MMA Needs a Greater Vocabulary
From how we describe and categorize fighters to the way we speak about the fights themselves, MMA needs to expand its lexicon
Saturday night, as the final horn sounded bringing the clash between Natan Levy and Mike Breeden to a close, Twitter lit up with praise for the lightweight combatants and the 15-minute contest that just concluded.
“That was a great fight!” was the prevailing refrain from fans, fighters, and media alike.
That’s when the idea for this commentary settled in with me, because this was my reaction:
Now, as per usual, the obvious pre-editorial statements apply here:
I’m just one person and this is just my opinion on things; you don’t have to agree. You’re free to think I’m a complete dork for wasting my time writing about this stuff. You can be completely satisfied with the language we use to talk about this athletes and fights. Or you can think what I have to say is interesting.
Now let’s get into it, shall we?
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Clearly, my definition of a “great fight” and others’ definition of a “great fight” are vastly different, though I do think people throw around “great fight” fairly freely and would probably admit they have different categories of “great fights” if pressed, which kind of validates the main thesis of this piece — that we need a greater vocabulary in MMA.
That’s not to say that all great fights have to look a specific way or meet certain criteria. The fight between Cub Swanson and Dooho Choi that is going into the UFC Hall of Fame was undeniably a great fight, as was last summer’s bantamweight clash between TJ Dillashaw and Cory Sandhagen, and they look nothing alike, but I would argue that rather than having different categories of great fights, the sport and its consumers would benefit from finding more precise ways to talk about these athletes and exhibitions.
Saturday’s fight between Levy and Breeden wasn’t a great fight to me — it was entertaining and enjoyable to watch, with shifts in momentum, tense moments, and a handful of quality attacks landed on either side. But it was also sloppy and flailing at times, with each fighter making several technical and tactical mistakes.
To me — and again, this is just me here — calling that fight “great” feels disrespectful to the truly great fights we see inside the Octagon and in cages across the sport each and every year.
It was an entertaining fight, a competitive fight, a back-and-forth fight, but great?
While the classification of last weekend’s lightweight prelim provided the impetus for sitting down and actually putting this together today, it’s clearly something I think about a great deal and have written about in the past as well.
I think we have a very limited way of speaking about athletes and events, keeping things very binary at times (i.e. good or bad) and picking from a finite numbers of options (ex. elite, contender, journeyman, bum) in other instances, and neither of those things make all that much sense to me.
Some of undoubtedly has to do with the fact that I use words every day, love word games (Boggle, Scrabble, Wordle, Quordle, Words with Friends), and try to be precise with my language as frequently as I can be so that what I’m thinking, what I’m trying to communicate comes out as clearly and accurately as possible.
But I also think it would be a huge benefit to fans, to fighters, to media if we expanded our lexicon and figured out better, more precise ways to talk about these fighters, fights, and the sport as a whole.
Let’s take some of the words we use to describe the competitors themselves:
Contender
Prospect
Journeyman
Average
Bum / Can
How I define those words and how others define those words are going to vary, but they probably shouldn’t because we need them to be universal and convey the right information.
If we call everyone a contender, then no one will understand what it rightfully means to be a contender; the same goes for prospect and journeyman as well. Adding modifiers helps clarify things to a certain degree — “fringe contender” or “long-term prospect” for instance — but it feels to me like there are a limit number of words used to describe these athlete, and many of them are ill-assigned or improperly used in my opinion.
Journeyman is a great one to illustrate this point because people think of it as a slight now, when that’s shouldn’t be the case. Far too many people hear “journeyman” and think “hack that couldn’t make it to the top,” when the term is actually meant as a signifier of someone that carved out a long, productive career for themselves as a perennial tough out that gave everyone they faced a good fight.
Joe Lauzon is a journeyman.
Despite what Colby Covington thinks, Jorge Masvidal isn’t a journeyman. He’s one of the biggest stars in the sport, a two-time title challenger in the UFC, a former Strikeforce lightweight title challenger, someone that has been stationed in the Top 15 in two different weight classes at different points in time, and spent the last seven years and counting facing good-to-great competition.
But we just throw that term around and let it land on anyone that hasn’t won a title, when that’s not what it’s supposed to mean.
It’s like last year when Antonio Carlos Junior got released, called “average" by my fellow Canadian Adam Martin, and prompted me to write a lengthy piece breaking down not only why I disagreed with the categorization of the Brazilian grappler, but also the way we categorize athletes in general.
Ironically, I don’t think many would deign to call Carlos Junior “average” today, given that he ran through the competition in the PFL light heavyweight tournament last year, won a million bucks, and started off his 2022 campaign with another first-round submission win, but losing to three straight Top 15 opponents in the UFC earned him that designation, which all kinds of people were completely on board with at the time.
I said it then and I’ll say it again now: we’re far too reductive in how we discuss these athletes, and limit ourselves to only a small collection of words and ways of describing them for some reason, but also misapply those same words and descriptions all the damn time.
It’s like people only have a handful of ways of describing these competitors and want to use as few words as possible, so they pick from the list of available terms and run with the one that is closest, rather than taking the time to explain things more clearly.
The same applies to events too, which seem to be labelled one of four ways: awesome, solid, not good, and terrible.
According to many, most fall in the second half of that foursome, and only absolute monster events garner the “awesome” tag, with a handful of Saturday’s being described as “solid” over the course of a year.
Everything is instant reaction, surface-level judgements because digging deeper, articulating things clearer, and find a better way to describe things rather than banking on the same handful of terms is… I don’t know… too difficult? Not worth it? Asking too much?
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Part of what keeps this idea prevalent in my mind is that I watch how the conversations in these other sports and arenas have shifted over the years, becoming more nuanced, with more niches opening up, more voices gaining prominence, and how that has created greater understanding, greater interest, and greater ways to discuss those things and I wonder why MMA can’t follow suit.
The discourse surrounding the NFL and NBA have never been richer, more intelligent, and more robust. The same goes for professional wrestling (in some realms), movies and television, music, and so many other things.
And yet MMA seems to want to stay put, tethered to a limited vocabulary and finite topics of conversation, desperate to remain the same, with the same language and the same voices, when so many others are moving forward.