There was a time when the UFC was strenuously apolitical. There were fighters who seemed like assholes and others who didn’t, of course, but that was part of the fun. When Matt Serra famously disparaged his welterweight rival Matt Hughes as “a jock asshole” in season 6 of The Ultimate Fighter, it could be hard for an outsider to know what to make of it. One professional athlete calling another a jock? Aren’t they all jocks? It only made sense within the peculiar logic of MMA broadly and the UFC at the time, which was somehow both a sport and not a sport, “as real as it gets,” but also transparently entertainment. To its fans, it was somehow both the only pure sport and the anti-sport sport. MMA writer Ben Fowlkes once described it as “sports without the metaphor.”