A cockfight, only we’re using human beings.

Date February 20, 2007

This Slate story about Ultimate Fighting is pretty much just hilarious:

Stoking the fury of aficionados and piquing the curiosity of novices, the announcers began to wind up the hype: “There is dislike. There is distrust. There is simply hatred.” In a clip, Shamrock, a veteran known as “the most dangerous man in the world,” expressed his belief that Ortiz is a punk. Meanwhile, Ortiz, a punk, forwarded the notion that Shamrock is over the hill. Cut back to Shamrock: “Tito Ortiz is going to find out who Ken Shamrock is, was, and is now.” The “is now” in that sentence wasn’t really a redundancy. Shamrock was employing a new tense—the ultimate tense—to describe how he was about to be bringing it, how it was about to have been brung.