CARL REVIEWS: THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER 32, EPISODE 1

I am paying for my crimes and I am not happy.

PREVIOUSLY, ON THE PUNCHSPORT REPORT:

I am through doubting Garrett Armfield. His combinations make me happy and gosh darn it, I want to be happy when I watch mixed martial arts. GARRETT ARMFIELD BY DECISION and I swear to god if the universe does that thing where I finally pick someone and they get the shit kicked out of them I will review this season of The Ultimate Fighter while weeping uncontrollably.

AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION:

This is why you don't bet on mixed martial arts.

In the many words I have spent on mixed martial arts over the last several years I have referenced The Ultimate Fighter on many occasions but have only rarely directly addressed it. This is because, as a general rule, the UFC doesn't either. Once upon a time, The Ultimate Fighter was a groundbreaking show that proved pivotal in introducing mixed martial arts to the mainstream television audience. Management credits TUF 1 with saving the entire company.

That time was twenty years ago. In the modern era, TUF is a fossil. Its position as a talent funnel has been truly and fully usurped by Dana White's Contender Series, and the UFC produces it begrudgingly, to the point that when you load up Fight Pass, the UFC's digital network, there are individual advertising shelves placed front and center for:

• The last six UFC events

• The last six years of event replays

• The last six seasons of the Contender Series

• The archives of six different regional MMA promotions

• The archives of multiple long-dead MMA promotions

• The archives of six different jiu-jitsu grappling competitions

Every season of The Ultimate Fighter, the most important show in UFC history, is hosted on Fight Pass, but in 2024 it does not rank even a single front-page advertisement, even while a new season that will lead to an anticipated championship fight is on the air.

And god help us, we're going to review the fucking thing.

I swear, aside from the obligatory meme catchphrase, that's the actual, genuine banner image they use for TUF on Hulu. Even their own show page cries Please, no, not again.

This season is already two episodes into its run, so once I am caught up this will be a weekly series, but god help me, I have to get there first.

EPISODE 1: THE OPPORTUNITY OF YOUR LIFE

The last time I really watched TUF, it was 2017 and they were crowning the inaugural Women's Flyweight Champion. Maybe it's fitting that I am now compelled to return to the show, as we are, once again, balancing the future of the Women's Flyweight belt on this dated reality television show. The rivalry between Alexa Grasso and Valentina Shevchenko has managed to hold up the top ranks of the division for almost a year and a half, at this point. In March of 2023, Grasso won the belt from Shevchenko in a shocking upset; half a year later they had a rematch that ended in a draw thanks to a screwy decision. A third match was obligatory, but thanks to rehab, scheduling and the myriad joys of marketing, the UFC decided to string Grasso and Shevchenko along as team coaches for this season of TUF, dragging the feud out as long as is humanly possible.

So here we are. This season contains Featherweights and Middleweights and we are going to follow them until it's over.

In the past, seasons have been themed: Veterans vs newcomers, challengers for a newly-opened weight class, etc. Within the first thirty seconds of the intro, they establish the theme for this season: The Fighters Come From Lots Of Places. 16 fighters from 14 different countries! This is not for any particular reason except a desire to be eclectic. Dana White is, of course, the first person to speak on the show as the eternal protagonist of the UFC, and he has never looked older or less interested in anything happening around him. As he recounts the 20-year anniversary of the show he looks keenly aware of the linear passing of time and how inescapable it is.

Incredibly, as they introduce Alexa Grasso, Valentina Shevchenko and the background of their rivalry, they completely gloss over the draw. Like, right the fuck over it. Dana monologues about their first fight and what a huge upset it was, and then transitions straight into talking about their upcoming third fight. What happened to the second match? We don't fucking talk about the second match. Start shadowboxing.

