What They Cannot Control, They Hate

Go Ahead and Grumble

 There are a variety of programs online that I listen and/or watch even when I detest one of the hosts, or find myself in frequent, vehement disagreement with the points that they make. I’m not a masochist, though, I simply want to see if my own take on various topics can stand up to the scrutiny of some of these counter positions that they hold. Sometimes, they can’t, and I end up having to do hours of extra reading and research to determine where I am flawed in my thinking and stance, or they are in theirs. It can be exhausting, but I get to learn something, so it’s always worth the time.

     Recently, UFC fighter Sean Strickland had some absolutely brutal exchanges with members of the press up in Canada who addressed h8m with a variety of socio-political inquiries that have nothing to do with martial arts, melee combat, the UFC as a league, or his particular background or history in the fight scene. They wanted, it seemed, to instead try to shame him for some prior sentiments that he had given voice to, sentiments he honestly, genuinely feels. This sort of adversarial approach would be wonderful to see at, say, the White House Press Corps, most of whom are so busy kissing Karine Jean-Pierre’s and the Biden Administration’s feet that they forget that their job is to make the people in charge ANSWERABLE TO THE PUBLIC.

     Anyway, one of the shows I listen to regularly, whose host I detest intensely, but must admit is a reliable source for current events news, covered the Strickland story and interview, hence my becoming familiar with it. He and his crew had the obligatory seal barking, flipper clapping response to Strickland’s response to the gatchafolk, a response I empathize with because I had much the same one (along with some snickering derisively). One of the cohosts brought up that he suspected that one of the reasons that Strickland felt so free to speak the way he does, is that combat sports, like the UFC, don’t rely on teams. “You shouldn’t say/do X, Y or Z, it’ll reflect poorly on the team,” said the co-host, starting to make a key point in all of this.

     And then, per usual, the host, egomaniac and dismissive, haughty dickhead that he always is, just brushed that aside and started blathering. Rather than cheering on his co-host and trying to help expand upon the solid point the co-host started making, the host went off on his own tangent. Without even intending to, he sort of inadvertently demonstrated his co-host’s point.

     You see, the way that the UFC and many similar combat sports organizations operate is as such: the UFC is a promotional and distribution outlet for MMA as a form of competition, and its roster of fighters are NOT employees; they are independent contractors. As such, Bud Light has no leverage over the UFC to threaten terminating their advertising contract based on comments or behaviors of said fighters. They literally cannot point to a fighter’s behavior or commentary as cause to breach their advertising contract with the UFC, because the fighters are not UFC staff or employees.

The Other Sports Leagues

     You may wonder what all of that has to do with the notion of ‘control’ or ‘fear’ mentioned in the title of this piece. Let’s stick to sports for now, and just trust me, folks, I’ll get you there. The NFLPA and the NFL Owners’ Association have a bargaining arrangement that overarches and governs all contracts from the top-down. If you want to play in the NFL, you must join the NFL Players’ Association, according to league bylaws, the moment you secure your first contract.

     Now, the NFLPA has certain terms and conditions and expectations of its members, and it is through these terms that most league-originated fines are handed down against players. On top of this, individual owners/teams have additional terms and expectations of their players, hammered out in their contracts, by which players must abide. It’s all part of the negotiations handled by agents and the ownership, and includes things like performance bonuses, playtime obligations, injury reporting mandates, and yes, morality clauses, if ownership prefers them. Oftentimes players can see themselves losing out on guaranteed money if they refuse such clauses in their contracts, and one notable such expectation that I recall was Brian Westbrook, a running back for the Philadelphia Eagles back during Andy Reid’s tenure there, accepting 2 million dollars less over a two-year extension to his contract in order to avoid the ownership’s request clause that he never publicly speak ill of the city’s political leadership. Westbrook said ‘Nope, if your elected leaders here suck, I will say as much, you can keep the hush money’.

     Layer upon layer is settled on players, until eventually, there’s a whole heap of red tape that players cannot individually navigate or cross through. Sponsors are another matter too, because of how they are structured. For instance, if, let’s say, Pepsi, decided that they wanted Josh Allen to appear in commercials for their beverages, they’d obviously draft up an endorsement contract with him and his agent. However, if they want him to appear in the Bills uniform during the commercial, the contract has to cut the Bills organization in on the deal as well. If ownership objects to the commercial, or the product, but they have no contractual obligation from Allen saying that he can’t take a commercial or endorsement that the Bills refuse, then he can do it, just not in uniform. It’s all levels of complicated and weird.

