It’s brutal, it’s violent, but more and more people are watching a sport that was once banned from television because it was too bloody. These days, cage fighting is prime-time television and mixed martial arts (MMA) is a multibillion-dollar industry, but away from the UFC spotlight, Americans fight on the mat every day. What you’re going to see in the next few years is people who are supposed to be playing baseball, basketball or football, and instead move to mixed martial arts.
We meet an all-American male and female fighter with high expectations in places and places you wouldn’t expect, including cage fighting and a church where the Bible goes hand in hand. For some, MMA offers the opportunity to live out a dream. For others, those dreams have been dashed.
Savant Young is a professional MMA fighter with 13 years of experience in the sport. If you type his name on YouTube, it only takes 15 seconds to see how he earned the battle title Black Superman, but now Savant spends more time teaching other fighters than he does knocking them out more.
Savant co-owns Fight Academy, a gym in Pasadena, California, specializing in mixed martial arts (MMA). Gyms like the Fighting Academy have sprung up across the country, with more than 2.5 million Americans taking part in MMA training or fighting in 2010. A lot of people train just to stay in shape, but everyone wants to fight.
When guys coming off the street say they want to fight, they have to go to all the qualifying sessions, go to practice because at the end of the day, not being ready for the sport is a very serious consequence.
MMA combines various martial arts such as wrestling, boxing and jiu-jitsu. Because the game is usually played in a cage, it is also called cage fighting. While MMA fans love the high technicality of the sport, they also celebrate raw brutality. Videos of fan-made knockout games often go viral.