And I do mean start shadowboxing. There's no preamble, there's no introduction for the group, there is zero time spent on the process of the coaches evaluating fighters. We get a couple minutes of b-roll where everyone's shadowboxing and then it's right back to Dana for team picks. After a bunch of coin flipping, the teams, and their respective pick orders, break down to:

TEAM GRASSO
FEATHERWEIGHT:

• Guillermo Torres of Mexico, Pick #1: Alexa picks him because he is Mexican. This is openly stated as the reason.

• Kaan Ofli of Australia, Pick #5: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Bekhzod Usmonov of Tajikistan, Pick #9: Valentina is annoyed because they are country neighbors.

• Mairon Santos of Brazil, Pick #13: Mairon gets a dark-room confessional monologue about how it is his destiny to win this season.

MIDDLEWEIGHT:

• Robert Valentine of Switzerland, Pick #3: Robert is a Valentina training partner and she's mad Alexa stole him.

• Paddy McCorry of Ireland, Pick #7: After three straight picks with zero dialogue, Paddy gets a monologue about how proud he is to be Irish and how the Irish are known for fighting and drinking.

• Omran Chaaban of Finland, Pick #11: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Tom Theocharis of Canada, Pick #15: The show does not bother to talk about him.

TEAM SHEVCHENKO
FEATHERWEIGHT:

• Roedie Roets of South Africa, Pick #2: Valentina thinks he is strong and technical.

• Zygimantas Ramaska of Lithuania, Pick #6: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Nathan Fletcher of England, Pick #10: The show does not bother to talk about him, but he has a bowlcut, and it's terrible.

• Edwin Cooper Jr. of America, Pick #14: Valentina throws her binder in the air to celebrate because the choices are now academic, but the show does not bother to talk about him.

MIDDLEWEIGHT:

• Shamidkhan Magomedov of Russia, Pick #4: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Mark Hulme of South Africa, Pick #8: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Ryan Loder of America, Pick #12: The show does not bother to talk about him.

• Giannis Bachar of Greece, Pick #16: The show does not bother to talk about him.

I remember watching this show and I remember things like picking teams and introducing fighters used to get, like, attention. We have gone through the entirety of team selection and fighter introduction in ten minutes. Ten out of sixteen fighters did not get so much as a sentence. Even their first entry into the TUF House, the no-communication, no-leaving palace of restrictions, gets just a ninety-second blurb where they tape flags to the wall and talk about how glad they are to be here, and god almighty, how did The Ultimate Fighter fall into this level of drudgery? Who is the target audience for this show? If you like MMA you've already lost interest because nothing has happened and if you're just a casual reality television fan you've already lost interest because 1/4 of the way through an episode no one's even gotten to fucking talk.

We cut directly from the house to booking the first fight, and with equally no time to build tension, it's Team Shevchenko's Roedie Roets vs Team Grasso's Guillermo Torres. Get the top picks out of the way, I guess. The scene is over as soon as it begins and we smash cut right back to the house so we can finally focus on someone.

THE ROEDIE ROETS STORY

Home video rolls of Roedie walking around in the bush in Polokwane, South Africa. He discusses the farm he grew up on, which has been in the family for generations--if you have gathered that Roedie's family are Afrikaners, congratulations--and his choosing mixed martial arts over rugby. He, his father and his girlfriend all train together, they are an inspirationally supportive family network, and he likes both wrestling and spinning hook kicks. The end.

THE GUILLERMO TORRES STORY

Guillermo does not get a home video package, he just talks in the dark confessional room. He's a wrestler and competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics, where he was eliminated in the qualifying round. The end.

No, seriously. That's it. Thanks for coming out, Guillermo.

The big drama point of the episode, and the only bit that escaped the containment of No One Fucking Watches The Ultimate Fighter and reached the greater MMA internet, is Valentina Shevchenko's demand for her team that, during training, you are not allowed to drink water. This is wildly silly, deeply irresponsible, and is dwelled on for roughly ten seconds before we return to b-roll of the fighters hitting bags, which, too, is cut away from half a minute later to return to the TUF house, where Guillermo is taping pictures of his mother, sister and daughter to the wall, which includes an admittedly adorable shot of an arm tattoo of his daughter's drawings.

