How Sentimentalism Changes Our Feelings About Fighters

"Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself." - W.B. Yates

Muhammad Ali and Matt Hughes are two people you would, never ever compare to each other normally. Ali is the greatest heavyweight pugilist of all time; Hughes was a great welterweight champion in mixed martial arts. Ali is a black Muslim who in his day was a touchstone for social commentary; Hughes is a white Christian who'd rather go deer hunting than do an interview. At first you think that the only thing in common these two men share is the fact that they made their living with their fists. But they share more in common than you think.

I first started following MMA back in 2005, when I stumbled across the second season of The Ultimate Fighter. Matt Hughes was one of the coaches on that show, and he was the very definition of a heel. He berated the fighters on his team when they didn't perform well, and he either mocked or criticized the fighters on the opposing team to their face. He was both the high school jock who shoved you in a locker, and the coach who always saw you as a failure. He was not a beloved figure. I remember the absolute glee that MMA fans around the world had when Georges St. Pierre finally knocked Hughes from his perch as welterweight champion in the fall of 2006. Hughes didn't do much to help his image over the next few years - he feuded with Matt Serra, and wrote an autobiography that featured stories from his life that bordered on disturbing.

Muhammad Ali was every bit the heel that Matt Hughes was and then some. He had always played the role from the very beginning, when he was Cassius Clay, the loud mouthed Olympic gold medalist from Louisville Kentucky. His gimmick at the time was to call out the round he was going to defeat his opponent in - if he said "Archie Moore must go down in four," then by God Archie Moore would be finished in the fourth round. People actively rooted against him because he was a loud mouthed braggart. They so badly wanted to see someone put him in his place, to make him eat his words. This only got worse after he defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title and announced himself as a member of the Nation of Islam, along with changing his name to Muhammad Ali. It escalated as Ali's rhetoric got more sinister - he openly decried integration, and even attended KKK meetings to discuss how the races should be separated. He refused induction into the armed services, which enraged the conservative base in America. He decried his greatest rival, Joe Frazier, as an Uncle Tom, a gorilla, an ugly and ignorant man. And people hated Ali for it, even beyond the world of boxing. He was a total social pariah.

Yet today, both Ali and Hughes are remembered warmly and fondly. When I see fans talk about Hughes today, it's always in terms of how great his legacy is, or how he was a wonderful champion. There is nary a hint of the hate this man generated just four or five years ago. Fans who once openly rooted for Hughes to be destroyed in every one of his fights, now campaign for him to have favorable matchups that he can win as he heads into retirement. With Ali, it's even more exaggerated. You'd swear this man was Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. rolled into one. Not only that, he's been transformed into some sort of an untouchable boxer, a man who only lost when he wanted to, and could beat Wladimir Klitschko, Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson in the same night with one arm tied behind his back.

Mark Kram looked at the way people view Ali today in his fantastic book, "Ghosts of Manila" -

"Cheap myth coruscates the man; the wire scheme for his sculpture is too big. Junk commentary has been slapped on it to the point that a precise appreciation of just who Ali was (and is) has become obscured. Worse, grandstanding compassion over his admittedly tragic current situation has only served to block a clear view of him even more. While myth usually begins in a place of truth - in this case, uncommon boxing skill- it often ends in a place of fantasia, and this is where we find Ali. He has been celebrated for the wrong reasons and has been interpreted by an increasingly uniformed generation of media that was barely born at the height of his career."

Kram brings up two excellent points here, the first being that a lot of the reason for sentimentality with Ali is his battle with Parkinson's disease. We see someone who was once a brash young man and a superb athlete reduced to a silent old man with a terrible tremor. It makes you feel sympathy for him and it makes it difficult to recall all the things that people disliked him for so many years ago. But his second point is even more salient - most of those writing about Ali today weren't around when he was actively fighting. They are seeing everything in retrospect, through sentimental blinders.

And I think that's a bit of what we're getting with Matt Hughes. A lot of the people who think of him in warm terms simply weren't following the sport when this man was the ultimate heel. If you just started following the sport within the last year or two, you've only seen Hughes as an aging fighter, out there giving his all in the twilight of his career.

But there's something more to it. I've seen Hughes through two sets of eyes over the years - at first, the man I rooted against in his fights with Royce Gracie, BJ Penn and Georges St. Pierre, then years later as the man I rooted for against Ricardo Almeida. I no longer see him as the super heel that terrorized people on The Ultimate Fighter - I just see him as the quietly confident former champion who still puts on exciting fights more often than not.

Time softens feelings, and we have forgotten how we thought of Ali and Hughes in their respective primes. We choose to remember the good aspects of both men, and forget the things that upset us. And while Ali and Hughes certainly deserve to be remembered fondly, let us not totally erase from memory what they were really like at one time. Not only is that rewriting history, it is disrespectful to both men's legacy. How Ali and Hughes portrayed themselves is an essential part of who they were as fighters and as men.

And we shouldn't forget that.