I'll kick back, order my chicken wings and grab a soda.

It'll be my first of the week, you know, with this new "eat right, exercise hard" regimen I've been on. Like Lance Armstrong, I'll live strong ... except for Saturday.

Because Saturday is fight night, and I'll be at a sports bar in Charleston ready to take in the action. It's the only way to take in a real fight -- if you can't be there in person -- at a sports bar. Guys swill beers, like they sometimes should, and girls serve em' up nice and cold. It's a throwback -- almost -- to the prehistoric days when "Ugga" was a big word with many meanings and we drug our women around by their hair.

Luckily, society has advanced since the cave days and nobody's gonna' be draggin' anybody around the sports bar by the hair Saturday night without going to jail. Such barbarism is no longer accepted in most countries.

But, if you open up your ears heading into Saturday's fight you'll hear those insisting barbarism is on its way back and that it's going mainstream. Of course, they'll be talking about the UFC, and just in case you've been under a rock somewhere, it's the biggest and best thing going in the fight game right now. It could very well be the death of boxing and all other forms of fight sports all rolled into one and that's what has the bigwigs scared. It's why people like Jim Lampley try to dismiss the rising popularity of the sport as a fad.

But, fad it's not. And, that's because unlike boxing and pro wrestling, the UFC has developed a reputation for delivering. And, in the rare instances when it hasn't, the company has done its best to make it up to the fans. In fact, the UFC has been ingenious in some respects, due to the fact that it has actually given would-be pay-per-views away to its audience. UFC 70 was free for satellite and cable television subscribers, broadcast live on SPIKE TV, and featured a title change, Gabriel Gonzaga's stunningly vicious defeat over heavily favored Mirko Cro Cop, for the heavyweight crown. And, after the second, much-ballyhooed Ken Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz matchup that ended in Shamrock getting pummelled just seconds into the fight, UFC President Dana White publicly admitted the pay-per-view was poor and vowed to make amends. He did so by putting on a Shamrock-Ortiz III fight -- free -- on SPIKE. So far, the company has practiced good business sense.

It's something boxing isn't known for. You pay $50 for a pay-per-view fight. It stinks. You just got screwed, pal. Sucks for you.

It's one reason why boxing has started to take notice of what's happening on the other side of the fight spectrum. Nothing says you've arrived as a player in the fight game better than big-money boxing taking notice of what you are doing. And, with UFC grossing a reported $223 million in pay-per-view revenue compared to HBO boxing's $177 million ... boy, have the boxing loyalists been talking.

Yet, nothing may precipitate the death of the "Sweet Science" more than the powers-to-be in the sport allowing a name -- such as a Floyd Mayweather or Bernard Hopkins -- to actually step in an Octagon and fight. Recently, both have taken their shots at the UFC -- Mayweather saying that guys not good enough to be boxers get mohawks, tattoo their heads and go into a cage and street fight.

It's a given, if a Mayweather or Hopkins stepped into an Octagon, they'd automatically be the best standup guys in the joint. Nobody in the UFC could stand toe-to-toe with "Pretty Boy" or "The Executioner" ... and that's why they wouldn't. The fight would last all of five seconds standing up. It'd go just a tad bit longer than that on the ground, and it would play out a little something like this: "Big" John McCarthy would come to the center of the ring, give the trademark, "Are you ready? Are you ready? Let's get it on!" deal that he does, and then the UFC fighter would charge across the cage, shoot into the legs of the boxer, take him down and turn the whole fight into a jiujitsu match that either ends in a choke, an arm bar or perhaps just a flurry of elbows or fists. Ground and pound is not a term that boxers are familiar with. It'd be like taking a fish out of water and trying to have him fend off a hawk. That's why the guys who make the big bucks in boxing -- the most crooked people on the planet, perhaps -- cannot let a big name fighter try his hand at getting in the cage. When they do so -- and he gets destroyed -- it'd just put the sport even further in the tank.

And so, as barbaric as a matchup between a guy called "The Ice Man" and another guy called "Rampage" may sound, understand that so many of the people who will be telling you to write it off as a fad, as human cockfighting, as a blood sport that only appeals to a younger generation, are people that simply don't understand. It's more of a mental thing than so many could ever comprehend. Mixed Martial Arts is just what it says it is. It's the art of fighting in every form and style. To learn those styles and to train in each takes a tremendous amount of discipline. The dinosaurs of boxing who dismiss it are speaking from ignorance.

We're not bloodthirsty. We're just thirsty for a good fight, and boxing -- well -- it just doesn't offer that up too much anymore.

T&D Sports Writer Brian Linder can be reached by e-mail at blinder@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5553.

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