That's the first likable thing that's happened on this show and the episode is half over. We go back for more backstory on Guillermo, except that backstory is, once again, that he was a wrestler who wrestled until he decided to fight instead. He moved to Arizona to be closer to the sport, he was divorced for reasons that probably have to do with voluntarily choosing to move to Arizona, and his goal is to make enough money to bring his daughter to America with him.

Weigh-ins happen! They are both on weight. This segment is thoroughly perfunctory. Dana White monologues again about how cool and international all of this is. No one has spoken more on this show than Dana White and I get the sense this will be the case for the entire season, even though he no longer cares about it.

And with that, it is already fight day. We watch the two men solemnly walk into the Apex to the tune of some truly incredible, vintage, circa-2005 easy listening buttrock, the lyrics for which are:

like a freight train, racing down the tracks (yeah)
gotta head full of steam, i'm never looking back
fist in the air, eyes on the prize
when the bell rings, i'm taking your spine

yeah, yeah, yeah, you know i'm coming for you
look out, look out, look out, you know i'm coming (what)
yeah, yeah, yeah, you know i'm coming for you
look out, look out, look out, you know i'm coming (what)

'CAUSE I'M COMING FOR YOU.

This is where you've been hiding the STEMM reserves all this time? The Ultimate Fucking Fighter? Bring back the gladiator intro, you cowards.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Guillermo Torres (7-1, Team Grasso) vs Roedie Roets (7-1, Team Shevchenko)

It is worth noting that, on paper, this is a bad matchup for Torres. Roets is ten years younger (27 to 37, for the record), four inches taller, and has half a foot in reach. However, Torres is a wrestler, and there are twenty whole minutes left in this episode. I sense the grind is about to be embraced.

ROUND ONE

For whatever reason, the fight trunks this season have a single line vertically bisecting both the groin and the butt and it is incredibly distracting. Roedie bounces around and almost immediately takes Torres down, in what seems like a bad sign for the Olympic wrestler. They're back on their feet and against the cage by the time a minute has elapsed, and after thirty seconds of clinch striking Guillermo hits an extremely fucking cool lateral drop that almost spikes Roedie on his head. Unfortunately, as often happens with high-amplitude takedowns, they're back on their feet and against the cage again almost instantaneously. Roedie spends the next full minute grinding Guillermo into the fence and chipping at him with punches and knees. Guillermo is frustrated and his attempts at pocket striking are not working. A failed takedown brings them back to the center of the cage, Guillermo swings a couple leg kicks, and once again, with ninety seconds left, they are back on the fence and Roedie is back to chipping. They trade cage position back and forth a couple times, and Guillermo lands a couple half-winging body shots, but otherwise nothing happens.

Between rounds, Valentina tells Roedie he won the round but needs to focus on better control. In apparent defiance of the entire point of this season, Alexa Grasso is not actually in Guillermo's corner, and we instead watch the back of a mystery man's head call Guillermo a cabrón and tell him he needs to feint and work harder. 10-9 Roedie.

ROUND TWO

Having tried wrestling to little effect, we now have awkward wrestler striking instead. Despite being much stubbier, Guillermo is controlling the range with leg and body kicks and Roedie is inexplicably lunging in with winging hooks. One such lunge gets Roedie chucked on his back, and Guillermo and his ass-line hang onto half-guard and land elbows to the thigh and, when he is occasionally bored, face. From Roedie's corner Valentina channels Rampage Jackson and tells him to get up, but does not elucidate on how. After two full minutes of mostly ineffective ground and pound Guillermo gets swept while passing to mount, but Roedie cannot complete the sweep and winds up on his knees getting punched repeatedly in the ribs. A scramble leads to a Roedie takedown, and within seconds, Roedie is in full mount with two minutes to work. He almost immediately screws it up and winds up on his back. He looks very, very sad. Guillermo lands the traditional full-guard body-body-head arm punches while Roedie tries to hammerfist him from the bottom, but neither man can accomplish anything. With forty seconds left Roedie pushes Guillermo off of him and gets back to his feet, but he simply winds up pressed into the fence, taking small knees to the thighs while thinking about the history of his people and the political machinations that led him to this cage.

