Guest Blog: Five Finger Death Punch Guitarist Zoltan Bathory Pulls No Punches in Analysis of Mixed Martial Arts Fighting

Thanks to Five Finger Death Punch’s successful tour on last year’s Family Values and their current breakthrough single “The Bleeding,” the band’s debut album, Way of the Fist, has sold a respectable (in these times) 89,000 copies since its July 2007 release. And the group remains the only new rocker on the Billboard Active Rock Top 10.

On April 26, the band will head out on tour with Disturbed and this summer Five FInger will take part in the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival along with Slipknot, Disturbed, Dragonforce, Mastodon and others, which shouldn’t hurt their bid for world domination.

Obviously, these guys don’t have a lot of downtime, however when he can find a window of breathing room, guitarist Zoltan Bathory often flips on the tube and forks out some of his royalty money to watch some mixed martial arts fighting on pay-per-view. Here he is, talking about his favorite passtime.

A sport that was once underground and banned by some politicians, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) (aka cage fighting), was successfully kept out of certain states, but has hung in and fought its way to the top of the entertainment food chain. Today, MMA has become mainstream prime-time television fare and a pay-per-view record-breaker. Strangely enough, your grandma probably even knows who Chuck Liddell is. Better yet, your grandma probably knows what a triangle choke is! Wild!

So, MMA’s popularity is knocking down that of Major League Baseball, Basketball and pretty much everything else but Tila Tequila. Are we living in violent times? I mean – is it just the war or are we collectively angry about other things? Is it the economy? Maybe there’s just something in the air. The icecaps are melting, the bees are dying, Bill Clinton may become the first lady… Does anyone know what the f–k is going on around here?

Before you think too hard about that, check this out. I’m a huge MMA fan. In fact, my whole band is really into the sport. When we’re on tour we’re watching the fights all the time and we have tons of videos, too - King of the Cage, Gladiator Challenge, Pride FC, UFC – we’ve got it all. Our favorites are the live events though; we make bets, scream out combinations and techniques, throw punches, beer cans, and subway sandwiches at each other and, occasionally, at the TV, too. It’s like a big, crazy circus.

My fascination with MMA is not just some sadistic bloodthirsty craving I have to watch guys pummel the shiznit out of each other. I am more involved in it than that. For me, it’s more personal. There was a time when I headed toward becoming a professional fighter, but constant injuries were getting in the way of masturbation. Haha - just checking if you are awake! What I meant to say was playing guitar is quite difficult in a cast. So, as my music career took off, I abandoned that road, stopped competing and slowly dropped out of the regular training, too. Occasionally I still go to boot camps and I roll just for fun, but that’s pretty much it for me.

I’m pretty much content with having the honor of standing on the mat pretty much with the royalty of the MMA world at one point or another. In fact as I’m writing this I’m sitting here with King Of The Cage and SHOOTO World Champion Jake Shields discussing this very subject. (see photo) Once a fighter is always a fighter. One could never shed that skin.

Humans have roamed this planet for over two million years now, fighting, hunting, and doing what it takes to survive. That is our genetic disposition. We are survivors and brutal fighters by nature. “Civilization”– is only a couple of thousand years old, at most. Our bodies took millions of years to evolve into their present state. It’s impossible for our nature to completely change in a few hundred years — to adjust to this brand new idea of society and its rules. It hasn’t been so long that we as a species detached from nature, and created a society that doesn’t depend on our fighting and hunting skills. The reality is, people were not designed to spend their time in cubicles, under fluorescent lights and buy their meals in a supermarket.

People today are all suppressed fighters and survivors and I think MMA is an outlet that diffuses some of the pressure. It reminds us of what we were before – what we are capable of. Why MMA? Why not boxing? Because MMA is the closest thing to reality. You look at widely accepted fight forms such as boxing, wrestling and you know in the back of your mind that it’s not real fighting. Those athletes operate within the strict rules of their respective sports and that makes the fight itself pretty far from “reality.” Don’t get me wrong, if Mike Tyson hits you in the forehead, you’re still dead. But what if you could kick him, throw him, take him to the ground and put him in an arm bar? It would be a completely different playing field. Only then, it would be a “real” fight. No pun intended, but boxing took a big hit when the whole world came to that realization.
The question is, why is all of this happening now? With the .com boom, for a second it looked like geeks would rule the world — their music, fashion and slang was taking over. Web guys acted like rock stars. It was a surreal moment. Then, with the crash, there was a sharp and violent shift, so now the meek will not inherit the Earth. Now, we are talking about testosterone and muscle, Ji Jitsu and Muay Thai. MMA superstars are, sooner or later, going to get their own action figures. People are growing balls again.

I’m so glad for that, but we have to wonder what happened. Are we all trying to shake off the chains of social conditioning — the rules. Maybe our genes are rebelling against the physical oppression of office chairs, hamburgers and the fluorescent lights. Or, with the war and all the associated hostility, maybe it’s simply a reflection of a violent era. Could it be that we are all just blood thirsty spectators and would enjoy a train wreck just as much as we enjoy cage fighting? Or there is something more to all of this? Let’s find out – you tell me!

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