Opinion: The Anniversary of a Terminal, Beastly Sickness

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Since the moment the first Ultimate Fighting Championship grabbed sensationalist headlines back in 1993, mixed martial arts' death has been routinely and incorrectly forecasted. After the UFC was taken off of pay-per-view -- “The Dark Age” as it is now colloquially known -- it was supposed to kill the sport, but didn't. When Semaphore Entertainment Group finally got the sport regulated in New Jersey, but failed to get the state of Nevada on board and had to sell, it looked like a death knell for the sport.

When the Fertitta brothers scooped up the UFC brand under dubious circumstances and finally got back on PPV with UFC 33, Vitor Belfort pulled out of the main event against Tito Ortiz and the event turned into one of the most famous disasters in MMA history with three dreadfully boring 25-minute title fights. The promotion ran over its allotted three-hour PPV block, resulting in most fans' feed going black halfway through the bout. This boondoggle was supposed to kill MMA, too.

Week in, week out, it's hard to write any sort of opinion column without at least tacitly mentioning how disappointing and frankly dire WME-IMG's first five months of UFC ownership have been. No one expects WME-IMG to put the UFC in its grave out of negligence, but the bloated UFC schedule and roster -- even with the company allowing more and more notable fighters to head into free agency and sign elsewhere – has undoubtedly created an atmosphere where even die hard fans invest their time and money more shrewdly. It is not uncommon to see fans suggest this dynamic is “killing” the sport, albeit in a slow, terminal sort of way.

The MMA public may have an intrinsic inferiority complex, the fear that the sky will always fall and this blessed, violent sport will disappear forever. This is simply not realistic, not in 2017. MMA isn't going to “die” as such. Like any culturally entrenched sport, MMA's fate is to soldier on into the future, bearing the scars and sicknesses of whatever has afflicted it in the past, Affliction included.

Fifteen years ago today -- April 28, 2002 to be exact – MMA caught a nasty virus. Today, most of its symptoms are dormant, but that destructive DNA still resides inside the host. This was the day of Pride Fighting Championships 20. This was the MMA debut of “The Beast” Bob Sapp.

When it comes to Sapp, there's an inherent conundrum. Sapp is 12 years removed from his cultural and fighting relevance, and that's perhaps being generous. For fans who have stumbled into loving this sport in the last 10 years, at best, they'd know that Sapp was once famous in Japan and now takes questionable bookings to get punched once or twice, fall down and tap out due to strikes. For someone who was a fight fan through 2002 and 2003, you could talk about the surreal insanity of Sapp's celebrity for hours.

For those who lived through Sapp, no explanation is really necessary. For those who didn't, I'm not sure what explanation could ever suffice.

Here's the Cliff's Notes version: after playing offensive guard at the University of Washington, Sapp was selected in the third round of the 1997 NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears. He never caught on and was bounced out of the league for allegedly testing positive for steroids. After taking a menial job at a funeral home lugging caskets around, the 6-foot-4, 330-pound Sapp decided to try his hand at pro-wrestling.

Sapp also took a booking that would change his life and combat sports history: on Nov. 4, 2000, he defeated fellow former Chicago Bear William “Refrigerator” Perry in an episode of “Celebrity Boxing” on FX. It didn't get the mainstream media attention of Perry's next “Celebrity Boxing” bout against 7-foot-7 former NBA player Manute Bol, but Sapp-Perry did catch the attention of one person in particular, K-1 founder Kazuyoshi Ishii.

This was a truly unique and historic moment in MMA history, as K-1 and Pride FC had promotionally aligned with one another, exchanging talent and more crucially, putting their respective talents on two of Japan's five major network broadcasters, the Tokyo Broadcasting System and Fuji TV respectively. This is the same relationship that would help create K-1 and Pride's landmark “Shockwave” event in August 2002, the event where Sapp nearly killed Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira seconds into the contest, in front of an alleged 91,000 fans in Tokyo National Stadium. While the 91,000-plus number is historically in dispute, Shockwave legitimately drew over 70,000 in attendance. With all due respect to Olympic gold medalist Hidehiko Yoshida's Pride debut, Sapp was perhaps the biggest reason for that monster number, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Before he even fought professionally, Sapp,was heavily promoted in the Japanese media. For millions and millions of yen, the naturally charismatic and physically freakish took on a gimmick that, at best, could be described as “King Kong under duress, if he was human.” At worst -- and that's probably most correct in Sapp's case -- his character could best be described as a cringe-inducing, thoroughly racist caricature of black American masculinity.

