Brandon Royval goes by Raw Dawg. Good, good: doesn’t quite have the classical Greek ring of “dog-faced Agamemnon,” but it’s a fighter’s brand. Memorable and ridiculous. He’s the No. 3 bruiser in the 125-pound division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. That’s one twenty-five. A wireframe warrior. Seventeen wins, seven losses. A couple of weeks before his eighth, he’s invited into the rent-a-ring at a local fight promotion in his hometown. He comes up, says a few words. I don’t remember any of them but it doesn’t matter. Verbal facility isn’t required when you can drop your opponent with a knee to the chin and a straight right and then seal the deal with elbows. That, in 2023, got him a shot at the flyweight title. Too bad he missed it, and in the presence of UFC originalist Donald Trump (better known for his day job). Welcome to the new, old fight game.
All sports are nonlethal simulations of war: the eternal contest. You can dress things up with collared shirts and spheres and goalposts, but the one-on-one clash is the prototype. The least diluted version of the real thing. When seventh-century Athenians mixed their martial arts they added only pressed olives. Oil is thicker than blood. We’ve come a long way to perfect the beautiful delivery of death. Wheel-lock muskets, warheads, white phosphorus, pagers stuffed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate. (The reaper’s equipment is obsolete; we’ll take it from here.) Now you can detonate your enemy’s left anterior pelvic bone from 300 miles away. A masterstroke. Paris’s arrows, guided by Apollo and by lust for the fair-haired Helen, couldn’t achieve such precision. Remember Bibi: the face that launch’d a thousand hips. But distance has stripped from war the camaraderie of hatred. An author whose name and work I can’t find wrote that “the hostile face-to-face glowering confrontations with our enemies, like the sweet and mutual regards of love, are liberties allowed only to intimates.” Mano a mano, foes acknowledge each other’s human individuality. An I for an I. Listen to Wilfred Owen:
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