Each year, thousands of people are willing to pay a high fee just to gather in aesthetically architectured arenas to watch young men bash into each other and get severely injured to win a trophy that brings pride to the winning side. Sound any different from a brutal gladiator fight back in the Roman era? Well, many modern day sports fit the description.
While sports like American football and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) does not put competitors in a life or death situation, it may seem like an extension of the more uncivilized habits of human beings to spectate violence for pleasure. We can speculate if these sports are really any different from fatal battles, except now, bound by law and greater value for human life, we lure the competitors with money and fame to devote their lives for the entertainment of the masses.
As media tycoon Ted Turner once said, “Sports is like a war without the killing.” For the participants, the incentive might be wealth, glory or just the adrenaline rush. While for the crowd it gives them a reason to solidify a sense of belonging and bond over a cause to feel empowered. Garrett Fagan, a professor at Penn State, mentioned in an article about the similarity between gladiator games and football, that we seem to have “a consistent appetite for violence as spectacle.” Ultimately, human beings seem to look for a reason to go to war and cheer for triumph at the price of blood.
When our need to fight is so great that we invent means in the form of sports to prove ourselves better than another man or team, is it a surprise that so many countries are at war to prove their beliefs or ways are better than another’s? It all goes back to survival instincts perhaps.
However, there is a positive trend to be noted. Regardless, of how intimidatingly similar famous MMA fighter Ronda Rousey’s arm bar may be to a Roman gladiator chopping off his opponent’s limbs, human beings have moved away from publically executing one another for amusement.
In fact, my search for the similarity between combat sports and gladiator games led me to a new kind of sport that is science fiction and expected to take place in 2016. A company called Chiron Global is raising funds to create a sport called Unified Weapons Masters.
The idea of the game is to use high-tech body armor, which would be made of advanced composite material and would be integrated with force measurement technology. This armor, code named “Lorica”, will show a real time trauma profile of the fighters and thus provide a scientific judgment on who should win, without inflicting any real damage on the participants. The goal of the company is to pit the world’s most skillful martial artists against each other with real weapons, but countered by high level of safety.
This progression toward making sports more technological, virtual and safer tells us maybe a future generation of homosapiens will deem contact sports as savage and turn to virtual sports that still lets their body feel the same rush of survival hormones.
This brings me to the question, will we ever learn to settle a dispute without putting real lives in danger? If I had to deliver an “I had a dream speech”, I would say yes. I dream of a world where warring countries put on their Google glasses to play StarCraft in a simulated world to decide who the winner is. Where men and women don’t have to put their lives in real danger to save their nation, but can still fight for a cause and still ask the crowd, “Are you not entertained?”
