A good friend invited me to a local Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the interim UFC Lightweight Championship. He explained that it was going to be a big night. The contestants were Paddy Pimblett and Justin Gaethje, both former champions with nearly untarnished records. One of them, “Paddy the Baddy,” was a celebrity for his scouse (Liverpool brogue) and blonde Johnny Ramone hairdo or in Liverpool slang “ketwig” (so named for the effect of spending haircut money on ketamine).
“Consider this excursion anthropological,” my friend advised. Respecting his intelligence, I took his advise.
Not knowing what the venue or the event would be like (I’d neither been to a Buffalo Wild Wings nor seen a UFC fight), I prepared myself by checking customer reviews of the venue. The extraordinary number of one-star ratings and reports of lousy or nonexistent service suggested to me that the staff had ceased pretending to love their jobs. One reviewer reported that she got food poisoning on top of being ignored. This indicated that their disaffection had spread to the kitchen.
I started to strategize. I’d get seated quickly by bypassing the host station and going straight to the bar. I’d order only what was least likely to have been contaminated by a booger-flicking prep cook. Then I realized, having written a number of scathing and unnecessary restaurant reviews myself—a practice I long ago abandoned for the easier, predigital recourse of not patronizing the place—that most people only bother to write reviews when they’re pissed off. I also knew that these pissed-off reviewers, especially the one who got food poisoning, were negatively biased. Thus there was no way to accurately foresee the evils that this national wing chain would inflict on me. I could do nothing but wait and see.
My next subject of research was UFC. I gave that up as soon as I started. Mostly because its significance was ancient and obvious—a bloody battle for fortune and fame. What Dan Carlin calls “painfotainment.“ Also, the available information about UFC seemed only to lead away from its significance. That’s a fancy way of saying that the more I learned about UFC the less I understood it.
It may seem odd that I knew so little about wing chains and gladiatorial combat. But I grew up in a media-poor environment and had to be selective about how I wasted my time. Pissing away my mortal minutes wasn’t as easy as it is now, and going out had to be well worth the effort. Going out to watch TV was out of the question. So, for me, this was a new experience.
I arrived at Buffalo Wild Wings early and the place was already packed, mostly with bros in their twenties. The few women who were not on staff wore the same expression as those who were on staff: bored neutrality. It seemed that all the women were in attendance by obligation more than preference. And most of those who weren’t working were literally attached to a man—that is, moored by the simian grip of worry that they might drift off.
At first the place impressed me as loud. Then I noticed that the few people who were making noise were trying to make themselves heard above the combined din of fifteen or so TVs. The screens were of various sizes and definitions and high on the walls. Those who weren’t trying to talk were staring at these screens, eating wings and drinking beer.
Most of the men were in small groups. They looked like refugees from a lonely and boring Balkan dictatorship. What I mean is that they were not as impressed as they thought they would be, but had no desire to go back to the place from whence they had come.
I strategically went to the bar area and placed myself in front of the largest screen, on which two fighters were enthusiastically dancing around and throwing tentative jabs. Suddenly, one of them connected. This knocked the other one off balance, giving his aggressor an opportunity to land a few more punches to the face and a kick to the head, which knocked his victim to the mat. The aggressor then proceeded to punch his victim’s face and head, using the floor for support, like a work bench. At this point my friend showed up. I asked how beating a helpless guy like that was fair. He said that UFC rules and boxing rules were different. To me it looked like UFC rules were absent.
These brief episodes of unchecked brutality elicited shouts and howls from the room. The shouts and howls appeared to be significant, but I couldn’t tell what they signified. After the fight, the two fighters hugged each other affectionately. The guy who lost seemed grateful to his opponent for kicking his ass. I sensed that there was meaning in this, like the loser was grateful to the winner for teaching him a lesson. But I couldn’t tell what the lesson was.
A waitress arrived right away. I was surprised that the service was so adequate, confirming my suspicion that it’s mainly angry people who write reviews. I ordered a beer and wings. My friend ordered more beer and more wings, including the “Blazin’ Knockout” wings. According to the menu, these were spiced with Ghost Peppers and Carolina Reapers and heat-rated at 300,000 to 350,000 Scoville units. As I’d never eaten anything that hot in a restaurant—except maybe a Chicken Vindaloo in London once—I figured that it was just hype.
When the Blazin’ Knockout wings arrived, I ate a few. They were hot, but not painfully so. At least, not at first. It was a different type of burn, you see. It slowly increased over the next ten minutes until I was pretty sure that it had achieved the promised Scoville rating. I’ve eaten hotter chilis directly, both fresh and pickled, but never anything with such a slow increase in pain. It was like being in an earthquake, where at first you acknowledge that it’s happening, then, depending on how long it lasts, you get a sense of its severity. I admit that I began to worry that the burn would not plateau.
As for my friend, his face was getting redder and redder. “The endorphins are kicking in,” he reported. Endorphins are a natural response to pain and, as mine had not yet kicked in, I guessed that he was in a good deal of it. “I think some are hotter than others,” he said with evident effort. Then he stopped talking, which he rarely did.
I, too, endured the pain in silence, inwardly congratulating myself on my manliness. It reminded of the Tongva rite of passage of laying on a nest of fire ants. It made me feel that I mattered more than I did.
With burning mouths, runny noses and watery eyes, we drank a whole lot of lager and watched several less notorious combatants harm each other in the “octagon” until it was time for the main event. The first part of it was commentary on the combatants’ careers. Joe Rogan, Lord of the Manosphere, was there. His head would randomly appear at the bottom of the screen. Most of time he wasn’t talking, but doing what they call “making an appearance.” Every time Rogan appeared, I noted a certain complacency in his smile. It was a smile that seemed to say, “Men like what men like, and I am not ashamed of being a man who likes what men like.”
When Patrick Pimblett (”Paddy the Baddy”) made his pre-fight appearance, I was disappointed to see that he was not sporting his ketwig. He had styled his hair in cornrows, which, no matter what kind of hair you have, make it worse. In Pimblett’s case, the cornrows were a breech of authenticity that I was sure would spell his defeat, as it did Samson’s.
His opponent, Justin Gaethje, entered the octagon with a clean-cut look and manner that reminded me of Maximus Decimus Meridius. I immediately sensed that he would win. Mostly because conspicuous Pimblett losing to unpretentious Gaethje was showbiz logic. It was what UFC fans, the Manosphere and the universe in general wanted.
My prediction was brutally realized in real time. Gaethje methodically pummeled Pimblett’s face into a gory mess. Each of his fast, powerful and deliberate punches landed with an ugly thwack. From the start, Gaethje had Pimblett backing up and returned two-to-one what Pimblett threw at him. A couple of times Gaethje held Pimblett against the mat and diligently jackhammered his face and head. Pimblett came out of every round looking like someone climbing out of a car crash, while Gaethje looked like he was back from a morning jog.
Before Pimblett was taken to the hospital, Joe Rogan interviewed him and repeatedly complemented him on his “grit.” Though Pimblett had trouble making sense, the interview wasn’t altogether vapid. There was a message in it for all of us men: however outmatched, we must sometimes endure painful and brain-damaging beatings at the hands of our betters, always keeping in mind that we deserve it because we are worse.
Mouth still burning, I exited the Manosphere, but not before surveying its occupants one last time to see if any were worthy of Joe Rogan’s approval. It was difficult to tell. There were no beatings in progress and no tests of grit under way. Most of the men were still mutely staring at the screens. They had redder faces but otherwise appeared unchanged.