to see real violence wish it just didn't happen, the way I wish street fights didn't happen. But you're not gonna get anywhere offering what an MMA fan understand as an inferior product. And the MMA fans know there's karate and wrestling and BJJ to watch, they just aren't as interested in it.
I don't try to rationalize it much. I know most people, especially in the circles I'm in, can't stand to look at it. I don't mind that.
The idea that society has moved past the need for violent spectacle or something just doesn't work for me, because I enjoy the sport. And plenty of other people do, too
Fighters for the most part are going to do what will make them the most money. If the fans are there for knockouts, they're gonna go for knockouts. If BJJ tournaments offered the same money making opportunities that MMA does, a bunch of fighters would very happily switch
Ironically the growth of UFC and Boxing tells me we're trending back to the Roman days. Sure we won't have full on gladiators but everything old is new again feels like...
To hold up Roman as some sort of maxima doesnt really hold up. Its just that they were rich so they invested more in spectical, just as we do now.
Hah, not so much - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=biffs+bumps+bra... - big hits are a big thing, to the point TV specials and such are made on it.
If so, then you agree with the person you responded to, you just want to draw the line in a different place.
That feels like an ad hominem, but I'll focus on what I think your point is.
I don't really have a problem with amateur MMA, etc. But paying people for violence as a sport isn't just acknowledging it; it's encouraging it. And it's encouraging athletes to push themselves into injury, some of which is life destroying.
Should people be allowed to attend private sex clubs where consensual sexual violence is a key part of the group activity?
My complaint falls away when you remove the profit or the long-term injury.
Boxing is beautiful so are many of the other martial arts, but there is something just so magical about a good boxing fight that can have skill and technique, emotion and grit. And actually watching all the other adjacent sports - MMA, Muay Thai, Kickboxing just serves to elevate boxing and show how much further you can take an idea when you specialise.
From what I know, boxing seems way safer than say NFL nowadays but you know it's not "fighting".
We didn’t catch Lance Armstrong using PEDs for something like eight years.
They're not being stupid by continuing the fight and trying to hide injuries. They are trying to get a w instead of an l, and sometimes that just means you need to keep the fight going another minute or two until the time is up. That can literally mean the difference between having a successful career and retiring with a mediocre record. It can be the difference between a shot at the world title, versus being on the free undercard fights. Fights. They are making a calculation, and probably the same one I would make in their same situation. It is very easy to look back on the reckless youth as being stupid. Fortunately, I have enough recording of myself from that era to see that I actually had thought it through pretty well, I just didn't realize how bad it could be in the future. But, if I had a world title under my belt, none of my current maladies would feel nearly as bad :-D
But wanting to continue when even your coach knows it’s over is a kind of pressure sale situation. You’re in the moment and sort of trapped, and having a concussion and a brain full of adrenaline makes you have even worse judgement.
I blame the committee, only partially the refs since the refs aren't makign the rules.
To be clear my disagreement was with the parent that said adrenaline made the fighters stupid.
For me, I can hardly think of a worse use of a life than fighting for sport. There is not a single fighter on earth I would trade places with. Not one.
My girlfriend was a martial arts trainer for a few years, and many of the girls she worked with cited Ronda specifically as their inspiration. They're not competing, this is a hobby, but they're doing it because they were inspired by people like Ronda.
I just envy their discipline...
I have to ask, what's your ideal life look like?
When I consider how Naoya Inoue fought 11 rounds with a broken orbital socket I am profoundly inspired by the heart he demonstrated and his will to win - his focus and his skill to change strategy mid fight.
It's easy to handwave his ability to fight through pain thanks to adrenaline... until you try it for yourself.
It's inspiring to know just how much we can overcome ourselves if we want something enough.
What's the deeper meaning of getting heart disease and myopia by sitting at a computer learning how to be a good programmer?
What's the deeper meaning of doing anything? It's all temporary vanity. In a million years, even the Pyramids will have worn away!
It's all ships in bottles to keep us busily interested til we die. :D
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.
And steroids make you not only dumber but more violent.
Scientific American agrees[1] that violence is not correlated with testosterone:
> "When aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection between [testosterone and violence] all but disappears."
Another study finds higher testosterone promotes pro-social behavior[2].
