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Hurt Game: For all its complexity, at heart MMA is about damage

There are many dubious subcategories of sports dialogue, but post-fight interviews are one of the strangest. Lobbing some perfunctory questions and a live mic at someone in the aftermath of physical combat is probably not a defensible practice, and talking around “Tell us how it felt to give your co-worker a severe concussion?” can generate mixed results. More often than not, the outcome is an out-of-breath – and maybe also concussed – athlete repeating a couple of sports cliches while awkwardly recovering from their fight-or-flight reflex. Occasionally, though, they unearth something uncharacteristically real.

It is not important whether you saw Bellator champion, and former UFC title challenger, Rory MacDonald’s last fight—a draw against the underrated, but rarely exhilarating Jon Fitch.