The Ultimate Fighting Championship is among other things a brilliant marketer of itself. This is embodied by longtime UFC President Dana White, by design the promotion’s biggest star. White has so successfully mythologized his role in the rise of the UFC that it may be now be functionally fact.

That’s the genius behind the craft, though. Not only does White repeat the Myth with enough frequency and conviction to drown out reality, but he weaves it into the promotion’s present-day narrative, perpetually in motion nearly every weekend of the year. The Zuffa Myth is one chapter in an ongoing story where White plays the protagonist, bearing the weight of the sport on his shoulders so that it might live another day. Another chapter of that story is being written, and it was taking root in real time at UFC on ESPN 11 on Saturday…

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If you didn’t watch the first three fights at UFC on ESPN 10 on Saturday in Las Vegas, you didn’t miss much but you also missed a lot.

The combined fight time of those three fights was 1:53. In those 113 seconds, however, Christian Aguilera short-circuited Anthony Ivy with a monstrous overhand right, Tyson Nam starched Zarrukh Adashev with a straight right counter and Julia Avila overwhelmed Gina Mazany with a ferocious flurry against the fence. In MMA, a lot can happen in not a lot of time…

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Jon Jones wasn’t the first to speak up, but depending how things go, he may be the most important. For the last week and a half, the greatest light heavyweight of all-time’s Twitter feed has been a long overdue polemic against the contractual precarity of Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors.

“Just go ahead and release me from my UFC contract altogether,” he tweeted on May 29. He doubled down on that request the next day, bid the light heavyweight title farewell a day after that and otherwise railed against getting ripped off “tens of millions” of dollars throughout his career. The alternative—forking out a little extra money for a banger against Francis Ngannou—is looking considerably better than it already did, which is saying something.

If it were just Jones kicking up dust and if times were normal, the UFC would likely do what it always does in these situations: keep the gears in motion and wait for the unhappy party to come back around. In the meantime, focus on promoting the next batch of stars, so if the unhappy party doesn’t come back around, some other G.O.A.T.-of-the-week can slide right into the spot and keep the general order of things intact. Most of the time, however, fighters come back around. What other option is there?

Still, these are not normal times, and Jones is not alone…

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Gilbert Burns in the UFC on ESPN 9 main event did what no one had previously been able to do: He did not get knocked out by former Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight titleholder Tyron Woodley.

Context is important here. After Woodley’s first career loss against Nate Marquardt in a failed bid to capture the Strikeforce welterweight crown in 2012, he bounced back with a 36-second knockout of Jay Hieron in his next fight. After dropping a controversial split decision against Jake Shields in 2013, he returned five months later with a hellacious first-round knockout of Josh Koshcheck. After getting outpointed by Rory MacDonald in 2014, he rebounded with a 61-second technical knockout of Dong Hyun Kim two months later. In the next fight after each of his first three losses, Woodley not only won but did so with highlight-reel knockouts in the first round.

Then Kamaru Usman thoroughly dominated “The Chosen One” in March 2019, taking the welterweight strap and derailing Woodley’s five-year, seven-fight unbeaten streak…

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Whether it’s a novel or an essay, the elements of good writing are often no different. In a 2015 TED Talk, novelist Ryan Gattis detailed what he called the five essentials of immersive storytelling, equally applicable to fiction and nonfiction: (1) hooks to grab readers’ attention, (2) the unexpected to keep their attention, (3) cause and effect to link events and push the story forward, (4) descriptions of feeling—mental, physical, emotional—to help readers connect on a human level and (5) concrete specific details to convince readers that what they are reading could actually happen.

There is no shortage of good MMA writing that employs these tenets, from opinion columns and longform features to investigative deep dives. Most of it is scattered across the Internet and some of it has been bound to physical pages, but regardless of the medium of publication, almost all of it has been nonfiction. This is a curious phenomenon. One would think a sport as dramatic as MMA would be ripe for dramatization, but the very allure of the sport—its chaotic unpredictability—can also make it difficult to shape into a narrative. The vagaries of life are not easily reconciled with the demands of dramaturgy…

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