Personally I've found that rather than androgens being a mediator of violence, estrogen seems to be a much powerful inhibitor of rage/violence-potential. Low estrogen causes particularly difficult-to-control emotions. Generally when someone is taking high amounts of steroids they are likely also taking anti-estrogens (blocking testosterone's conversion to estradiol).
This low estradiol, due to another drug, not steroids seems to be what most often causes violent emotional dysregulation. Generally not testosterone or other androgens without anti-estrogens.
Perhaps my TRT is making me extremely dumb though ;-)
0: https://lithub.com/it-turns-out-theres-not-a-lot-of-science-...
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-....
2: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2022/08/esc_testosterone_anim...
Tell me that you have no idea about physiology without telling me.
Slightly off-topic though; you're acknowledging that they might contribute which isn't unfair here.
Suppose that there are enhancement drugs. They work, and a lot of competitors are using them. Then it becomes far more believable that the current champion is enhanced and has managed to hide it, than that someone who is not enhanced has miraculously managed to beat the entire field of people who have such a big advantage.
My view lead to me being certain about Lance Armstrong years before he was caught.
The fact that Greg was such a brittle rider - a god one day and barely finishing another - gave me hope that he was legit. The fact that he has focused in retirement on cheating cemented that for me.
Last I heard he was trying to watchdog riders sneaking small electric motors into their bikes. Even 50 watts is a lot of boost for a cyclist.
Why not bring a gun to an MMA fight while they're at it too
The most effective doping agents are often the easiest to detect, and modern anti-doping programs like the biological passport and whereabouts program are very effective. It's no reason to be complicit -- the science continues to evolve, athletes who go awry will continue to get caught, and athletes who follow the rules will continue to have to work hard to stay within the boundaries (it is not trivial to stay within WADA guidelines even as an amateur athlete; a lot of people who get medical treatment for a common issue would violate the rules a few times over without realizing it).
But to look at an entire sport and disregard them all as cheaters without evidence does nothing but encourage young athletes to feel like they need to risk their health in order to compete and belittle the accomplishments of clean athletes. We need to hold cheaters accountable, not throw in the towel.
I agree that "a lot of competitors are using them" is an assumption. In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption. But that does vary by sport.
I entirely dismiss the argument that our tests catch cheaters. There have just been too many examples over the years of athletes getting away with cheating for years. At this point the burden of proof is on those who think we're catching them. In fact as articles like https://www.shu.ac.uk/news/all-articles/features-and-comment... show, anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it.
All that said, I agree on holding cheaters accountable. And think we should go farther. If someone who trains with you gets caught, you should also be punished. On the assumption that there is a chance you were just not caught, and if you weren't doping, you likely knew and didn't tell. That would create social pressure to not put your teammates at jeopardy. And I think THAT would finally end cheating.
Haha no, definitely not. For clarity, we're talking about banned substances, which isn't always the same thing as performance enhancing drugs. It is actually debated whether a lot of the WADA banned substances are performance enhancing drugs; but WADA would rather athletes don't take things that could be harmful to them because they might enhance performance so they tend to err on the side of adding things they worry about or have evidence of athletes abusing.
Moreso, I mean that it's simplistic to assume that the type and amount of illegal substances you can get away with while skirting an increasingly aggressive testing framework will be sufficient to be the world champion. There's a risk tradeoff here and a million variables in high performance training -- athletes put their entire career on the line when they take banned substances and get no guarantee of return. Take the recent case of Collin Chartier in triathlon: reached #14 in the world, started doping over the off season, caught within a few months of use, and career is now over.
> In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption.
Right, and once they're caught, they're banned. They are no longer a "competitor who is using them". Your logic makes an assumption that the population that is left just hasn't been caught yet, rather than that their negative tests actually indicate a lack of doping. And that is an assumption.
> anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it
These surveys come up with numbers showing anywhere between 1% and 70% of athletes have consumed a banned substance. Remember that weed is a WADA banned substance that 50% of the US population has tried. These studies are glorified guesses that vary depending on the wording they use.
We are still looking at whether over the counter pain killers are mood altering substances. I’ve seen circumstantial evidence of this in myself. (Though I don’t think I’d want me or a friend to fight on painkillers - reduced coagulation and bruises are no joke).
