The MMA Playhouse: Chael Sonnen as Andy Kaufman

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One of the things that MMA doesn’t have that other mainstream sports do is a rich history going back long than several decades. In terms of historical context, MMA doesn’t have it in the way baseball, football and basketball do. When we want to compare various fighters in terms of ability it’s not towards the past we look for the apt comparison for most comparisons. We look in the present and to a fighter’s current peers for most comparisons; the abilities of certain wrestlers are measured against one another in terms of their ability to translate that sport into MMA as well as their success in it from NCAA titles to World and Olympic success.

For the rest we have to look outside of the sport for other comparisons, and Chael Sonnen’s change from being merely a brash fighter to being an agent provocateur of all things Brazilian has its roots in the past. But it’s not in athletic accomplishments does the right example come: it’s that in entertainment.

Anderson Silva and Georges St. Pierrre’s dominance is measured against guys like Michael Jordan for an apt discussion. Their string of dominance has set the standard for MMA champions in the future in the same way an athlete’s image as a winner was changed after Jordan. With Jordan willing the ‘90s Bulls to six titles, his will to win greater than nearly any force save for the supernatural, to go through your career without a title looked significantly worse. It wasn’t ok to merely be a great player and come close to winning a title to be amongst the elite; winning titles became much more synonymous with greatness. Being a champion and defending a title after winning it has distinguished GSP and Silva moreso than their counterparts; more than 2-3 title defenses is rare in MMA and the two are setting the standard for dominant champions in the same MJ did the same with winning.

And for some, pop culture moments tend to make for the best comparisons. With a sport that has such a short history, and one that has radically changed into its current form only fairly recently in historical terms, we have to look elsewhere for anything resembling a sort of historical context. Pop culture and other sports work perfectly because they’re easily relatable.

Certain moments in pop culture history tend to be repeatable for one main reason: because they work.

It’s why young, female, attractive pop stars start out as doe-eyed innocents and then embrace a radically sexualized persona to symbolize they are no longer a young girl: they are woman and we ought to hear them roar. It’s why no one should’ve been shocked when a talented singer like Christina Aguilera can go from singing about the power of first love and the magic of a first kiss, dressed like the girl next door, to singing about how she wants to go get “wild and dirty” while clad in not much more than butt-less chaps and a smile, greased like up a minimum wage worker underneath a car at a Lube Pro.

We see it all the time, most recently with Miley Cyrus and it stands that it’ll happen again with any other number of young female singers trading their fading innocence for a burgeoning womanhood expressed in degrading terms. It’s a sizable career boost that allows a singer to shed her Disneyfied roots and move on to being more than merely appealing to a certain segment of the population; it’s a gamble, as some fail miserably, but most wind up better off than where they started. Shedding the skin of a teen star to being an adult star is a lot like transitioning from television to movies, amongst others.

Andy Kaufman had one of these moments in his career, the same kind of moment Sonnen had right after Silva’s embarrassing victory over Demian Maia. By becoming the antithesis of the quiet, reserved Silva, the Olympic team member stumbled onto something that vaulted him to the spotlight of MMA for some good and bad reasons. But it wasn’t new or unique; he was merely copying the playbook that Kaufman was running right up until he died in 1984 of cancer.

In 1982 Kaufman was winding up his run on “Taxi” and wanted something big to follow it up with. Kaufman had been a fairly popular comedy star of the 1970s and wanted something big to start his run after playing a variant on his “Foreign Man” shtick on the popular television comedy. And he did it with an improbable run with Memphis wrestling star Jerry “The King” Lawler with one of the great defining moments on network television: Lawler’s epic slap of Kaufman on “The Dave Letterman Show.”

Kaufman had been humorously wrestling women for his own handmade title as an “Inter-Gender World Champion,” as he’d grown up a wrestling fan and secretly wanted to be like the powerful men of yesteryear he grew up watching as a child. He would issue challenges and it became his new bit, a throwback to an era that was about to end.

Professional wrestling was about to change, too, as Vince McMahon Jr. and the WWF were about to destroy the territory system through which Lawler had developed. The Kaufman-Lawler angle was a bit of genius in retrospect: Lawler was to have grown tired with Kaufman’s schtick and challenged him to a match, which the cowardly Kaufman would back away from. Eventually pretending to injure the comedian with his trademark piledriver, Kaufman would go on NBC with Lawler on “Letterman.” In a neck brace screaming about his injury, Lawler would eventually slap the comic on national television to set up one of the biggest matches in Memphis pro wrestling history. He had paid off all the work with something he could proud of by seizing the moment; it had been a classic storyline in the industry and Kaufman got to realize his dreams in the ring with Lawler. Years later we knew it was all scripted by Lawler and Kaufman, as we had long suspected, but there was magic building up to that big match in Memphis. And if it had ended there, this would’ve made a great story as it stood.

