Josh Rettinghouse was a massive underdog. He never legitimately threatened his opponent through three rounds, and was beaten soundly in each one. Crushing legkicks rendered him unable to walk. He may have had a puncher’s chance, but it was vanishingly small. He was done. His sport needs to embrace the fact that there was no reason for this fight, or any fight like it, to continue.
While other combat sports face similar issues, and deal with them poorly, they tend to display some vague awareness that violence has consequences. (Boxing people, especially, know that their sport has been and continues to be a goddamned tragedy.) From top to bottom, though, many people involved in MMA don’t.
Some of this blissful ignorance is due to the relative youth of the sport. We haven’t had to face its true consequences, because we haven’t yet seen what time does to 70-year-old former fighters. In part, the problem is due to the fact that many fans, stuck in a defensive posture, simply refuse to acknowledge the health hazards inherent in full contact fighting. One of them happens to be Dana White, president of the UFC, who runs around shouting things like “It’s the safest sport in the world, fact.”
This isn’t true. Fighters die. A fighter is almost certainly going to die in Dana White’s UFC some day. No one’s ready for it.
Casualties are inevitable in any violent form of fighting. The list of well-known boxing deaths is depressingly long, and for everyone who’s died, there are many more victims. And for every one of those we know about—Muhammad Ali, say, or Terry Norris, whose story is strikingly told here by Leigh Cowart—there are many more whose stories we haven’t heard or noticed.