It would change the strategy of the sport, but it may help prevent brain damage over time.
What would make sense would just be to disallow head strikes. Hit your opponent in the head and forfeit.
Or you could go in the other direction, and let fights be to the death.
What's the benefit of the middle ground? If you want to see what works in a fight, it's crippling the other guy. If you don't want people to be crippled, you probably shouldn't allow crippling them in the future either.
Among the sets of rules that allow head strikes, traditional boxing is the worst.
It is much more dangerous than any kind of kickboxing or MMA, because the boxers have few methods to defend themselves and few other means of winning, except by a knockout that is easiest to achieve by a head strike. Even during the Greek antiquity, pancration (i.e. MMA) was considered to have a much lower risk of injury than pugilism (i.e. boxing).
But they distinguished between that and stand up striking aka pugilism? Though the latter is a Latin word hmm
I'd be very uninterested by non head striking martial arts.
Martial Arts is a search for truth. It's not only about fighting as it is also about discipline, self improvement, peace, community and some spritualism
But if you care about combat them you have to fight/spar. No point pretending taichi is a combat skill if no one in two generations or more have applied it practically.
MMA is the closest we can get to a controlled safe arena to facilitate that search for truth.
Do what works. Love him or hate him, the Conor McGregor shoulder punch was a great moment of reminding people that the spirit of MMA should be formless.
For that reason I find it frustrating that UFC has banned 12oclock elbows and football kicks and grounded knees. Not because I want to see people's heads getting smashed but because the obvious desire to not get struck by those would promote less risky takedowns and would probably make the sport less wrestling dominant.
Pankration allowed striking, kicking, wrestling and submission grappling, so it was very similar to the MMA of today.
However, the pankration fighters did not bandage their hands with leather straps, like the pugilists, so they were not able to hit as hard the head of the opponent.
Moreover, they had plenty of other options for winning a match, so striking was not as emphasized as in pugilism, which remains true today in MMA vs. boxing.
> Martial Arts is a search for truth.
> But if you care about combat them you have to fight/spar.
> Do what works.
The truth is that barehanded fighting has been obsolete since the invention of rocks.
If you want to see what works, expect to see a lot of strikes that break the opponent's knee, and wrestlers putting their opponent's eyes out.
If you don't want to see that, how are head strikes supposed to be different?
> No point pretending taichi is a combat skill if
Huh? Nobody does pretend it's a combat skill. It's a set of exercises† practiced voluntarily by grandmothers, and imposed upon schoolchildren, for notional health reasons. If you suggested to either group that it might be relevant in combat, they would find that hilarious. (In fact, I have read a Chinese comic series in which there's a running joke that someone is seen as a martial artist when, in reality, all they can do is morning exercises. That person eventually defeats a gorilla -- the gorilla has been beating up actual martial artists by copying their moves, faster and stronger -- by doing some morning exercises, which it copies. Their total uselessness in combat means that the gorilla is no longer threatening.)
It is best known for the funny narrations that people make up to accompany and describe the exercises.
"I have a watermelon."
"Here you go."
† Well, really, tai ji is the interaction between yin and yang. The exercises are tai ji quan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGrzPU0zDY&pp=ygUQdGFpIGNoaSB...
I think taiji gets a bad rap. Although I haven't done explicitly taiji, when I did some shaolin quan which included baduanjin I was very impressed with how holistic the training was (with the exception of combat application). I think the training was "boring" but has the necessary ingredients for preparing the body to be conditioned for very fluid movement which turns out is very good for long term health and preservation of your MSK system. I came away impressed that we've had so much of this figured out for so long well before we had the science to explain it. Baduanjin was actually designed to be accessible regardless of age or prior skill level.
> The truth is that barehanded fighting has been obsolete since the invention of rocks.
So with a rock or even a rock weapon like an axe or whatever you are telling me you think you could take on Khabib? That rocks have completely obsoleted physicality and skill so now you will win.
> If you want to see what works, expect to see a lot of strikes that break the opponent's knee, and wrestlers putting their opponent's eyes out.
