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Mixed martial arts is not what it used to be. In its early days, the sport was widely dismissed as a cringey toughman sideshow and relegated to the outcast fringe. For years, MMA was sustained by an obsessive and faithful fan base that mined fight clips from dingy corners of the internet and watched on low-def VHS tapes.
If you knew, you knew. If you didn’t know, you probably didn’t care to. There was something cultish about following MMA in the 1990s and early aughts, like hitting the midnight screening of “Eraserhead” or grooving to Lee “Scratch” Perry. Or watching Fedor Emelianenko smash some big, scary dude you thought was unbeatable.
That might not make sense to those who’ve only recently acquired a taste for cage fighting. As MMA has evolved into a quasi-mainstream attraction over the past decade or so, by which time Fedor’s spotlight had faded, the sport’s audience has expanded as well. So it’s reasonable to conclude that newer fans may not get what all the fuss is about over Saturday’s Bellator 290 main event, in which Emelianenko will fight for the final time (9 p.m. ET on CBS, with prelims at 6 p.m. ET on the Bellator and Showtime YouTube channels).
This is a significant moment in MMA history, not simply because Emelianenko is challenging heavyweight champion Ryan Bader in one of the two title bouts that night in Inglewood, California. (The other pits Johnny Eblen, the undefeated middleweight champ, against Emelianenko’s protege, Anatoly Tokov.) Fedor still has massive appeal, and it is not about today or anything that has happened in the last decade. It runs deep into the sport’s underground past, which he ruled with an iron fist. That might seem hard to fathom for those who look at Emelianenko and see just a quiet, balding 46-year-old with a burly physique that is not at all sculpted in granite.
Emelianenko is known to his fans as “The Last Emperor,” but it would be more fitting to dub him MMA’s first emperor. There are other…
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