For as long as recollection serves me, the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) has been demonized by the media with varying degrees of justification. I believe that, in this day and age, MMA has been unjustly portrayed as something its not.

MMA is a combat sport like boxing or wrestling but it encompasses most areas of human combat that don’t involve external weapons.

Most MMA organizations follow the unified rules of the sport created by the California and New Jersey State athletic commissions.

These rules include legal technique guidelines that prohibit finger pokes/strikes, kicks to a grounded opponents head, strikes to the back of the head, groin strikes, and biting among other things.

In the early 90s however, when MMA first arrived to the U.S., the Ultimate Fighting Championship was conducting unethical and dangerous open-weight tournaments. The stigma has survived throughout the years and has thus plagued the sport.

Unlike in the past, MMA has now developed into the purest form of combat while still providing a relatively safe venue to compete in. The sport is not a “human cockfight” as many have referred to it as, including Senator John McCain.

I think the main reason that this delusion is so popular is because the idea of fighting on the ground has been viewed as taboo by western society. Sports such as boxing have created a stigma about hurting someone on the ground being unethical.

In reality it’s not about ethics. If it were, all competitive sports where people hurt each other would also be in question.

Athletes have died in boxing and even suffered from brain damage because of the amount of punishment that they have taken throughout their careers.

To this day, no one has been killed in an MMA contest. This is a commendable statistic especially because boxing records an average of 10.4 boxing deaths per year worldwide.

I’m not implying that sports that are dangerous shouldn’t be allowed or even spoken poorly about. I just don’t think that a sport that is statistically safer and requires more diverse techniques should be viewed disapprovingly.

So if you find yourself judging a sport or anything for that matter at face value, look into it a bit and try to understand what it actually is even though it may be taboo.