Sapp cashed in big on the character. From late 2002 through 2004, Sapp was all over Japanese television: in commercials advertising everything from eye drops to gummy candy; on variety shows menacing fans during games of “Tekken” and chasing after teenage Japanese pop groups; recreating the Michael Jackson “Thriller” artwork for his own album, “Sapp Time.” His K-1 bout with sumo legend “Akebono” Chad Rowan on New Year's Eve 2003 drew a 42.5 television rating in Japan, with over 54 million people watching live. K-1 tried to have him fight Mike Tyson on several occasions. Sapp may have never been a truly global MMA star, but at the peak of his cultural resonance, he was more famous in Japan than Conor McGregor is, anywhere, even Ireland. Several times over, in fact.

But this day, April 28 just 15 years ago, is when we got our first taste of one of the most lucrative, destructive ploys in combat sports history. Pride 20 was a card headlined by the incredibly anticipated first showdown between Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic and Wanderlei Silva; arguably 2002's “Fight of the Year” between Murilo “Ninja” Rua and Mario Sperry; Ricardo Arona's breakout win over Dan Henderson; Antonio Rogerio Nogueira's Pride debut and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson beginning the winning streak that would place him among the best 205-pounders in the world. None of this was nearly as important as Sapp's debut against Japanese pro-wrestler and Pride jobber Yoshihisa Yamamoto.

We will probably never know if Sapp-Yamamoto was a work, but it didn't really have to be. Yamamoto tentatively pawed and kicked at the enormous Sapp until just over two minutes into the bout, when he ran into a clinch with “The Beast,” who had at least four inches and 120 pounds on him. Sapp unloaded hockey fight-style uppercuts and massive hooks until Yamamoto was rescued. Incredibly and unfortunately, a star was born that night in Yokohama.

Just about five weeks later, Sapp made his K-1 rules debut. Against 220-pound kickboxer Tsuyoshi Nakasako, Sapp fouled the Japanese veteran repeatedly, throwing him into the corners of the ring, repeatedly clobbering his opponent while he was down. Sapp was disqualified in 90 seconds flat and physically exploded -- sadly, the exact intention -- while K-1 officials tried to restrain him. The gimmickry was immediately transparent; any sane person watching this, no matter their love for kickboxing, knew that K-1 had scripted all of this right out of the pro-wrestling playbook.

Three weeks later, Sapp returned to Pride to face Rings shoot-style wrestler and legit MMA fighter Kiyoshi Tamura -- all 5-foot-10, 200 pounds of him. Sapp threw him in a corner and battered a man 10 times more skilled than him. It took him 11 seconds. It was everything Pride and K-1 could've hoped for and more.

If you didn't know the rest of the Sapp saga, you'd figure this would be a classic case of an overhyped promotional clown getting pushed to the stars, then eventually melted by the sun. That is not what actually happened. This is why Sapp's place in history is pernicious and another reason why his legacy is contaminous.

In the aforementioned fight against Nogueira, who at this time had yet to meet Fedor Emelianenko and was considered both the best heavyweight in the world and generally indestructible, Sapp piledrove “Minotauro” on his head in neck less than 10 seconds into the bout in one of the legitimately scariest “How is this guy not dead?” moments in MMA history. And for almost 15 minutes, he threw Nogueira around and bashed him from guard. Of course, we all know Nogueira survived Sapp and the lights going out in the middle of the fight, got an armbar and forced the tap.

However, because of Nogueira's penchant for taking enormous amount of punishment before prevailing combined with Sapp's surprising success using nothing but sheer size and strength, the lesson many MMA folks took away from this bout was that if Sapp just kept training, just spent more time with Matt Hume and Maurice Smith, he would be unbeatable.