     The NBA, MLB, NHL, and many other team leagues have this same sort of set of issues when it comes to their dynamics of what individual players can and can’t say or do.

Standing Alone Is Not Universal

     Golf. Tennis, Swimming. Combat sports. Any sport that sees singular talented persons trying to best a field of other single persons is best suited to standing against the tide of such things as cancel culture or ‘woke’ bullshit. The UFC, Bellator, WEC, Lion Fight and LFA, just to name a few such organizations, all do this by having their fighters act as independent contractors, thus letting the fighters themselves determine what guidelines they will bend to or not. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t logically or legally hold the league responsible for what Strickland says.

     What will happen, sooner rather than later, I expect, is that any attempted ‘cancellation’ on Strickland will come from angles less often used, but when they are used, their effects tend to be quietly devastating. I fully expect an attempt will be made to de-bank him, particularly since he joked about Justin Trudeau and his tyrannical yes-men in the Canadian government machinery doing just that to a host of peaceful protestors not long ago. Moreover, I expect that social media companies and sports news outlets will begin producing less-than-flattering coverage of him, shadowbanning or restricting the reach of his personal accounts, and generally trying to make him become a forgotten man. They will do this because he dared to snarl at them when they tried their usual brand of browbeating prior to UFC 297. This is when having friends, rather than a union of some sort, will prove invaluable to him, and others like him, in the future.

     You see, in an employee union, or an outfit like the NFLPA, if one member gets into some trouble, and the union bosses or league ownership opts not to defend that person, they are often pretty much screwed. The bosses will warn other employees to distance themselves from the affected player or league member, and they’ll be left to twitch in the wind. The collectivist approach leaves its individual members vulnerable, powerless, and worse still,  betrayed by their very own comrades when these things happen.

     A friend, though, without a contractual obligation, who actually cares for your fate? One friend who will help lift you back up is worth more than a thousand fellow union members who must step back and do nothing to help you.

     Fighters know this all too well. In the cage, in the ring, they are on their own. But they have friends, trainers, mentors and colleagues and sparring partners who will stand with them, even if in a year’s time, they’re punching or kicking or choking each other in competition. They work and train as friends, as true allies and enthusiasts of the arts martial, and then, they fight alone.

     The individual must be free, and his or her best help against the kind of woke scolds like the journos who tried to get a ‘gotcha’ on Strickland, and recently on Dana White, is going to come from within, or from those who actually give a tin shit about the person, and not an ideology. The mobs are collectivists, after all, and who wants to become the very thing that’s trying to ruin them?

These Fighters Could Destroy Them, And the Woke Know It

     I have a hypothesis regarding why the ‘woke’ so detest fighters like Sean Strickland, or Cowboy Cerrone, or Floyd Mayweather, or Connor McGreggor. These fighters don’t all have ‘fuck you money’; they are not all set for life that way. But what they do all have is the capacity for barely restrained violence, and the moment they feel any level of threat coming in their direction, like Strickland did with that reporter, they can and will respond, disproportionately if possible. They won’t just give rudeness and nastiness in kind, they will instead opt to dump nuclear levels of vitriol right back at the folks who give them shit.

     And they don’t need or care about your opinions, or anyone’s.

     Drop any of those fighters in the middle of the woods with no supplies, and they’ll not only likely survive, they’ll make their way back to civilization, track you down, rip your head and neck open like a very weird and bloody Pez dispenser and shit down your throat. It’s the same reason the woke collectivists hate and mock survivalists and preppers; those people don’t need the mob or their approval, and they can take care of themselves.

     It’s the same sort of rationale behind the woke hatred of Christian communities who stick together in their faith and their small towns; those faithful support each other and lift one another up without trying to one-up each other in some kind of rank-order of ‘who’s the most oppressed’ like the woke mobs do. They have real community, at the level of the human soul, and these mob mentality scolds barely have a soul at all.

     In the comedy scene, you have folks like Dave Chapelle, Joe Rogan, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais who do have the ‘fuck you money’, resources at a level such that they can comfortably prepare for the day when the mobs turn their full nasty attention on them. They’ll have diversified and readied themselves for their eventual cancellation, sit back with a smile, and say, ‘Fucking try me, people. It isn’t going to happen, I’m not going anywhere’.

     What they cannot control, they fear. What they fear, they hate. And what they hate, they will endeavor to destroy, in any and every way available to them.