This quora post captures exactly what I think is about the search for truth in martial arts - there's so much "theory" that struggles to hold up in practice where a bouncer/martial artist reflects on how knee breaks are a low percentage high risk technique when trying to execute in real life. https://www.quora.com/Are-knee-destructions-illegal-in-MMA
I think non practitioners routinely underestimate the difficulty in executing these kinds of techniques under duress. I mean, a proper liver strike is a 1 hit KO and karate teaches the liver kick where you strike the liver with the ball of your foot. How often do you see that technique used? It's like the mma equivalent of the football bicycle kick.
IIRC Jon Jones used knee kicks and they werent so effective that they were banned or changed the face of the sport.
Eye gouging is weird, I'm unsure how it would change MMA and we'll never find out. If they're good as a strike people will stop engaging and resort to kick range but kicks can make you more liable to take downs which then brings you into gouging range in wrestling.
If anything UFC rules has shown that physicality kind of trumps skill unless the skill gap is very large. Which is a frustrating outcome but a truth nonetheless - martial arts is only useful if you're also strong
I don't agree that consistently is the right word. I've certainly seen more extra hits than necessary, but good refs step in fast and with authority. Perhaps you watched lower rank fights with less experienced refs?
Let's not fool ourselves. They are mainly prize fighters, despite the "martial arts" name of the sport.
Combat sports are an ancient discipline existing across distinct and varied human cultures and every mature form acknowledges this constraint by having a third party to referee the match.
I'm not sure your distinction has any material significance here. As others have pointed out, the referee is there to stop the fight and the fighters are trained to continue until the such a time.
Fighters often do stop, an example from just last week is Bahamondes vs Giagos (although this is probably not a good example of avoiding concussion).
https://youtu.be/X2Z1En-eAgk?si=8lBY27afFMfv_Z90
But there's many, many examples of fighters stopping when they know their opponent is finished, and IMO only very few examples of fighters egregiously not stopping.
Wrestling/no-gi BJJ doesn't have a gi, so players can't lock down their opponents as much and there's a lot more movement in neutral. And Judo has a gi, but the way you win is via high-amplitude throws, which is a much more spectacular win condition. I think they're both much more exciting to watch than regular gi BJJ, especially for non-practitioners.
I think BJJ's main spectator-unfriendly flaws are that it has a gi and doesn't reward high-amplitude movements. So, unsurprisingly, the metagame has evolved around locking down your opponents.
(Background: I did Judo as a kid, and do BJJ now.)
What really makes me appreciate it isn't knowing how to do it, it's more that the buddy who got me into it was very, very talented, and had retired into coaching at a gym, and before I ever stepped foot in a gym, we'd hang out, have some beers, and watch footage as he explained what was going on. At the professional level, it's quite nuanced and complex, like a chess match.
Some guys would be proud of ending someone’s career but it doesn’t sit well with everyone. And a couple people have died after a fight. I don’t know of any stories where the other fighter felt anything but terrible about it.
Their target demographic is people who will pay to see a violent spectacle. There are certainly people who find violence thrilling in martial arts, but there are a lot of people who have never done any training, who are uninterested in learning that running away is your best defense or how to de-escalate a tense situation, who have a credit card and want to see someone get punched in the face until they're bloody. That's who MMA producers and refs are targeting, not you.
I'm a kiteboarder and a skier. Do you think that the stores with Dakine luggage or North Face jackets at the mall (which feature prominently-placed posters of people kiteboarding and skiing) are really intended for me? No, they're intended for people who wish to send social signals that they are wealthy, stylish and adventurous.
It's the same with (a subset of) Nascar fans - Many are uninterested in karting time trials that might be more approachable to more amateur participants in motorsports, but they'll on the TV every Sunday hoping to see a big crash, and the same with (a subset of) NFL and NHL fans - they just want to see someone's head bounce off the turf/ice.
That spectacle is what's for sale, it makes money in a way that 10 years of patient practice does not.
I prefer ONE which feels a bit more pure. I like how they promote mutual respect between contestants and some of the highlight reels celebrate restraint (look up Xiong maybe).
Combine that with their same approach to cutting weight and I think they're a much classier promotion.
Sometimes UFC and boxing feels like soaps for male dominated fangroups. But boxing is just so beautiful sometimes
In MMA, if someone’s head is bouncing off the mat then you should be grabbing the opponent's elbow immediately.