Mixed martial arts is all the rage

Millions of Americans watched backyard-brawler-turned-pro-fighter Kimbo Slice bust open James Thompson's cauliflower ear May 31 on primetime television, spilling blood all over the canvas.

Like any movement, the mainstreaming of Mixed Martial Arts has its landmarks.

That night on CBS, after years of the sport being relegated to pay-per-view and cable, is one of them. But the closer-to-home changes in how the sport is viewed really prove its place in the mainstream.

As recently as six months ago, Matt Hughes would tell people his Yakima gym, Focus Martial Arts, didn't teach mixed martial arts; he taught tae kwon do, jiujitsu and karate.

Things have changed since then, as MMA has continued to grow in popularity.

The sport's top stars, guys like Chuck Lidell and Kimbo Slice, have higher name recognition among young men than the three current heavyweight boxing champions, Samuel Peter, Wladimir Klitschko and Ruslan Chagaev.

People are watching this hybrid of grappling, kicking and striking in record numbers.

"One expects that its status as a sport that people participate in themselves would become more viable," said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

In other words, these days when someone calls and asks Hughes whether he teaches MMA, well, he says yes.

"After watching all that stuff on TV, it's an opportunity for them to live their dream," said the 43-year-old who has boxed, kickboxed and fought in a variety of martial arts.

Hughes, who also has opened gyms in the Tri-Cities and Ellensburg, says he has about 400 students in all, ranging from 3 years old to 67. Four days a week he gives private lessons to an orthodontist. And, while the vast majority of his students are young men, he said interest among women is on the rise.

Across town at his own gym, Yakima Mixed Martial Arts, Rich Guerin remembers a time when there really wasn't much demand for that kind of training. He and a group of other MMA fighters fought under the Yakima MMA banner, but it was a club, not the business it is now. That changed in 2005.

"What prompted me to open a business is having so many people say, 'I really want to learn,'" said the 37-year-old Guerin, who operates the gym with his wife, Julie Guerin. "I have doctors, lawyers. I have police officers, teenagers. I have a lady in her 60s who's been with me for three years now."

Not all of them train with the goal of stepping into the ring someday. Between Guerin's gym and Hughes, hundreds of Central Washington residents are paying anywhere from $40 to $110 a month for gym memberships, depending on the type and frequency of training they desire.

Of the 100-or-so students Guerin teaches, only a handful are looking to climb the ranks into pro fighting. The others are trying to get into shape with "combat cardio," or they're trying to test themselves physically during training.

At 5-foot-9 inches tall and weighing 168 pounds, local attorney Marty Dixon falls into the latter category. The 33-year-old has been learning to fight at Guerin's gym, mostly jiu-jitsu grappling with a little striking thrown in.

And although he has no plans to get into any sanctioned fights, he enjoys pushing himself against physically bigger men during training.

"I would consider it like any other competitive sport," Dixon said. "Most professionals I deal with, especially in law, are competitive. And they seek an outlet for that."

Elisa Powell, a 34-year-old staff trainer for the state Department of Social and Health Services, takes Yakima MMA's combat cardio class and has enrolled her 7-year-old son in the gym's MMA Kids Club.

"We wanted him to learn how to protect himself," she said.

Though her husband is a bigger fan of pro fighting than she is, Powell appreciates the strategy and intricacy of MMA technique.

"I've seen it growing a lot within the last couple of years," she said. "In fact, I was telling my husband I wouldn't be surprised if it was an Olympic sport in 10 years."

Now that's mainstream.

What it says about society is a matter of interpretation.

"To have an art form where human beings are hitting each other hard in a controlled fight is, at the very most basic level, a little disturbing," said Thompson, the Syracuse pop culture expert.

But is it any worse than football or boxing -- both of which can arguably be seen as just as violent, if not as blatantly so?

"I suppose when you get right down to it, a lot of sports clearly reflect a way in which we're playing out a lot of our violent tendencies," Thompson said. "In some ways, they're a way to control violent impulses."

It's also important to note how the big-name MMA organizations, Ultimate Fighting Championship and Elite Xtreme Combat, have tightened rules since the sport first burst into the national consciousness in the 1990s, he said.

The original version, available on pay-per-view and home video, had no weight classes, no gloves and allowed participants to kick downed opponents. As a way of divorcing itself from that past and from the backyard brawl scene, modern MMA has evolved with a much stricter set of rules.

"For this sport to really have a chance of making its way into the central parts of the culture, like football and soccer and NASCAR have, it needed to be in many ways spruced up," Thompson said. "It's feeling out those parameters."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 577-7693, or at pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

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