“Come on, hit me in the face, playboy. Where is your jiu-jitsu?”
--Anderson Silva to fellow Brazilian Demian Maia, during their title fight.
Last year’s UFC 112 event was headlined by a middleweight title fight between the striking phenomenon Anderson Silva and the grappling prodigy Demian Maia. Fans expected Silva to come out guns-blazing from the bell, and sure enough, he dropped his opponent with a straight right hand early in the fight. Then, instead of swarming on the disoriented Maia with punches, Anderson Silva struck comical poses and taunted his opponent.
The striker used his fantastic speed to feint his opponent and tag him with hard punches that Maia had absolutely no answer for. The taunts continued for 25 minutes, and Maia was helpless on the way to a decision loss (MMA Junkie, 2010).
After the fight, there was a huge backlash to Silva’s lackluster performance. It was obvious from the first round that Silva could have finished the fight at practically any time, and yet he chose to taunt, dance, and facetiously run away from Maia for five rounds. At the post-fight presser, reporters scrambled to ask the defending middleweight champion why he acted that way in the cage, to which Silva replied through a translator, “He disrespected me” (Cage Potato, 2010).
Silva’s vague explanation was not reinforced by any pre-fight hype from Maia; all of Maia’s interviews were by most accounts respectable. Maia acknowledged his opponent’s reputation as the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world and said that it would be the greatest challenge of his life.
In actuality, the source Anderson Silva’s utter contempt for Demian Maia was revealed during the course of the fight. At the end of the second round, Silva exclaimed in Portugese, “Come on, hit me in the face, playboy.”
In Brazil, the epithet ‘playboy’ refers to a “hedonist rich kid, the product of a pampered upbringing who cares little for the poor” (Fighters Only, 2010). It is clear that Silva was resentful of Maia’s background, the product of a struggle between “ethnicity, race, and class…” a “status quo… that exists to this day” (Neate, Platt, 2006). Despite the fact that both men are Brazilian and therefore probably both of mixed race, Demian Maia is from a rich, white, family; and Silva is black and from a modest background—meaning that he once resided on the “bottom couple of rungs of a tall racial ladder.”
This resentment harkens back to the days of colonial Brazil, a country that imported more slaves than North America. Plantations were centered on the (invariably white) male plantation owner, who had unlimited power on his land. Legally, the owner could do whatever he wanted with his slaves, including killing them in cold blood (Parker, 1993). The idea of total male domination and power lead to the development of Brazilian machismo, a concept that totally pervades Brazilian society through politics, sex, and undoubtedly the world of Mixed Martial Arts.
Though the rest of the MMA world may have been shocked by his performance at UFC 112, the fact is that Anderson Silva grew up poor and black in a country with an ugly legacy of slavery. Without growing up there, it is impossible to determine the many subtleties associated with classism and racism in Brazil. The anger and resentment at the upper class that culminated in Anderson Silva’s embarrassment of Demian Maia may have shocked the MMA world, but it is important to remember that Silva’s background made him the greatest fighter alive today.
Sources:
Ufc 112 play by play and live results. (2010, April 10). Retrieved from http://mmajunkie.com/news/18649/ufc-112-play-by-play-and-live-results.mma
Fact check: Did Demian Maia disrespect Anderson Silva?. (2010, April 10). Retrieved from http://www.cagepotato.com/fact-check-did-demian-maia-disrespect-anderson-silva/
Anderson facing backlash from Brazilian fans for Maia slurs. (2010, April 11). Retrieved from http://www.fightersonlymagazine.co.uk/news/viewarticle.php?id=4281
Neate, P., & Platt, D. (2006).Culture is our weapon. (p. 75). New York, New York: Penguin Books.
Parker, R. (1993). Bodies, pleasures, and passions: Sexual culture in contemporary brazil. (p. 24). Beacon Press.
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