Glover Teixeira spent a major time inside the UFC’s light heavyweight division. Now retired and preparing for a boxing match against Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, the 46 year old former champion has watched the sport transform around him, and he does not love everything he sees.
Speaking on the Mighty Cast podcast, Teixeira drew a sharp line between fans of the UFC and fans of mixed martial arts as a craft.
“Because then it’s hard, right, to pay somebody even for the company, right? Let’s say another company stop paying the figh ters, you know, but we need views. You need the guys to watch, you need the people to watch,” Teixeira said.
He pointed to short attention spans as the culprit.
Texeira stated, “It’s because of people now is so ad*icted to dopamine. You know, they’re in the phone scrolling. They don’t even watch one video, they go for the next video. Those are the guys that want to they get so bored on a fig ht right over there.”
He continued, “They want you to be a fan. You want to, like I say, understand and enjoy, but those people just want to be excited. They want somebody to entertain them in a way.”
That craving for quick, digestible spectacle, Teixeira said, is exactly what led him to Power Slap when it launched.
“And a lot of people try to do a different shows like for example Power Slap. When I first hear this thing I’m like ‘Oh my god you got to watch this s**t.’ It’s people talking s**t. Now like they’re going to knock you out and I can take it. It’s a fast and there’s a lot of knockouts and people like that dopamine, right? They don’t care about the art. They losing that, you know.”
Teixeira extended the idea beyond fig hting, comparing it to how people no longer stop to notice architecture or public art because they are fixed on their phones.
“Everybody’s going to be looking at the phone. Nobody’s going to look any art. They can see the sunset on the phone, you know. Oh, there’s the sunset. Okay, let me check it.”
[Editor’s Note: Quotes have been edited for clarity and readability.]
