Out of context, in the ring, Keto Allen looks like the biggest guy you've ever known: the one with the weight bench in his basement in junior high; the one whose arms made you look up the word 'biceps' in the dictionary.
Practically speaking, Allen isn't actually that large. He fights at about 170 pounds. But his body looks over-stuffed with muscle. On Friday, crouched over Kamloops's Aaron Berke, bouncing his thinly-gloved fists off the other man's face, he looked positively huge.
Allen was fighting on the under-card of an event put on by Edmonton's Maximum Fighting Championship -- an event that briefly burst into Edmonton's mainstream when it was originally booked for the Francis Winspear Centre.
The iconic concert hall backed out of the booking in January, a move that still rankles MFC owner and president Mark Pavelich.
But while Pavelich remains put off by the venue change, it's hard to imagine many of the fans at the Edmonton Expo Centre Friday were much bothered, either by the new location or by the perceived slight to the sport they love.
In some ways, mixed martial arts is a world unto itself. Fans have their own media -- fight-focused websites such as sherdog.com offer blanket coverage -- and their own brands, such as TapouT, Affliction and Head Rush. They can fill hockey stadiums for marquee promotions and pack enough smaller venues to justify at least 14 more shows in Edmonton this year.
For an outsider, it's a world that can look gaudy. The stands at Friday's event offered plenty of crass T-shirts and gold chains, platform heels and fake breasts.
But it's also one that isn't monolithic. The fans don't all come from the same places or look the same way, and neither do the fighters.
Take Gavin "Forrest" Neil, a Victoria-based fighter who looks as unassuming as Keto Allen does strong.
Unlike other fighters, Neil doesn't have chiselled muscles, a shaved chest or visible tattoos. On Friday he walked to the ring to the song Gump, a parody tune by Weird Al Yankovic. He shook his bemused opponent's hand twice before the opening bell. After it rang, he knocked the other man down with one punch before forcing him to submit with a choke hold.
"You're talking to me now and you don't even think I look like a fighter," Neil said in an interview after his fight. He's right, he doesn't. He looks more like what he is when he isn't fighting, a history and sociology student at the University of Victoria.
Officials at the Winspear Centre have always maintained the MFC booking was a mistake, that they cancelled it because they don't do sports, not because that sport was mixed martial arts.
But the public reaction to the booking was definitely sport specific. People online and off reacted in horror at the idea of human combat in the pristine concert hall.
Mixed martial arts, though, isn't nearly as violent as many people think, at least not according to Bryan Hogeveen, a University of Alberta sociologist who serves on Edmonton's Combative Sports Commission, the body that licenses fights in the city.
"There's this idea that they're out there getting maimed," Hogeveen said. But in reality, he continued, most fights end with little long-term damage to either fighter.
Still, it's tough to imagine many skeptics being convinced by a close-up view. The stands were still filling Friday when Keto Allen's arms were pistoning punches into Aaron Berke. His blows made a funny sound up close, like a long inhale followed by a quick wet thwack. They were never particularly loud. Just a kish-thump, kish-thump that built speed until the referee pulled Allen off. They were just loud enough, in fact, to make you wonder how they might have sounded in the Winspear Centre, where the world-class acoustics could have echoed them to the back row.
www.maximumfighting.com
