Instead of asking Mark Hunt if he wanted to stop, officials should have forced him to

Mark Hunt

In retrospect, the doctor should have been a clue. The doctor meant well. The doctor was a great big red flag.

It happened between the fourth and fifth rounds in the headliner of Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 65 event at Adelaide Entertainment Centre in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Standing over the series of misshapen lumps that had very recently resembled Mark Hunt, this cageside doctor leaned in close and asked, “Mark, can you honestly see?”

A funny bit of phrasing. It’s the “honestly” that makes it. As if Hunt’s instinct would naturally be to lie, but when pressed for honesty by some guy in a suit during the precious 60-second rest period before he had to face fellow heavyweight Stipe Miocic (13-2 MMA, 7-2 UFC) again, Hunt (10-10-1 MMA, 5-4-1 UFC) might give in and admit, honestly, that his eyes were swollen virtually to the point of utter uselessness.

And then, what, the doctor might have felt better about stopping it? But only if he could coax those magic words – “I can’t see” – out of Hunt first? Only if he could convince Hunt to effectively quit and admit defeat, which we all know he won’t, which is why we have people like doctors and referees and coaches there to begin with?

That’s the part that makes no sense about how we approach these things in MMA. Even with all these safeguards in place, all of which serve as a tacit admission that we need them, that the athlete is not always the best judge of when outside intervention is warranted, it seems like we look for every excuse not to use them.

And a guy like Hunt, he’s an expert at providing those excuses. So what if he was no longer really in the fight after the second round? So what if, by the end of third, he had turned into an inert punching bag for Miocic, who had sense enough to put Hunt on his back to eliminate his puncher’s chance, and endurance enough to keep peppering him with punches until someone in an official capacity asked him to stop?

Mark Hunt

Hunt’s great and terrible gift in those situations is the ability to do just enough to ward off the stoppage. He might be doing nothing more than lying on his back, sucking air and eating leather, but tell him to improve his position, and he’ll move just enough to show signs of life. Tell him to fight back, and he’ll toss out a blind backfist. Warn him that you’re going to stop it, and he’ll shift himself from one bad position to another, altering nothing but at least providing the illusion that the fight has entered a different state, one that we must let develop of its own accord.

We’ve seen this from Hunt before. He staved off defeat several times in his legendary fight with Antonio Silva in this exact same fashion. The difference there was that he managed to eventually fight back rather than merely survive. He had periods of encouraging offense to break up the periods of prolonged inactivity. After two rounds against Miocic, however, the most encouraging thing Hunt managed to do was stand up every once in a while.

So why did it take five rounds to finally stop this thing? The answer probably has something to do with the weird culture of MMA, which prefers a sad, dangerous brand of closure to even the vaguest hint of doubt. We don’t throw towels or quit on stools in this sport. At least, not as much as we should.

Instead, we prefer these illusions of safety. The ref demanding a slight change in position in order to allow the face-punching to continue. The doctor asking, honestly, whether a fighter can see.

It’s as if we fear the awful finality of the stoppage so much that we look for any way around it. Then we get someone like Hunt, who’s so tough and so stubborn that he actually laughed when the doctor asked him if he was willing and able to continue against a dangerous opponent, and it’s hard not to feel like it’s only a matter of time before we mess around and let something terrible happen.

It’s not a sin to stop a fight. We didn’t get anything out of those last two rounds except maybe a little extra depression hangover for the morning after. Hunt didn’t get anything out of them except about 30 extra blows to the head, none of which he needed in order to prove his tough-guy credentials to anyone who’s ever seen him fight.

There was no good reason to let that one-sided fight continue. It continued because the people responsible for stopping it apparently felt that they hadn’t been given enough explicitly good reasons to do so.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. We should know by now that you can’t trust a fighter to tell you when he’s had enough. Not even if you ask him directly. Not even if you implore him to be honest with you. Sometimes what the fighter needs is for us to be honest with him. He might not like it, but he’ll get over it. You can’t always say the same thing about the consequences of screwing up in the other direction.

For more on UFC Fight Night 65, check out the UFC Events section of the site.