I have not watched TUF in so long that I've forgotten: These fights being amateur exhibitions (and thus not necessary to be publicly disclosed, which would sort of ruin the show), the third round is optional and occurs only if the judges think the fight is even. To no one's surprise, it is. 10-9 Guillermo, and we go to the final round. We finally see Alexa Grasso in a camera shot sitting outside of the cage, which makes me wonder why the hell she's not actually doing the thing the show is for.

ROUND THREE

Roedie is keeping a brave face, but he is tired. He falls taking a leg kick and gets back to his feet, but his striking was already labored even when he was fresh, and now he's having serious trouble reaching Guillermo. He sure can charge him with takedowns and force him into the fence, though! Another full minute of cage clinching ensues, with Roedie landing the occasional knee to the gut, but nothing happens until the three minute mark, when Roedie tries and fails to get another takedown. Torres makes his way to his feet, both men are now visibly breathing hard, and Torres has yet to land anything substantive with two minutes left in the fight. Roedie scores a solid knee, but he charges into a right hand that Torres does not attempt to follow up on, and when Torres throws another right so wide and telegraphed Todd Duffee gets PTSD flashbacks all the way across the country, Roedie takes him down. Torres manages to get back to his feet, but Roedie is riding his back and kneeing him, dignifiedly, in the ass. A break in the assault lets Torres roll for a kneebar, but it's nowhere close, and he doesn't seem to have anything left. He manages to get back to the fence and wall-walk to his feet, but it's all small, chipping Roedie Roets punches with nothing coming back his way, and Torres is simply out of time.

Unsurprisingly, Roedie Roets wins. Scores are not announced, but 29-28 is guaranteed. With the exception of that fantastic lateral drop absolutely nothing memorable happened at any point in this fight, and said lateral drop ended in no effective offense whatsoever.

Both men return to their locker rooms. Roedie feels he did his father and homeland proud; Torres gets hugs from his teammates, but in his heart, he is hurt. (This is not supposition on my part, he says so.)

We end the episode with the announcement of the next episode's fight: A middleweight tilt between Shevchenko's Shamidkhan Magomedov and Grasso's Omran Chaaban. Dana White wants you to know this is a great matchup you should be excited about, and on our way out we get a COMING THIS SEASON ON THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER sizzle reel that includes highlights like:

• People kickboxing in a gym

• People boxing, in a gym

• People running outside

• The coaches playing basketball

• Valentina shooting a pistol in the desert

• A mildly irritated fighter saying 'fuck you' to someone

• A fighter getting a scan of a skull fracture

• Multiple fighters gallantly pledging to represent their countries

• Dana White describing a fight as 'fucking unbelievable'

And that's it. That's the whole thing.

Look, here's the dark secret: The Ultimate Fighter is a stupid show. It's always been a stupid show. The entire premise of the thing is rooted in taking a bunch of professional fighters, putting them in shitty circumstances where they can't leave or see their families but they can sit at home with a bunch of other fighters and drink, and it is, and has always been, aggressively silly. The only true evolution of the show came from stepping off its early-season Survivor-style obligatory-physical-challenges roots, and that evolution is two decades old.

But this? This is anti-fun. Watching this episode felt like trying to find a handhold on a Slip 'N Slide. It's not just that there was no time made for the characters or the coaches or the format, it's that, had there been time, there wouldn't have been anything to say. No drama, no emotional investment, no gimmick. It's just dudes, and they're from different places. Isn't that enough for you? No?

Well, maybe we can interest you in the Contender Series instead.

Nine more episodes. Jesus christ. At least we won't have to do introductions next time so it won't be 3000 goddamn words.