Opinion: Eulogy for the UFC’s Pre-Soccer Aesthetics

---

I'm no conspiracy theorist. I don't think that Zuffa architected the timing of Jose Aldo officially pulling out of UFC 189, and it goes without saying that Aldo's infirmity is a gut punch-level disappointment. With that said, the timing of that announcement certainly helped the Ultimate Fighting Championship in one particular capacity: burying its embarrassing UFC fight kit unveiling on Tuesday and quieting the Reebok backlash for the time being.

If not for the stakes and nature of the Aldo news, it would look like a classic politics-and-PR 101 maneuver, the timing just so particular, coming nine hours after the UFC-Reebok kit press conference -- long enough to get news reports out but not long enough to let everyone get their hottest, deepest screeds out there and certainly not long enough for the chirping voices in the MMA echo chamber to build to a full cacophony of scorn. It's a bit of dumb luck in a hard week for the UFC, and frankly, I won't stand for it.

You know me, obsessive and annoying dead horse beater that I am, I can't resist. However, in fact, I'm not digging up this fairly fresh grave just to get in a few kicks. I want to eulogize what we're leaving behind. The next time we see fights in the Octagon, it'll be a new world blanketed in bland attire under the guise of professionalism. For now, we're leaving behind a literally more colorful, personable time. It cries out for remembrance.

Before that, those kicks I mentioned.

The fact that the criticisms of the UFC-Reebok presser were so uniform, pun partially intended, is instructive. It wasn't just that it was portrayed as a nationalistic fashion show; it was a nationalistic fashion show from dubstep hell, a surreal morsel of a dystopian future. With dozens of hand-picked international UFC fighters on stage in their virtually identical Reebok attire, they looked like an army of trained mech robot pilots from a science fiction movie. No one, not the Reebok brass, not UFC President Dana White, not any of the UFC stars like Conor McGregor, Joanna Jedrzejczyk or Cain Velasquez who were called to the microphone, seemed like they wanted to be there.

Why would they be? For Reebok, this is simply another chance to market to a niche sports training demographic, like CrossFit. For UFC execs, they know that this rollout is going to be anything but popular. Fighters know they're mostly getting screwed on the deal. Again, speaking of the uniformity of public sentiment, even the most perfunctory of UFC announcements are usually marked by roster fighters endorsing the cause via social media, even when it's forced. Twitter and the like were positively silent on the talent front, save for this notable tweet from UFC middleweight Josh Samman:

I have really, really enjoyed the MMA media reaction to today's fashion show. Also, I think my tongue is bleeding.

— Josh Samman (@JoshSamman) June 30, 2015

Cosmetic makeovers are typically never successful on launch; take it from someone at Sherdog.com. However, what stinks about the UFC-Reebok kits goes beyond taste and aesthetics. It's a fundamental misreading of the role apparel plays for combat athletes, in general, and MMA fighters, in particular. In an era in which the UFC is more desperate for recognizable stars than ever, it has whitewashed a 600-fighter roster into palette swap enemies in a 16-bit video game.

There is something wonderfully ironic about the UFC and Reebok patterning their inaugural kit after soccer. Naturally, both companies are looking to the politics of respectability and the fact that futbol is the most internationally visible, inclusive sport and one that generally confers class and integrity. Of course, this comes at a time when FIFA is mired in scandal and soccer is in its most profound state of disrepute in years.

The phrase “kit” itself is a peculiar choice. It's clearly a direct rip from soccer nomenclature, but it's hard to imagine it wasn't chosen deliberately as a way to avoid the phrase “uniform,” which has obvious implications for the UFC, its enterprise and whether or not its fighters are employees or independent contractors. The phrase “jersey” has no real currency, as despite the kit's inclusion of a rash guard, fighters don't actually compete in them. While I'm firmly in favor of MMA having linguistically robust jargon, the fact that “kit” has no cultural precedence in MMA makes the actual thing itself seem all the more foreign and alien.

It's obvious to see how we got to this point. The UFC's larger, promotional aesthetic -- and by extension and emulation, all of MMA's -- has been satirized and mocked to the point of mainstream humor, to an extent that average people will draw a sketch of a mohawked, tribal-tattooed miscreant in an Affliction shirt reflexively if you ask simply ask them, “What does an MMA fan look like?” However, not every MMA fighter is some yahoo in a bedazzled V-neck. In an attempt to look “professional” like other sports, we end up with a 180-degree turn, with a UFC uniform stripped of anything that could resemble personality. Worse, any space on the gear that could be used in a psycho-visually positive way is taken up with an enormous diagonal “UFC” graphic across the chest.

