HBO's Real Sports: The fight before the fight

On Tuesday HBO’s award winning series Real Sports covered the culture of extreme weight cutting in mixed martial arts. The episode covered veteran lightweight Ramsey Nijem as he sucked down 13 pounds in 17 hours ahead of his PFL quarterfinal final fight vs. Natan Schulte on October 17, 2019, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Nijem’s prior weigh-in attempt, was at PFL 5 (2019 season), which was held on July 25, 2019, in Atlantic City, New Jersey; the fighter could not make weight and was disqualified and removed from the card. This time Nijem made weight, barely able to walk, after working out, sauna sessions, salt baths, dry heaving, and eventually shaving his own head shaving his head. It was brutal.

I just physically am killing myself, literally killing myself trying to make this weight and by the time I get to the fight, I don’t even f***ing care, said Nijem. That becomes the fight. It’s harder than a fight. Fighting’s kind of fun. I f***ing hate weight cutting.

The next day, Nijem lost to two-time PFL champion Natan Schulte tin 52 seconds.

The episode also covered two well-publicized weight cut fails.

In January of 2018, middleweight contender Uriah Hall was transported, after attempting to cut 18 pounds in a day for his fight vs. former UFC champion Vitor Belfort. A physician told Hall that if he had somehow managed to make weight the next day, the fight would have killed him.

He told me I would have died, Hall revealed. Cause if I had to put my body through that stress, it wouldn’t have recovered.

Real Sports also covered former UFC flyweight champion Nicco Montano’s weight cutting efforts before a contracted fight vs. Valentina Shevchenko in September 2018. Montano reached out to the UFC Performance Institute for guidance.

UFC P.I. coordinator of sports nutrition Clint Wattenberg said that Montano could cut from her current 155 to 125.

The data corroborates the fact that yeah, you can make 125, said Wattenberg. It’s not going to be easy. You have the body fat to make 125.

Montano failed to make weight, and instead was transported to the hospital, and stripped of her belt.

MMA has turned dehydrating into a sport. Reducing yourself to the point you cannot walk, just one day before you have to reach the highest performance level imaginable, is objectively irrational in the extreme. And in MMA is a hurting game, where you are trying to traumatize your opponent’s brain, and weight cutting causes the brain to shrink, so it no longer sits snugly inside the cranium, and is thus subject to more trauma.

Fighting is inherently dangerous. Adding another severe danger to it has got to stop. When there is a high-profile death, it will stop. But it would better if it stopped before that.