America

("Ladies, do you mind? Gonzaga-Carwin is about to start.")

There's simply nothing better in the world than screaming at a row of flat-screen TVs in a sports bar during UFC events, surrounded by a pack of howling MMA fans, buzzed off of dollar-drafts of Bud Light. (Honestly, we defy you to find something better than that. The love of a child? Ha.) So in our continuing efforts to serve you, CagePotato is setting out to determine America's 25 best bars/pubs/lounges/other-places-that-serve-booze to watch MMA. And we need your help to come up with some nominees. So what makes for a great MMA bar? Well...

— The bar in question always shows UFC and other important MMA events, with the sound actually turned on.
— The fights are shown on multiple screens, so you don't always have to be pointed in one direction.
— You are never charged a ridiculous cover to come in during pay-per-view events.
— The place draws a fun, enthusiastic crowd, high on attractive women and low on douchebags
— It's a solid place to hang out even when fights aren't going on. The drink list is deep, and the place either contains a diverse jukebox or a DJ whose shit is on point.

If the place you go to watch MMA meets most of these criteria, we want to hear about it. Go to this forum thread and tell us the bar's name, the town it's in, its website if it has one, and a little bit about why MMA fans should go there. If you play your cards right, we might just organize a CagePotato meetup there one of these days — and your first dollar-draft will be on us. Thanks guys!

(My inner child, consumed with rage.)

One of the things I like to do in my spare time is read the internet and get mad. I honestly love it, to the point where it's a shockingly poor use of my time. But I can't deny that there's a pleasure in indulging in the viewpoints of others that drive me absolutely insane, sometimes more so than reading opinions that I already agree with. I stumbled on to a gem yesterday by Jamie Samuelsen of the Detroit Free Press, who managed to say almost nothing that I agreed with in a relatively short article about why MMA "won't catch on to the mainstream."

Here's one of my favorite lines of reasoning from Samuelsen, who explains that while people tell him MMA is increasing in popularity, he doesn't see it happening:

I don’t see the roots of the MMA. I don’t see it inherently in our culture. It’s a fascination, but it’s certainly not a participation sport. “Yeah, I do a little cage-fighting in my spare time. Let’s go see how the big boys do it.” I went to a UFC event at the Joe in 1996 when the sport was really picking up steam and was supposed to be the next big thing. Twelve years later, the sport has certainly grown. But has it grown to the extent that it was supposed to have. Yes it’s bigger, but I don’t think it’s that much bigger.

I bring this up not to bash Samuelsen's viewpoint, but because it's a fairly new criticism of MMA. We're used to the human cockfighting angle, but this -- this claim that it's not rooted in our culture and not "a participation sport" -- is something different, and something worth responding to.