Last month a rich, boastful alpha male savoured the greatest victory of his life in New York City. Almost no one thought he could do it, but he made it look easy. In the build-up he ridiculed his opponent mercilessly and feuded with enemies on Twitter. ‘I’d like to take this chance to apologise,’ he said straight after his win, ‘to absolutely nobody!’
This wasn’t Trump Tower, but Madison Square Garden. Conor McGregor had just become the first two-weight champion in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history. Thanks to the Irishman, who combines the athletic talent of Muhammad Ali with the comic ferocity of Bill Hicks, the event broke the arena’s ticket revenue record. Yet his sport of mixed martial arts was only legalised in New York State this year. The UFC had finally elbowed its way into America’s sporting mainstream.
Luke Coppen and Joel Snape discuss the relationship between Trump and UFC
Donald Trump had wanted to be there that night to celebrate his own unlikely triumph in the US elections. Secret Service agents reportedly persuaded him to stay at home. Why was the next President of the United States so eager to attend an event that would have probably horrified his predecessors? Simple: he loves a sport that is, in essence, a battle for physical dominance. ‘It’s sort of like, you just — somebody dies!’ he once said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it… It’s not like, “Oh, how are the judges voting?” It’s like, you know, somebody just succumbs.’
The UFC’s first show was in Denver in 1993. It aimed to settle an age-old question: what is the world’s most effective martial art? The organisers wanted to separate true martial artists from practitioners of ‘Bullshido’: self-proclaimed masters boasting of their ‘secret death punch’.

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