Soon it will be 20 years since Idiocracy reached American cinemas. From the imagination of Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, it tells the story of a soldier and a prostitute placed in a state of suspended animation. Waking up from their cryogenic sleep 500 years later, this completely average duo discover their country has degenerated so much intellectually that they are now the smartest people in all the land. It is a savage satire of the hyper-commercialised, mind-numbingly moronic future United States, and nobody knew then how quickly this cult classic would start to resemble a documentary.
In 26th-century America, the most popular television show is called “Ow my Balls!” and features the main character repeatedly getting hit in the testicles. The same puerile gag on repeat elicits hearty guffaws time after time after time. When the star of the show sings the national anthem before “Monday Night Rehabilitation” (the national sport in which men driving weaponised monster trucks kill criminals in the arena), a fan runs on and kicks him in the genitals. The crowd, including Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, a former porn star and pro wrestler turned president, goes wild, as if they’ve never seen such a thing before.
That movie came to mind the other night when trawling through footage of Run it Straight, a new “sport” from Australia and New Zealand. It involves two burly men standing maybe 20 yards apart and then running into each other at full speed. The intention is to knock your opponent out. It went viral on TikTok (of course) and now a corporatised version of this carry-on is apparently about to sweep the world. Some Americans are salivating at the prospect because exactly this sort of brute-force collision was known as the Oklahoma Drill in gridiron training back in the day, until the NFL banned it because of the brain damage it was causing.
Trying to trace the exact moment sport began to dumb down is like trying to figure out when society itself embraced the mission creep of collective stupidity. That date is subjective, always in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I thought the moment American newspapers started to carry WWE stories on the sports pages represented a landmark. Like some idiot lumping novels in the non-fiction section because all books look the same to those who don’t read them. That happened a couple of decades ago. The woman who ran the WWE then runs the department of education in Washington now. Take that, Mike Judge.
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Against that background, UFC hosting “Freedom 250” on the White House lawn this coming June 14th is only to be expected. America invented baseball, basketball and its very own brand of football but this type of mixed martial arts is somehow regarded as the most fitting way to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. Nothing captures the zeitgeist better than a sport created by and for those who played a little too long with their WWE figures, unfortunates who suffered cranial bruising performing diving elbow drops on younger brothers from the backs of couches.
How else to explain their ridiculous notions about their beloved code of combat? Only those who’ve never held a pawn in their hand could claim, as UFC supporters often do, that it’s a form of “human chess”. Sitting in Madison Square Garden the night Conor McGregor defeated Eddie Alvarez, I thought the most telling moment of an interminably dull evening came during an earlier bout. “What a knee to the head,” roared the commentator about the decisive blow. That is a line that could be deployed in any car-park scrap and barroom brawl, and this is the preferred recreational pursuit of many toxic denizens of the manosphere, sport of choice for those whose frontal lobes are not yet fully developed. In other news, the FBI recently brought UFC fighters in to train its agents at Quantico.
Evincing his magic touch for lowest-common-denominator fare (usually some twist on instant-gratification pain infliction), UFC head honcho Dana White is also the brains behind Slap Fight. That’s the abomination where combatants take free shots, whacking each other across the face with open hands. In a February bout, a contestant named HollyHood Haley J strutted on to the stage with quite the swagger, gave the middle finger and simulated oral sex while being introduced to the crowd. She duly got knocked out so hard she headbutted the table on the way down.
Clips of HollyHood’s rubber-legged demise, replete with slow-motion replays of her face distending, and commentators talking faux sincerely about technique and stance, have so far garnered more than 14 million views. A gaudy stat that may explain why this brand of violence porn recently led to a deal for a five-year residency with MGM Resorts International in Las Vegas. The best tickets for Power Slap 19 featuring Da Hawaiian Hitman versus Manu at that venue on April 17th are retailing for just under $300 (€260). Fools and their money.