This is another piece of the soccer irony, as the UFC's kits are modeled after soccer's in every way except the dimension that matters most: soul. Whether you're talking the jerseys for international sides or the kits for a regional team, soccer gear has personality and individual flair. You get horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, coats of arms, different kinds of collars, different kinds of sleeves and every eyesore color combination you can even dream of. They display and reinforce tradition and, by extension, identity. They do not say “FIFA” or “UEFA” across the chest in ostentatious fashion, pushing the brand at the pyrrhic expense of its athletes. Consequently, the UFC kits are left looking like giant Uno cards.

You know what else makes soccer jerseys unique? The giant team sponsor on the chest from which the club profits. This is another issue entirely, but surely someone would take me to task for not stating the obvious.

As much as I delight in the shambolic -- the fact that “Giblert Melendez” has instantaneously become a widely understood MMA meme or Josh Koscheck is claiming that the UFC has no legal right to sell merchandise with his name on it, despite being still presently available from the Reebok store -- I know that we've already lost something. Skills still settle scores in the cage; it takes more than a pair of shorts to make a successful MMA fighter. Damn if a great pair of shorts can't crystallize their persona, though.

A pair of board shorts trimmed in flames or icicles may sound corny divorced from context, but they still added a hard-to-explain richness to Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. As if the nickname “Cro Cop” doesn't go far enough, Mirko Filipovic's checkerboard trunks captured his essence better than anything else, as silly as it sounds, even if he has forsaken them in recent bouts. Didn't hurt for showing off those Earl Campbell thighs, either.

Again, it's not even that the UFC uniforms are disappointing on a design level; it's that those failures coalesce in a way that undermines the ability to a) sell this overpriced, $80 merchandise and b) sell the UFC fighters themselves.

Kazushi Sakuraba wears orange, Phil Davis wears pink and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson wears woodland camo. Anderson Silva is black and yellow, Rich Franklin is chocolate and strawberry swirl. Melvin Manhoef wears gladiator shorts and Carla Esparza wears a singlet. Dennis Hallman wore a speedo once and Jutaro Nakao wore the same one his whole damn career. That doesn't even account for all the miscellaneous ring-walk gear, from wacky costumes to a T-shirt with a cheeky message. Hell, Georges St. Pierre comes to the cage in a gi, which somehow, Reebok doesn't even produce for public consumption.

As far as actual MMA training products go, the most notable successes in the sport's history were natural reactions to fighters' individual, idiosyncratic tastes. Shinya Aoki liked to grapple in long tights like Shooto veterans from 20 years prior; his training partners thought it was novel and it caught on. Aoki showed up to fight in his technicolor spats, hit gogoplatas on folks and pushed every grappling nerd to get a pair. Frank Mir is a massive heavyweight jiu-jitsu player and struggled to find shorts that offered him the necessary mobility to grapple, until Sprawl hooked him up with its split-seam board shorts before his UFC 46 rematch with Wes Sims. As simple as the design was, it caught on like wildfire in the community and helped put Sprawl on the map in that niche space.

Do I even need to bring up the reaction to and ongoing legacy of Chan Sung Jung's “Korean Zombie” shirt by Tricoasta or B.J. Penn's black belt vale tudo trunks, produced by RVCA? The organic process of a single person's preferences creating a piece of attire that inspires and excites an audience is dead now, beneath the sport's greatest stage. I'll suffer the ocular torture of a million Affliction shirts if it means we get another garment as iconic as Jung's, but at no time in the immediate future will a UFC fighter's choice of attire stagger the MMA population and spawn serious conversation, for better or for worse; and that's a damn shame.

I choose my words carefully there, as I do believe there's a measure of hope. The greatest irony of all is that from this point forward, the UFC-Reebok deal will be judged on its flexibility, a word they actually misspelled on the big screens during Tuesday's presser despite it being an emphasized buzzword within the presentation.

It would be both tone deaf and flat stupid for the UFC and Reebok to not consider the constructive criticisms of fighters and consumers going forward. Likely, most of that conversation will center on secondary sponsorships and whether an agreement can be reached for fighters to sell some small part of their apparel space. The cosmetic component can't be ignored, however. The world is better lived and more fondly remembered in color, and the UFC has just filtered its product to black and white, albeit with flag decals.

It's possible if not probable that some of you think I'm just being an overly mawkish aesthete, but I'm confident that time will vindicate me, and I'm not even talking about a far off, distant time. You might think this is all much ado about some crummy kits, but let me inform you that starting with UFC 189, there's four UFC events in seven days. That's 44 fights with 88 different fighters in one week, all wearing fundamentally the same gear with only the faintest whiff of customizability, personality or intrigue. Even if you detest fashion as a cultural concept, it will start to eat at you. You will miss the days of putting up with a dozen fighters wearing CondomDepot.com ads on their ass in order to enjoy one over-the-top costumed entrance, just to make you feel alive again.

While I'm being helpful, let me remind you that if at any point during those 44 fights you get confused as to the identity of any of the 88 combatants, their full name is conveniently located on the back of their jersey -- the jersey that they are not wearing inside the cage while they compete, of course, because they are not soccer players.