Why is Trump building a ‘cage’ on the White House lawn?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Construction crews set to work this week building a “cage” on the White House lawn. The arched framework for a temporary sports arena already looms over the neoclassical building like a looping roller coaster at a theme park.

For more than three decades, the cage — an eight-sided enclosure of vinyl-coated chain-link fencing — has been the official stage for mixed martial-arts combat, in which fighters from different disciplines square off under frequently brutal lowest-common-denominator rules. In April, the president traveled to Miami to sit cageside at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, embracing UFC CEO Dana White, his friend and supporter, and watching attentively through the wire as the fighters spilled blood.

Now Trump is getting to host his own fighting spectacle to ring in America’s 250th birthday and his own 80th. On June 14, also Flag Day, the White House cage will be the venue for the UFC Freedom 250 event, which will see Georgian Ilia Topuria and American Justin Gaethje face off in a title bout meant to mark the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

UFC aficionados know the cage as the Octagon: Renderings shared by the company last weekend depict the White House foregrounded by the signature structure with its black fencing and light-colored padded canvas flooring, ideal for showing spilled blood. In this mock-up of the upcoming event, two ambiguously rendered fighters confront each other in the cage, as spectators seated all around the structure look on. The United States Marine Band stands below the South Portico. The stars and stripes stand tall in the distance.

This cage, the image proclaims, is America.

Why call the ring a cage? Cages were originally for holding birds or other animals, and then, by extension, for confining and punishing humans. In the late 19th century, “cage” took on various meanings in sports: the hockey goal, or the structure in which baseball players practiced batting. Early basketball games were played within enclosures of netting or wire mesh, and sportswriters kept referring to players as “cagers” for decades afterward.

But the true precursor to the UFC Octagon might be the wrestling cage. In the 1930s, professional wrestling employed cages to amp up the entertainment value of scripted matches, says Michael Thomsen, author of “Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry.” Putting a match in a cage told spectators that the mayhem couldn’t be contained within an ordinary wrestling ring. Early cages were constructed from chicken wire, until steel began to be used around the ’80s.

In the ‘80s, Art Davie, a car salesman-turned-advertising executive in Southern California, was tasked with creating a marketing campaign for Tecate beer, Thomsen says. He pitched an idea that he hoped would endear the brand to younger consumers: a TV series, sponsored by Tecate, pitting martial arts fighters of different sizes and disciplines against each other.

While researching the pitch, Davie came across a magazine article about the Brazilian jiu-jitsu master Rorion Gracie, whose family pioneered a no-holds-barred style of fighting that would become a precursor to modern mixed martial arts. At the time, Gracie — who was making a name for himself in Hollywood as a stunt coordinator and celebrity trainer — was getting attention for his open invitation to fight anyone in the US for $100,000, Thomsen says. Davie approached Gracie about his idea and he agreed to come on board, but Tecate’s US importer swiftly turned down the proposal.

Undeterred, Davie quit his job and put his savings into bringing the ultimate fight night he had envisioned to life, Thomsen says. First, though, he and Gracie had to figure out the arena. Gracie ruled out a boxing ring, worrying that fighters could fall through the ropes, according to ESPN’s “30 for 30.” Davie, meanwhile, weighed a number of attention-grabbing gimmicks that would heighten the drama and intensity of the competition: “I thought about some sort of a cage, but maybe with a moat. We could put sharks in it,” he said in a VICE TV documentary. “Then I had thought about some sort of a circle and then maybe the outer ring would be electrified.”

At the advice of a cardiologist, Davie decided against an electric fence. But who deserves credit for the eventual eight-sided cage is a matter of dispute, as chronicled in the UFC’s short film “OCTO: The Disputed Origin Story of the UFC Octagon.” One account states that it was John Milius, a screenwriter and director and a student of Gracie, who suggested an octagon, based partly on the gladiator pit in his 1982 film “Conan the Barbarian.” (He and Davie also discussed a setup involving torch-bearing men and women on white horses dressed as the Vestal Virgins.)

Other accounts credit the TV production’s art director Jason Cusson or production designer Greg Harrison for the idea. Cusson noted in the short film that they considered plexiglass for the enclosure, but determined it would be dangerous for the fighters and difficult to keep clean. Eventually, the team settled on an eight-sided structure on a raised platform, with fighters contained by a chain-link fence.

Davie partnered with the pay-per-view production company Semaphore Entertainment Group to broadcast the event, which they decided to call the “Ultimate Fighting Championship.” Their first event, UFC 1, took place in Denver on November 12, 1993, and was a relative success. And the Octagon was crucial to the UFC’s promotion of the event as a taboo, death-defying competition, Thomsen says: “Being able to have some promo footage or pictures of people bleeding and mashed up against a chain-link fence made it seem a little bit more illicit.”

But while some viewers were eager for the hyper-violent spectacle of the UFC, other people and institutions regarded its lack of weight classes and rules as barbaric and bloodthirsty. The late Republican Sen. John McCain referred to the sport as “human cockfighting;” The New York Times’ Richard Sandomir wrote in a 1994 article that “The decline of western civilization can be viewed through the pay-per-view prism.”

Western civilization in fact has a long history of staging unfettered combat as entertainment. The ancient Greek sport of pankration employed techniques from the more structured disciplines of boxing and wrestling, with no rules except for prohibitions on eye-gouging and biting. In the 18th century rural Southern United States, even those limited Greek rules were dispensed with for the sport of gouging, Thomsen says, in which biting, head-butting and clawing at one’s opponent were all fair game. And as Roman emperors compelled gladiators to fight to their deaths for public entertainment, the historian Gerald Horne writes that white enslavers arranged boxing matches between enslaved Black people, both for their own amusement and to stoke divisions among captives.

By 1997, Ultimate Fighting began to join more conventional combat sports in dividing fighters into weight classes, for safety’s sake. But numerous states still prohibited the company’s no-holds-barred combat, prompting Davie to find legal loopholes to keep holding events. The spending on lobbying and legal fees in an effort to counter its reputation eventually led the UFC into a downward spiral, says Thomsen.

In 2001, Dana White and his friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta took over the UFC. By then, Thomsen says, the public perception had shifted from regarding it as tough and controversial to seeing it as desperate and pathetic. It wasn’t until the arrival of the 2005 reality series “The Ultimate Fighter” that the UFC regained public favor. The show successfully reframed the sport as an avenue for alienated, out-of-work fighters to build a potentially lucrative career, if they were willing to risk their physical or mental health, Thomsen says. It continues to enjoy that reputation today.

“The mechanics of that underneath are still kind of about fear and desperation,” he says. “The flip side of that is if you endure that fear and you learn how to overcome it, then you can become a mogul: A self-made millionaire, like Conor McGregor or Ronda Rousey. That’s kind of the dream that the UFC offers.”

Today, the UFC is a multibillion dollar enterprise, whose parent company TKO Group Holdings also owns the wrestling behemoth World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). And the qualities that once stigmatized the sport are now venerated by the White House. “Money can still be the fulcrum that people will debase themselves at a fundamental physical level to try and get,” Thomsen says. “That’s the American spirit, from the Mayflower colony to Floyd Mayweather.”

What to make of the image of a UFC cage erected on the White House lawn? “The reality is the UFC is who we’ve been all along as a country,” Thomsen says. “All these slow-walking precedents have pushed us into a place where now we can just be openly barbaric without the need for a manicured fantasy.”

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