Hate: What Alex Pereira’s Win Reveals About Combat’s Dark Side

After Alex “Poatan” Pereira’s brutal finish of Magomed Ankalaev at UFC 320 last evening, the Combat Sports Fans Coalition found itself admiring Poatan’s fighting spirit but also wrestling with an unsettling question:

What’s the role of hate in fighting?

As Pereira rained down thunderous ground-and-pound strikes and vicious 12-6 elbows, we couldn’t help but feel the emotional component of these strikes.  And to be clear - even though there were some Google-translate enabled threats to shut Alex’s “electricity off” it would surprise us if Pereira actually hates Ankalaev. We could believe he hates his last performance but we would put his motivation more in the category of how Michael Jordan used to invent beefs with his opponents or bet absurd amounts of money on golf to rekindle his edge. In the end, only Poatan knows what motivates him. 

Still, there was something primal, maybe even ancient about that finish. It raises a truth that most other sports never face: combat sports run on emotion, and sometimes that emotion isn’t always pretty but it is what makes the sport engaging.

The Paradox of Consent

Unlike football or basketball, no promoter can make a fighter fight if he or she really doesn’t want to. For example, I doubt there is any incentive Dana White could offer Merab to fight Aljo (witness Merab’s post fight sincere wedding toast). The act of stepping into the cage or ring is a kind of consent — both athletes saying yes to the inevitability and pain of violence.

But what happens when one of them isn’t just fighting to win, but wants to hurt their opponent? An infamous example is Rousimar “Toquinho” Palhares, a Brazilian MMA fighter and leg-lock specialist. When we go back and watch this scummy (Baz Ruten’s words not ours) jiu jitsu assassin deliberately hold heel hooks, kimuras, Suloev kneebars and even an inside sankaku calf slicer past the a tap we really start to wonder about calling MMA a ‘sport.’ In gyms all over the world kids as young as 4 and 5 years old are taught that the safest place to tap is directly on their opponent and if you are the one being tapped you are to immediately release the submission. Immediately. 

If love of competition gives combat sports their nobility, then hatred gives them a kind of unbalanced danger. Pereira’s demeanor — cold, restrained, burning — embodies that tension.

When Hatred Feeds the Art

In some cases, dislike or even hatred sharpens the edge. Fighters talk about how it narrows focus, boosts aggression, and strips away hesitation. Think of rivalries like Ali-Frazier, Tito-Chuck, or more recently Edwards-Usman II — moments when emotion juiced the contest.

But hatred also courts chaos. It risks reckless violence, post-fight disrespect, or even lasting harm — physical or psychological. Athletic commissions ban performance-enhancing drugs, but no one regulates emotional enhancers like rage revealing yet another inconsistency in our society’s approach to performance enhancing drugs and drugs more generally.

The CSFC’s concern isn’t moral panic — it’s integrity. It will not surprise you that we are not big fans of safety culture and all the virtue signalling that seems to have captured society. But when a fighter’s intent drifts from victory toward vengeance, the fight changes shape. 

Fans deserve clarity about the line between controlled violence and malicious harm.

The Question We Leave With

If fighters can’t be forced to fight, but can and do fight with the will to injure — what then? Unlike last week’s post where the CSFC proposed a specific change to Athletic Commission rules to improve the appeals process, we got nothing here. Zippo. Maybe the answer isn’t to erase hate from fighting, but to recognize it and make sure the rules provide a reasonable boundary between fair competition and something darker.