Opinion: The Monster The UFC Created

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Fan: “What advice do you have for someone who wants to get famous?”

Ricky Gervais: “Kill a prostitute.”

Dynamic. That’s the best way to describe Colby Covington’s performance on Saturday night, where he mixed relentless takedowns with multifaceted striking offense to shut out former champion Robbie Lawler in the UFC on ESPN 5 headliner. “Chaos” extended his win streak to seven, taking every round on the judge’s scorecards and earning a company record for strike attempts in the process. Covington neutralized Lawler’s much-venerated offense from the opening bell, battering him across the cage for the full 25 minutes in what was one part Michael Bisping’s volume striking and one part Chael Sonnen’s suffocating top game.

One-dimensional. That’s the most honest descriptor of Covington’s schtick once the final bell rang. Interviewed by Jon Anik in the aftermath of the official announcement, Covington rattled off his usual set of talking points. First, he made a sycophantic toast to the Trump family, a number of whom witnessed his display from the first row of the Prudential Center. Second, he made a generic call out to America’s armed forces, citing their sacrifice as the precondition to his in-cage success. With his conservative base catered to, he then set out to incite controversy, drawing a comparison between his dominance of Lawler and the train that almost took the life of Lawler’s mentor, Matt Hughes, in June 2017. He closed the show with a screeching, barely coherent callout of undisputed champion Kamaru Usman, before storming out of the cage to take a call from the Commander-in-Chief and engage in a cringeworthy confrontation with “The Nigerian Nightmare” on the UFC’s post-fight show.

Covington is the embodiment of MMA’s most grotesque attributes, a character spawned to exploit the media’s click-heavy business model and the UFC’s lack of competitive architecture. Less than three years, he was soft-spoken and thoughtful, eschewing (to use his words from a 2014 interview) the “drama aspect of fighting” and speaking candidly about the garden-variety poverty that many fighters experience on their way up the ranks. He was a guy who dutifully showed up to compete on the early prelims, soundly best his opponent, give post-fight interviews that no one watched, and fly home to relative obscurity.



Covington’s grappling-heavy fighting style and paucity of charisma meant that there was a natural ceiling to his UFC career, at least insofar as he would need to win an ungodly number of consecutive fights before the UFC would put any degree of promotional muscle behind him. In fact, as was revealed in Michael Rothstein’s ESPN feature last week, the UFC was preparing to release Covington after his fight with Demian Maia, this despite the fact that he was fresh off a dominant win over Dong Hyun Kim in Singapore and held a 7-1 record in the promotion overall.

Understanding this state of affairs, Covington set about -- quite transparently, but no less effectively -- to secure his position on the roster. He studied Chael Sonnen and Ric Flair; scripted material; figured out which buttons to push. First-form Colby first appeared in Sao Palo, describing the Brazilian fans in the Ginásio do Ibirapuera arena as “filthy animals” and their home country as “a dump.” It was a stunt that was roundly condemned by fans and media, and was reportedly reviewed by the UFC’s “code of conduct committee,” whatever that is. Paradoxically, given how “seriously” the UFC was taking Covington’s remarks, it also saved him his job, and catapulted him into a fight for the interim welterweight title.

Since then, Covington’s persona has evolved to embody the vacuous and reductive politics of the sitting president -- a telling development given his original shtick was as an internet troll come to life. He has paved his way to the undisputed title with Trump’s slogans (“Make Welterweight Great Again”), props (MAGA hat) and now his children. Though he has claimed that his “character” is merely an amplification of his authentic, red-blooded-Republican self, earlier this week Whizzered’s Jeremy Botter confirmed with Covington that he has never in fact voted (including in the 2016 Federal election), and his “interest” in politics has coincided entirely with his newfound infamy.

None of this is particularly searing insight, especially given how inauthentic and poorly executed Covington’s heel persona is when compared to a Chael Sonnen or a Brock Lesnar. But it is worth pointing out that the narrative that Covington’s lowest-common-denominator-approach is a disgrace to the sport isn’t quite telling the whole story.

Yes, Covington’s behavior is repugnant and yes, it’s an objectively bad thing for MMA that he will be given a platform to lob racially charged insults at African immigrant Kamaru Usman, and generally take up air time with exasperating stunts like this. You’ve got to think there’s a degree of sociopathy in the man, if not for the things he says, then for the family and friends who’ve reportedly cut him off because of them.

But beneath the sunglasses and the hat and the s--t eating grin, there’s a guy whose first choice was to let his extremely effective brand of fighting do the talking. That should have been enough to peak the UFC’s interest. That should have opened up doors to the Robbie Lawlers’ and Rafael dos Anjos’ of the world. That should have at least given him some damned job security, given that he turned out to be one of the best welterweights on the planet.

But it didn’t, and now we have to endure -- to borrow a phrase from The Guardian’s Karim Zidan -- the athletic embodiment of Trump’s politics. That’s as much a blight on the UFC as it is on anyone else.

Jacob Debets is a law graduate and writer from Melbourne, Australia. He is currently writing a book analyzing the economics and politics of the MMA industry. You can view more of his writing at jacobdebets.com.