Surely the wealthiest bottom feeder in sports history, White and those in his orbit are smart enough to know how much can be made scraping the very bottom of society’s barrel. Having earned a sizeable chunk of his fortune through his ersatz boxing match against Floyd Mayweather jnr, McGregor now owns a piece of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC). How better to illustrate the dumbing down of sport than the increased mainstreaming of a form of boxing that used to be illegal, confined to desperate, washed-up palookas getting seriously injured in smoky basements and dusty warehouses?
More than 17,000 vulgarians paid in to see Knucklemania V at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia last year. If the venues have certainly changed, the fight cards are still largely populated by individuals previously chewed up and spat out by UFC or boxing. Never mind that BKFC’s frontman, McGregor, has been found liable for sexual assault in a Dublin civil court, turns out the fans will come. Like every self-respecting modern sports promotion, BKFC even arrives retailing its own official putrid energy concoction, called Bucked Up!
In Idiocracy, Brawndo is the sports drink of choice, so popular they spray it on crops and cause the harvest to fail. The gullibility of 21st-century rubes is displayed on supermarket shelves piled high with caffeine and sugar elixirs with names such as Four Loko, Liquid Death, Body Armor, Jolt, RockStar, Jocko Go, Ghost Energy, Gorilla Mind and, of course, Monster, the proud sponsors of the popular clip of Hollyhood staggering around the stage. Marketeers must sit around for hours competing to see how ridiculous a moniker they can come up with to convince Generation Z this is the refuelling nectar they need.
Earlier this year, Matt Damon caused a stir when he revealed Netflix had told him and Ben Affleck to “restate the plot three or four times in dialogue” because viewers are double screening and can’t concentrate on one movie at a time. Plenty of parents will testify to the difficulties teenagers encounter trying to sit through a 90-minute soccer match on television without experiencing simultaneous phone action. It takes so long! We live in a highlight-reel age of perpetual distraction and ever-decreasing attention spans and it’s not only the kids who are struggling.
Half a million Americans regularly watch Rory McIlroy and his peers driving balls into a big screen on Tomorrow’s Golf League (TGL). A sentence that would surely have been considered far-fetched just a decade ago. It was designed to try to catch the eye of impatient boys and girls who think actual golf is something dreadfully dull and slow that parents have on in the background on Sunday afternoons. Turns out the average age of TGL viewers is 51. The middle-aged are as susceptible to the drive-through culture of modern sport, the creeping infantilism of games, as their children. Make it loud, make it fast and let’s all pretend a video game made flesh matters even a jot to those involved.
[ Ian O’Riordan: The Enhanced Games are fast becoming a running jokeOpens in new window ]
The nefarious influence of video games on IQs has been paramount. EA Sports FC (the game formerly known as Fifa) has produced the most irritating generation of soccer fans in history, dunderheads who play manager mode and then believe that in real life their favourite team is always just one canny new signing away from glory. And they know just the fella and formation the side needs too because it worked for them the last time they won the Champions League on a little telly in their bedroom with a controller in their hands, headphones on their ears and an exasperated parent shouting from the doorway.
More dumbing down. More idiocy. An entire cohort that thinks managing Liverpool is no more difficult than accessing a cheat code, these mouth-breathers can often be found videoing themselves cosplaying just-add-water punditry, spitting sweary soliloquies into microphones after adverse results. The reductionist diatribes of disaffected narcissists who think online performative anger is next-level tactical analysis and every defeat an opera in need of an aria. So many others savour these pantomimes of outrage that it’s become a very lucrative grift. Nobody ever went broke plumbing a new depth for the 21st-century sports fan.
Which brings us to “Monkey Bar Kicking Fights”. As the name of the new game on the block suggests, four people hang from a metal square suspended in the air and knock each other off by delivering kicks to the head and stomach and crotch (Ow my Balls!) until only one person remains in place. Last man hanging is the winner. The loser? The rest of humanity.
