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For the purposes of the show, the tryout seemed to work just fine.  They knew what was going on even if my head felt like it was going to explode.  And when a disagreement arose over a certain fighter who two different coaches wanted?  Well, they settled it by having both coaches talk to the fighter and make fun of the other coach’s abilities and personal style right in front of him.  This is never going to solve anything, I thought.  And yet, somehow it did.

I flashed back to an episode during the most recent season of “The Ultimate Fighter”, where they used a coin flip to decide who would switch teams.  That seemed orderly and fair, and yet, as Mac Danzig told us after the show aired, it ended up being even more complicated than we saw on the show.  First they had to decide if the winner of the coin toss was going to switch, or if winning meant he got to choose, or if no one got to choose and each guy was just assigned a side of the coin…

See?  That situation would have been resolved much differently on “Iron Ring”.  Plus, the whole thing would have been narrated by some guy who sounds like the M.C. for those “And 1 Mixtape” games.  Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, unless you’re my parents, in which case I advise you not to bother trying to figure it out.

But while “Iron Ring” illuminated many of the differences between whites and blacks, much like Barack Obama’s recent speech on race, it also ended by showing how similar we are.  For example, the number of actual fights during the first hour showing of “Iron Ring”: 1.The same as the number of fights we’ve come to expect in any given episode of “TUF”.  Spooky, right?

Of course, I was disappointed by the lack of an iron ring above the arena thus far, though I’m holding out hope that this will be rectified in future installments.  And while I didn’t exactly enjoy watching the show, I had to remind myself that this show is not for people like me.  By people like me, I don’t mean whites.  I mean aficionados.

We who read about MMA on the internet and watch everything MMA-related that comes on TV tend to fall into the category of aficionados.  We know the sport better than most people, and care about it more than is healthy.

“Iron Ring” isn’t for these people.  It’s for people who have never really watched MMA before.  It’s for people who don’t think they’d like it, but probably would if they gave it a chance.  It’s MMA for people who don’t like MMA.  And I guess that’s just fine.  From that audience, a few new aficionados are bound to spring up sooner or later.

Read more of Ben Fowlkes work at The Fighting Life.