MMA messageboards and discussion forums are a callous and unforgiving cesspool of crude locker room talk exchanged between loud mouthed, hardcore meatheads–so it’s hard not to love and frequent them.

However, beyond the profane and thorned exterior lies the life’s blood of the sport of mixed martial arts, still pulsing vibrantly even despite the leap to mainstream status. The casual fans can come and go or be interchanged like irrelevant bar coded commodities in a warehouse, but if there is a true voice of the maniacal diehards, it’s the online MMA community, and that voice is emphatically praising one fighter in particular: “The Korean Zombie”.

The tone of abrasive conversation over the last month or so has drifted back and forth from Anderson Silva’s disappointing and controversial title defense against Demian Maia, and how he disrespected the challenger almost to the point of ridicule; whether or not GSP should have been able to finish Dan Hardy in five rounds; myriad opinions on the Strikeforce brawl; what Doug Crosby is smoking; what is to become of the Fedor/Strikeforce/M-1 debacle; and whether or not the long awaited stateside debut fights from Gomi and Aoki proved that American MMA is superior (a sentiment fully propagated by Aoki’s dramatic pre-fight declaration).

Anyone that has logged hours on a prominent forum can surely agree that MMA fans will argue about anything (I realize by the nature of this comment that many will oppose it), so it’s an extremely rare and unique situation when the vast majority of them can bond together in a common cause and support it with unparalleled vigilance. A quick visit to such a place yesterday would elicit a cacophony of glorious praise being piled upon Chan Sung Jung for his deeply inspiring and emotion invoking performance.

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