Sonnen seized the moment in the same way. Calling Silva out to the carpet for any variety of offenses, and insulting him in a way no one had ever done, Sonnen didn’t merely make his title fight with Silva personal. The things he said were shocking because no one in MMA had ever really done what he did before to Silva. This had crossed the line from merely hyping a fight to making this a hot commodity. Sonnen had merely been another contender before he opened his mouth, a wrestler with a pedigree not as expansive as the fight with best amateur wrestling background he had defeated (Dan Henderson). Silva’s fight with Maia had made him an easy target for fans and Sonnen was the mouthpiece to do so. Dana White had famously promised that if Silva wanted a fight that you “didn’t have to ask Chael Sonnen twice” for it. Sonnen famously promised that this wasn’t going to be a fight, that it was going to be a one-sided beating and that Sonnen would be swinging the hammer. He had promised enough out of this fight that one had to wonder if Sonnen could cash the check his mouth was writing. And going into the fight, the match predictions were fairly uniform: Silva would destroy Sonnen and the trash-talking was just fight hype. Most predicted an early KO through spectacular means, similar to the Silva-Forrest Griffin fight.

Then something magical happened: Sonnen delivered.

For over 23 minutes, Chael Sonnen was dominating the man considered to be the best fighter in the world in both his weight category and overall. Taking him down and striking him more in that fight than he had been hit in his total career in the UFC, Chael Sonnen showed to the world that it wasn’t him hyping the fight. He had the ability to beat the champion; a last minute submission from Silva would save his title and earn many honors, including Fight of the Year from many publications. At the post-fight press conference, you could feel Sonnen’s anguish; he was two minutes from completing a promise he had made to his father, a promise he had failed at in both MMA and in amateur wrestling, Silva had shown the heart of a champion and single-handedly redeemed himself from a legion of fans upset at his clowning of the BJJ ace Maia. It was an epic win and if it had ended there, it would have also made for a great story on its own.

But unfortunately it doesn’t. Kaufman’s career in Memphis after the big match in Memphis extended far longer than merely that one big angle with Lawler. Trying to hold on afterwards far longer than was warranted, Kaufman ruined his career in Hollywood for his shot at extending his run as a pro wrestling bad guy in Memphis. He had blown his fortune to do so; famously his friends at the time like Robin Williams were lending him money, hoping that he wasn’t spending it on wrestling gear or mats in the same way drug addicts ask for rent money and blow it on Heroin (for example). Even Memphis wrestling fans were sick on him afterwards, leading to Kaufman’s exit from pro wrestling and his fall from grace, ending up dying of cancer and winding up more of a cautionary tale of the excesses of fame as opposed to a comedy legend.

Sonnen is hitting that phase of the Kaufman experience right now. After losing the championship fight, and having his personal life compromised by both his inability to maintain a proper course of treatment for hypogonadism as well as own fiscal irresponsibility (for lack of a better word), Sonnen’s emergence from silence has been more of the same. And it’s been boring, too, because it’s a slightly different variant on the same theme.

More insults to Silva, including that he didn’t lose their title fight because from where Sonnen is from you don’t lose a fight after beating a guy up for 23 minutes and then he wraps his legs around your head for two seconds. More insults to the Blackhouse fighting team and a wide variety of other fighters (Fedor Emelianenko, Wanderlei Silva and Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic, amongst others), implying their careers in Japan were the results of rigged fights. He’s been building himself up again by tearing down everything in his path, picking fights with any fighter willing to verbally exchange with the Oregon resident. The implication is that he’s become a star this way when it’s far from it.

The truth of the matter is that Sonnen drew less buys for his fights with Anderson Silva than Maia did before him and Vitor Belfort did afterward. Less people wanted to see his fight with Anderson, despite all his hype and delivery of one of the best fights in the sport’s short history. He may move the meter in terms of discussion but he doesn’t when it comes to what matters: people plucking down their money to see him fight.

It was the same with Kaufman as well. No one wanted to see him wrestle women, or Jerry Lawler, after the initial novelty of it all wore off. And everyone in Hollywood grew tired of his shtick and moved on, as well. Eventually people stopped paying attention. Sonnen has continually run his mouth on everything about Anderson Silva, et al, to the point that he’s become a walking self-parody in a short amount of time. Just like Kaufman did trying to become a pro wrestling superstar. People tuned Kaufman out, his story becoming a tragic one with the circumstances of his death. People are beginning to tune Sonnen out; when his next fight isn’t a massive selling PPV despite him being in a prominent role, you shouldn’t be surprised.

There are rare moments when Sonnen discusses the fight game with honesty. One can help but feel the admiration and respect he has for his next opponent, Brian Stann, in the way he talks about him. It takes a lot for any man in the hyper-macho setting of combat sports to admit that level of respect for his opponent as a competitor and as a man; Sonnen’s rare moments of humility and honesty belie the bluster that usually accompanies what he says about everything else. And it’s also the one that’s still intriguing, the Chael Sonnen we want to hear from.

Everything else is just background noise that we’ve seen before. When all is said and done, and the history of one of the first big ages of MMA is written, Chael Sonnen will find himself in the same position as Andy Kaufman. Remembered for what he said and did in a comedic, self-serving way as opposed to for anything else.