How Dangerous Is MMA?

Dana White's empire is built on no-holds-barred cage matches, but is stepping into the Octagon actually safer than it looks?

Luke O'Brien

Posted Jun 12, 2008 8:04 AM

• What The F**k Is Dana White Fighting For?

Men named Tank do not arrive quietly. Especially not David "Tank" Abbott, a pitfighter who made his MMA debut at UFC 6 in 1994 in a spectacular display of violence that sparked a fight about the dangers of cagefighting. Back then, Abbott was a fearsome man-hydrant who bench-pressed 600 pounds and looked like he'd just come from a Hell's Angels party. His opponent, John Matua, was even scarier. The scowling Matua was the size of a dojo and claimed to be a master of Kapu Kuialua, the "ancient Hawaiian art of bone-breaking."

Alas for Matua, Kapu Kuialua turned out to be useless in real combat. Within 20 seconds, Abbott had knocked the bonebreaker down and out. Then things got messy. Before the ref could step in, Abbott dropped a final thundering right on his supine opponent. Matua's arms and legs stiffened and cranked sideways, elevating off the ground grotesquely. It looked for all the world like he'd been paralyzed. Check it out here.

Let's be clear: MMA has matured significantly since 1994, but in its freewheeling early days part of the sport's attraction was the idea that paralytic doom was only a haymaker away. But was that dread misplaced? As terrifying as Matua's knockout seemed, he was unharmed. After 15 years of MMA fights and the adoption of vastly improved rules and safety standards, the KO appears no worse than countless others today. Wanderlei Silva turned Keith Jardine into a similar-looking meat plank recently at UFC 84. And a few weeks ago, these two fighters simultaneously Matua-ed each other in Indianapolis.

So how dangerous is the sport? There's not much medical data yet. But a few recent studies suggest MMA is safer than it sometimes looks. It's almost certainly less damaging to the brain than the accumulated trauma of getting punched in the head for 12 rounds by a boxer. And it's often gentler than a chop block to the knees from a 300 pound lineman. The variety of ways to finish an MMA bout together with a fighter's ability to tap out before taking too much punishment reduce the risk of serious injury.

A Johns Hopkins study from the March 2008 British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at the 635 sanctioned MMA fights in Nevada from March 2002 to September 2007 and found that while 23.6 percent of fighters sustained some kind of injury, the majority of them consisted of facial lacerations. Cuts can turn fights into drip paintings, but they're rarely serious (a few stitches and you're on the mend, champ). A majority of MMA fights (35.4 percent) ended by submission, whereas only 3.3 percent were decided by knockout. That's less than one third the KO rate in boxing, as measured by another recent study.

"Overall, [MMA] appears to be relatively safe," says Edbert Hsu, one of the doctors behind the study. "But more research is warranted."

Indeed it is. MMA may be more salubrious than all the bloodshed suggests, but that doesn't mean a sport this violent doesn't still contain real peril. "I'd be surprised if we don't see one death every three or four years as we expand the total number of events," says David Watson, one of the Nevada Athletic Commission's top ringside docs.

In the last decade, in fact, the sport has seen three deaths — two in poorly regulated shows outside the country and one in 2007 in Texas. The two fighters who died overseas may have had pre-existing medical conditions they failed to disclose. The Texas fighter died of "complications from blunt trauma to the head with subdural hemorrhage," according to the local medical examiner's office.

Fighters at the greatest risk are those who have sustained a head injury in training. If there's already bleeding inside the skull, even a slight bump can knock a fighter into the great beyond. Sometimes the only indication of a hematoma is a headache. And fighters eager to get in the cage may not reveal symptoms to doctors in their pre-fight screening.

This kind of talk may prevent parents from letting little Johnny near the nice cauliflower-eared man in the neighborhood gym, but one death every three years isn't a bad safety record for most sports. Johnny stands a better chance of dying young if he opts for pro cycling as a career.