With the gloves off, I have to say here that I actually have a lot of problems with MMA as it is handled at present, because I believe that, quite frankly, that all-out MMA fighting can lead to brain damage.
Sure there used to be some blood during fights, but most fights used to tend to get into complex submissions and holds rather than the slugfest that they are today. These days, it seems that the public doesn’t pay to see technical submissions on the ground. What they pay is to see two guys beating the daylights out of each other. The fact that fighters wear fight gloves only allows them to hit harder without damaging their own hands.
I realize that we live in a rather mercenary world where no one actually cares what happens to the fighters, but it’s beyond doubt that the MMA fighters tend to suffer massive brain damage in the course of their careers.
More than that, as a fighter suffers brain damage, his ability to take blows in the ring is reduced, leading to phenomenon known as the glass jaw, when a fighter takes a blow or two and is knocked out. As the losses pile up, a fighter later in his career, who has no other means of earning money, tends to take a string of losses, in which he takes a hammering, usually to the head.
These late career fights can be even more damaging to an already damaged brain.
When you’re hit in the head, your brain bounces around inside your skull, causing mild to severe trauma to the brain itself. Is this what a person really wants? I’m not saying that a person who practices MMA in competition for years might suffer brain damage, I’m saying that they will suffer brain damage.
When you compare this with BJJ, you’ll get a very favorable comparison, because injuries in BJJ tend to be of the non lasting variety. Yes, one does have stretched tendons or sprained limbs in BJJ, but these are the sort of injury, which, unless someone is being very careless, tend to heal with time.
Sure, people do tape up and wear guards, but these are simple precautions against mistakes. There are people who complain that the BJJ manual has become increasingly complicated over the years, but I say that all those rules actually make sense. Those rules ensure that a fighter does not take damage, and that matches are balanced out and that there is a certain amount of care that injury doesn’t occur.
More than anything, in BJJ no one is hitting his opponent as hard in his head as he possibly can, which is actually, if you really think about it, a very foolish thing to do. The young tend to think of themselves as immortal, but the fact if that no one is immortal.
In MMA and boxing, some of the top names in the business today struggle against depression and have suicidal tendencies. These things are difficult for a healthy person to deal with – imagine how much harder it must be for a man who’s just taken a horrible beating to the head and perhaps suffer brain damage to deal with.
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