Growing Pains

If women’s MMA is holding open auditions for its next crossover star, Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos is destined for the blooper reel. A bricked-up in-cage sociopath with a touch of goofy Brazilian charm, Santos is too damn weird for the fans who were Ludovico Technique’d into buying Gina Carano—the pre-packaged prom queen cum mean girl of women’s MMA—as the sport’s savior. The same Gina Carano is currently starring in Haywire, a movie that answers the rarely-asked but still urgent question “What if Steven Soderbergh got hella high and watched every 80’s action movie ever?”

This is also the same Gina Carano who, as a professional fighter, routinely struggled to make contracted weight limits and received charitable slash criminal matchmaking up until she fought for the Strikeforce 145 lb. championship against Santos at her Misery-era Kathy Bates-iest. The result was not entirely dissimilar to watching 30 Japanese giant hornets murk 30,000 European honey bees—it started out cool in a reptilian brain sort of way, before basic compassion kicked in and you realized how brutally unfair the fight was in the first place. Carano should be grateful Santos didn’t rip her cornrows clean off and put them up for sale as Amazonian keepsake necklaces on Etsy. Going to Hollywood was probably a good career choice for Carano, all things considered.

And so Santos got to lord over an otherwise anemic division until an oft-whispered accusation got to have its coming-out party, all formal like. Three weeks after a victory that lasted all of 16 seconds, the California State Athletic Commission announced Santos had tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol and would be suspended for 12 months. UFC President and unannounced Strikeforce shot-caller Dana White promptly declared (dude doesn’t announce, he declares) that Santos had been stripped of her title and added that her suspension “pretty much kills the division.” Santos’ predictable counter was to blame a dietary supplement, which is the same as announcing a desire to never be taken seriously ever again.

What the suspension of Santos means depends on your view of women’s MMA, a sport still viewed as distinctly kid-sister by most. Some people saw Cyborg as a human battering ram with all the crossover appeal of a … battering ram; some thought she could help the women’s division break through the glass ceiling. Regardless of where you fall on Santos, the trouble she’s in is a damn fascinating story that highlights the biggest and maybe even sole obstacle women’s MMA faces in becoming a self-sustaining sport.

No female professional sport can be truly self-sustaining until it—to some degree, at least—transcends the notion that its survival relies on having model-pretty, preferably white, faces out in front at all times. That overcoming fucked-up social norms is a requirement for a fledgling sport says a lot about why women’s sports in general are back-end-of-SportsCenter material most of the time. The divergent paths of Carano and Santos bring to life this concept in brutally stark terms.

Carano, the Maxim bro-babe of questionable fistic commitment, was handed unprecedented opportunities, based mostly on Beavis and Butt-Head-ian reaction to her thingies. She ended up with precious little to show for those chances, at least in terms of actual sporting accomplishments, but the privilege train never stopped for her. Carano improbably landed a made-for-her major motion picture despite having the personality of an awkward wall of drying paint prone to creepy giggle fits.

Santos, the walking monument to vascularity and violence, earned every drop of success she found. Yet, she’s been relegated to outcast status for a transgression that has been morally forgiven and rhetorically excused when committed by a laundry list of male athletes. Many fans and sportswriters insist on acting like we’re all gosh-darned upset by an athlete using those evil steroids none of us know anything about. In the case of Santos, the moral panic that steroids often inspire makes it that much easier to claim the imaginary high ground while perpetuating the kid sister condescension toward women’s sports. You could follow suit and be that shitty person.

Or—and it’s a lovely or—we could all realize that women’s MMA provides us with the opportunity to witness first-hand the rarest sports narrative there is: an inchoate sport finding its niche in the greater ecology. And it’s hard to miss the next big fight in WMMA, if only because the sport’s plotline is pretty threadbare right now. There is Strikeforce women’s 135 lb. champion Miesha Tate. There is 2008 Olympic judo bronze medalist turned arm-breaking savant Ronda Rousey. There is the scheduled March 3 title fight between them. Whoever wins will be the sport’s most visible face, and both sides have expressed a mutual disdain for how the other would handle that responsibility.

Tate is a genial sportswoman who indulges in the usual pre-fight theatrics, but is at core an all-business, be-nice type that isn’t about to make shit personal just because. In the cage, her style is a progressive blend of a wrestling base and easy relationship with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The end-product is rapidly becoming a mold many converted wrestlers consciously seek to emulate. It hasn’t hurt Tate’s profile that her particular mold happens to please the eyes of the testosterone-drunk MMA masses. 

Rousey is no less traditionally attractive, but she openly despises the idea of female athletes doubling as sex objects for slack-jawed little boys in the name of easy paper. But she’s not a Tebow-style holy roller either; Rousey gets all eyes on her thanks to a nasty shit-talking streak that channels all the wit, vitriol, and insanity of ECW-era Mick Foley. The lady can be reflexively mean in a very human, very cruel sort of way. The shit of it is that she usually comes off as a perfectly nice person, except when she does things like accusing a rival busted for steroids of having a dick. It makes for an arresting psychological profile, without even touching on what happens when Rousey’s in the cage. Her four professional fights have lasted barely two minutes combined (!) and they’ve all ended via her awful and awe-inspiring penchant for the armbar. I’m not talking standard issue, hurt-but-no-harm armbars either. Rousey takes evident, perverse joy in the dull snaps and sharp wails that come free with her handiwork. Compassion isn’t really her strong suit. 

Women’s MMA isn’t about giving a fan easy choices; no one is really pushing behind-the-scenes for fighters to hit the pre-programmed marks that kill these kinds of organic stories. It’s all grays. What we get instead is two complex individuals out in the open, trying to figure out what it means to be the vanguard of an entire sport. They do this in a sport that, at its core, unflinchingly challenges conventional ideas about gender roles while still struggling with how to present itself to a society still invested in those imaginary roles.

Women’s MMA isn’t going to provide any final answers on the larger issue, but it will eventually have to settle on an answer for itself. The answer, for the time being, depends on who wins come March 3. I just wish this viscerally exciting and narratively complex sport didn’t have so many of those annoying women. Feel me, bro?