Family Night at the Fights

Colby Covington vs Jorge MasVidal

There was a big MMA - Mixed Martial Arts - event at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas last night. One of the two main contenders - Jorge Masvidal - father is from Cuba. Osmany is from Cuba and is a big fight fan so naturally we have to watch the fight. It was PPV - Pay Per View - and very expensive compared to most other forms of televised entertainment - $100. $70 was for an annual "membership" and $30 was for this event. I guess I can understand that. They undoubtedly train as much as any other professional athletes, but I imagine they only fight a few times a year. Basketball and baseball players may play 100 games a year. And like all sporting events, only the obsessed are going to want to watch a rerun, so the promoters need to raise as much moola as they can at the time. Not much to be made in residuals.

One of fighters announced that he was donating half of his prize money, $45,000 to a children's charity, which means the prize for that fight was $90,000, and it wasn't the main event.

There were half a dozen or so fights on the card including one fight between two women. We missed that one because we didn't find out about the $100 price until showtime and then we got involved in a discussion of whether we should go to a sports bar to watch it. In the end, we decided to pay the fee. Of course, now we have to navigate the new, modern, convenient way of gaining access to the event. We needed like six pieces of information, some of which was for accounts we didn't know we had. We got there eventually, but we missed the girls.

Mixed martial arts weight classes

There were like five fights in ascending weight classes. The first fight consisted of 3 rounds. The heavier classes had five rounds. Each round was five minutes, so some of these fights went on for 30 minutes. One fight ended early when one fighter got a choke hold on the other. 

This is Mixed Martial Arts, so fights can involve boxing, kicking and wrestling. I enjoy watching the fight when both fighters are both standing up and trying to strike the other, but often one will tackle the other and then it turns into a wrestling match and that is very tension inducing. Not much action, but you tell they are both struggling mightily. Some of these wrestling matches turn very ugly, where the guy on top is beating the guy on the bottom. One fight was almost called because the guy was so badly beaten. But he got up for the next round and landed a big punch that came close to knocking the beater out. One time one fighter knocked the other down with a punch but did not tackle him. Apparently he wasn't a fan of wrestling either.