TUF Champions: Rashad, Forrest, and Reality

Whenever I see an article about the Ultimate Fighter, something in my brain goes off. It’s a “proceed with caution” impulse that keeps me from jumping to conclusions about a piece.

I expected to see more TUF recaps with UFC 92 and (more recently) all of the Time Warner insanity, but it seems more or less passed over, and I hadn’t seen a real retrospective about the change in the reality show. Then, of course, I went to check out Sports Illustrated, and found an article by Arash Markazi (the one who’s not Josh Gross).

I won’t bash the guy, because he’s doing a pretty good job working to inform the casual MMA fan, but I was a little surprised by certain bits and pieces of the article. Not to dissect his metaphors (there are a lot of problems with the Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood comparison, though the idea of a cagefight between those two jumpstarts the imagination), but this notion that there is some equivalence between the Ultimate Fighter and American Idol is strange and more than a little interesting.

It is important to understand, first and foremost, that the Ultimate Fighter changed MMA, but it didn’t change reality TV. The show was revolutionary for MMA fans who got an insight into training and got to see demonstrations of great athleticism and bizarre drills (especially in the challenges of the first two seasons).

The Ultimate Fighter is not Survivor, though it had that feel early in the series, with some fighters doing a great deal more fighting than others, and some going home without even stepping into the cage (the way that one fighter was forced to leave after the first challenge, on the first season, would piss off any fan going back and sifting through the series). The show, though, was not a popularity contest, and that was what made it fun to watch, especially with the antics of strange individuals (the eccentric Forrest Griffin and bizarre Luke Cuommo jump to mind from the earlier seasons).

As someone who was a fan of the sport before I started watching the reality show, I should admit that I was worried about how the sport would be percieved and how the show would be cut. Still, the quality of the athletes, the coaching and the legendary “do you want to be a f*cking fighter” speech, made the series rewarding.

Perhaps it was TUF 3, or TUF 4, when it started to become a “reality TV show,” chocked full of the kind of real world antics that I had been worried about having to deal with initially, but it became difficult for me to watch.

Still, the talent from those early seasons, and the rapidly progressing skill of the fighters from more recent seasons, has contributed a lot to the sport. Regardless of how you feel about this last season, about pranks and itching powder and trash talk and drinking, when Rashad Evans, the underdog winner of the second season’s heavyweight division, is the new UFC lightheavyweight champion, and he took that title from Forrest Griffin, that is a positive impact.

Griffin vs. Bonnar may or may not be the greatest fight in the history of the UFC, it may or may not have opened up a huge new audience for MMA. Some think the impact is overemphasized, and some see it as incredibly significant, but the success of the series has enabled the UFC, and given them the opportunity to hype some legitimate talent.