Karaoke versus Ultimate Fighting Championship: A Cautionary Tale. Or Maybe Just Some Stuff I Wrote.

Saturday night is karaoke night at Sparky’s. Every week the demographic table of this Pilsner-and-Paralyzer bar tilts sharply, and the hipsters tumble in on top of the mullet-sporting regulars. Sparky’s is usually the last square in a Saturday barhop, mostly because it will serve drinks long into the night, after the wimpier bars have given up and gone to bed. Plus they have special karaoke lighting, which means a bank of recessed UVs that turns everything into an impromptu ‘80s video. (Note: if you suffer from dandruff, brush yourself down before you go or wear a white shirt. Otherwise your shoulders will look like Christmas decorations).

Karaoke night at Sparky’s has become an institution. But we didn’t reckon on Ultimate Fighting Championship night.

Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, began in 1993. It was the purist’s answer to professional wrestling, boxing, and pretty much any form of contest. What if, the purist asked, instead of playing a sport with a semblance of civilized behaviour, we just put two guys in a ring and let them pound each other senseless? What if we staged a cockfight and replaced those bloodthirsty birds with two guys kicking each other in the head while 50 Cent watched? Wouldn't that rock?

UFC has grown and changed since the early ‘90s, to the point that it has become a pay-per-view phenomenon and a rules-based sport. But try telling that to the crowd at Sparky’s. I have actually gone to a cockfight in the Philippines, with men roaring, slapping down pesos and pissing on the outer walls of the compound while roosters with razor-sharp spurs tore at each other’s guts in a sawdust-strewn ring. The fighting may be a lot tamer, but the audience is pretty much the same: leaping, screaming men. At Sparky's, though, all bets are under the table, and the urinals largely work.

The UFC fighters on tonight's card don't have the flashiness of professional wrestlers, but they also lack the strange sense of refinement that clings (despite all evidence to the contrary) to boxers (I'm probably alone in feeling this way, I know). It’s telling that these guys make boxers look refined. Despite their muscled bodies and their fighting skills, they don’t come off as athletes. They mostly look like bouncers, and the rest look like the kinds of guys that the bouncers toss. The camera settles on one of the fighters at ringside, a buffed-out leprechaun on a starvation diet. “Gross,” says one of the women next to me. I think of pointing out that the man onscreen looks no worse than the guy she walked in with, but then I don’t want to risk an earnest headkick from her date.

Me and my friends have arrived just in time for the main event of UFC 91: the heavyweight championship bout between Randy “Captain America” Couture and an unspeakable giant of a man named Brock Lesnar. Couture looks formidable, with a gnarled, beaten face like a cauliflower used for a football, but Lesnar is surely the bogeyman’s bogeyman: a gigantic pink-faced Aryan who could likely kill people simply by falling on them. A tattoo of a sword neatly bisects his pectorals. My friend Krista names him Swordchest and promptly puts ten bucks down on him.

Even though I’ve never watched a UFC match before, it looks like Couture is the defending champ, and Lesnar is the challenger. The truth is a bit more complicated – this is in fact Couture’s comeback match, following a resignation in 2007 and a contract dispute with his corporate overlords. A long-time UFC veteran and Hall of Fame member, he gained the nickname “Captain America” after winning championships in two weight classes. Remarkably, the man is in his mid-forties, and though his face betrays his age, his body has pulled a Stallonesque trick on time. This man could run circles around me and kick me to death as he did it.

The match starts, and I'm drawn in to the spectacle despite myself. Just how much damage are these acromegalic freaks going to inflict on each other? I wonder. Couture and Lesnar circle each other, looking for some tiny way in to each other’s defenses. My god, I think, there’s going to be some finesse involved, and then Lesnar lowers his head and charges.

Lesard's battering-ram move comes as a shock.  This bleached Hulk, who looks so mentally dense that it probably takes him ten minutes to reach for the tortilla chips, clears the space between himself and his opponent in a blink, smashing his shoulder into Couture’s stomach and pinning him against the mesh wall of the Octagon.  The crowd erupts.  “Time to retire, Couture!” shouts a guy into my ear.  “Yay, Swordchest!” Krista screams.  Damn.  What happened to karaoke?

As soon as the fighters make contact, the nature of the match changes.  They’re now engaged in what I can only call a contest of strenuous gripping.  Both are clearly working on the same strategy: try like hell to force the opponent to the ground and keep him there until exhaustion takes over.  It is both exhilarating and boring to watch: you can feel the tremendous effort even through the screen, but it’s hard to enjoy the sight of two endomorphs hugging each other tight and occasionally slipping to the floor together.

It’s easy to make homoerotic jokes about the whole thing, but in a way it’s so overly homoerotic looking that it seems unfair to even point it out, like mocking your grandmother for having a feeding tube.  After a while I start pretending that Couture and Lesnar are doctors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to perform unnecessary surgery on each other.

It’s over by round two: Lesnar puts Couture to the ground with a punch and then hunches over him, whamming away. It’s a TKO.  While Lesnar stalks the stage with his belt, Couture watches with the inward look of a man recalculating his life.  It feels a bit sad – but then, even Captain America died.  Meanwhile the staff are clearing the floor and turning up the black lights: Randy Couture has lost, but karaoke reigns supreme.