More incredibly, with mere months of training, Sapp knocked out K-1 legend Ernesto Hoost. Twice. Within two months of each other. He ran roughshod over “Mr. Perfect” twice, an unprecedented upset that happened twice in a span of weeks. If Sapp was really just smoke and mirrors, if he was really just a woeful, racist Japanese television character, how could he do this to one of the greatest heavyweight kickfighters ever? This is what makes Sapp's conscious coordination of his latter career so bizarre. “The Beast” may have been more of a genetic, chemical specimen than a natural fighter, but he had legitimate fighting success out of the gate.

Perhaps his MMA and K-1 losses tempered or crushed his confidence and Sapp found it easier to go on taking big money fights in exotic locales and tapping out at the first sign of danger. Kickboxing purists reveled in his March 2003 K-1 loss to “Cro Cop,” who broke his orbital bone, crumpling Sapp to the mat and creating the image that this enormous behemoth was crying on the floor. Fight fans openly mocked him after his May 2004 loss to Kazuyuki Fujita, who savagely soccer kicked Sapp into submission in just over two minutes. It was Fujita who first revealed Sapp's “true form” if you can call it that: this mountainous, muscular man in the fetal position, wincing in pain before meekly tapping out.

You'd think that after the kakutogi boom in Japan died and combat sports were no longer a Japanese network TV fad, after Sapp crystallized his late career reputation for essentially being an opportunistic jobber, he would just be resigned to the dust bin of history. However, true superstardom is hard to find in prizefighting, no matter what continent you are on. This is why Sapp is 0-13 in MMA competition over the last six years, but still gets paid more than 90 percent of the UFC roster to show up. This is why Rizin rolled him out for a Shoot Boxing rules rematch with Akebono on New Year's Eve 2015.

It's hard to make conclusive sense of Sapp's early successes against Nogueira and Hoost, but for many, they served as a sort of perverse evidence that any athletic freak, especially one with a background in stick and ball sports, can roll into MMA and with the “right amount of training” become a world beater. It's how Brock Lesnar closed as a -200 favorite against Cain Velasquez on some sports books. It's why so many fight fans are thirsty to see disgraced NFL standout Greg Hardy get into the cage, even if they detest him as a human being.

The best thing you can say for Sapp is that he was the rising tide that lifted all boats, that his superstardom ushered in the most lucrative era MMA and kickboxing had seen to date and inadvertently or not, he got dozens if not hundreds of other fighters handsomely paid. Nonetheless, he did while willingly acting out a hideous, reptile-brained stereotype of African-Americans. When this idea is broached, the usual response is “Oh, well, you know how Japan is.”

Sapp is symbolic of a certain kind of gross cultural relativism that rationalizes turning a blind eye to antisocial behavior. It's the same impulse that leads MMA fans to shrug their shoulders while UFC champions get six-figure appearance fees to hang out with Chechen leader and MMA promoter Ramzan Kadyrov, while the dictator reportedly opens up concentration camps for homosexuals in a sincere attempt to genocide Chechnya's gay population. It's a world away, you know? As long as the fights are good.

Sapp is the most bitter reminder that true household names and celebrities are exceedingly rare in prizefighting and once promoters get desperate or need to pop a particular rating, they'll stoop as low as possible. This is how we end up with “CM Punk” in the Octagon and the UFC circumventing drug testing to get Lesnar onto the UFC 200 card. This is how we end up with the horror show that was “Kimbo Slice” and “DaDa 5000”.

Sapp didn't invent racism, opportunism, crackpot theories of how fighting skill is developed or the freakshow aspects of combat sports, but intentionally or not, Sapp courted all of these concepts, reinforced them and normalized them.

“The Beast” undeniably injected millions of dollars into the MMA and kickboxing industries, but he also left them both with a permanent sickness. When combat sports are at their worst, their most antisocial, their most craven, Sapp's shadow looms on the wall, bellowing in cartoonish laughter and it was 15 years ago today that his shadow was cast.