Trading Shots: What can we learn from a death in MMA?

In this week’s Trading Shots, MMAjunkie columnist Ben Fowlkes and retired UFC/WEC fighter Danny Downes look at a recent tragedy in the MMA world, and wonder whether the sport will ever be safer than it is right now.

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Fowlkes: Danny, Portuguese fighter Joao Carvalho died following a TKO loss at a Total Extreme Fighting event in Dublin, which is bound to prompt some soul-searching among fans who have touted MMA’s relative safety to boxing and football.

UFC President Dana White says it’s preventable if you have extensive pre-fight medicals, good on-site medical staff, and good post-fight care. Is he right? Or does all that just mitigate a risk we can never fully eliminate?

Joao Carvalho

Downes: Given the nature of the sport, I don’t think it’s possible to make tragedies like what happened to Carvalho 100 percent preventable. That’s not to say that we should just throw our hands up and not do anything about it. There are a lot of precautions that can be taken to reduce the risk, but will promoters go and do them? Even if they do, we know who most of them will pass the costs down to: fighters themselves.

If you watch the video of the fight, the finishing sequence does not appear to be a case of extreme negligence. The ref could have stopped the fight earlier, but watching Darrell Horcher get beat up by Khabib Nurmagomedov on Saturday at UFC on FOX 19 looked far worse. I think that’s the scariest part.

Everyone is looking for an easy scapegoat. It wouldn’t lessen the tragedy, but if we could place the blame on a referee, a promoter or a governing body (MMA is not regulated by the government in Ireland), we could make sense of it. We wouldn’t have to challenge our passion for the sport because we’d have a culprit to blame.

MMA is dangerous. We claim to know that, but we whitewash a lot of it. Now that a spotlight has been put on brain safety in football, it makes it more difficult to ignore the realities of what athletes are doing to their bodies. How do you cheer Glover Teixeira’s knockout win on Saturday without considering what it did to Rashad Evans? How do you praise Rory MacDonald and Robbie Lawler for the “Fight of the Year,” and not think about the long-term repercussions of a fight like that?

Rory MacDonald and Robbie Lawler

Fowlkes: There’s a difference between long-term repercussions and short-term safety issues. That’s not to say that they aren’t both tricky things to grapple with as a person who loves this sport. But one feels like an informed trade-off, even if it’s a slow-moving train that many don’t see coming until it’s already on top of them. The risk of being killed by one specific fight, though, I wonder whether fighters even seriously consider that possibility.

I know they sometimes act like they do. When they’re in a particularly chest-thumpy mood, we sometimes hear fighters talk about how they put their lives on the line for the entertainment of the masses, how you’ll have to kill them to beat them. But that’s just talk, right? No one really thinks, as they’re walking to the cage, that they might have seen their last sunrise. I mean, right?

And it’s true that competent pre- and post-fight medical care costs money that most small-time promoters just don’t have, even if the UFC does, but that puts the sport as a whole in tough spot. Because those fighters getting the quality care in the UFC? Almost all of them came up through those smaller shows. And when someone dies in a smaller show, the ripples reach throughout the entire sport – including the UFC.

It’s not like people are looking at this latest incident and asking themselves only what it means for regional MMA.

What I wonder is, are we really as comfortable with the risks as we think we are? And I mean all of us, from fans to media to fighters to promoters. You said yourself, we whitewash a lot of very valid concerns. At the same time, we use this inflated war rhetoric. We think we’re comfortable with the risks inherent in this sport. I wonder if we aren’t kidding ourselves at least a little bit.

Downes: Yes, the “you’ll-have-to-kill-me-to-beat-me” cliche is all bravado. As you said, the brain trauma issues don’t have the same immediacy. That’s something for future Dan to worry about. If fighters really thought they could die in the cage, they’d probably change their minds about doing this. It’s like how everyone is ready to go to war, until there’s the possibility they’ll get dropped off in a war zone.

There have already been the usual op-eds calling for MMA to be banned, but that seems unlikely. Most media members and fans will mourn the loss of Carvalho, but dismiss the event as an aberration. How many other aberrations will there be before it’s a trend?

With football, you can modify the rules and improve safety equipment. In boxing and MMA, there’s no real potential for that. We can cut down on extreme weight-cutting. We can become stricter about performance-enhancing drug use. We can have increased training for referees. We’ll never take the risk out of the sport, though.

Will Carvalho be the last person to die due to injuries sustained in an MMA fight? We all hope so, but maybe, as you put it, we’re kidding ourselves a little bit.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Danny Downes, a retired UFC and WEC fighter, is an MMAjunkie contributor who also writes for UFC.com and UFC 360. Follow them on twitter at @benfowlkesMMA and @dannyboydownes.