Welcome back to This Fucking Guy, where we here at the CME take a long, hard look at someone in the MMA world with the hope of answering the question: this fucking guy, what is his deal? Today, in advance of the welterweight title rematch at UFC 268, we turn that lens on Colby Ray Covington.
Serious question to start us off here, does Colby Covington have fans? Again, this is meant sincerely, as in I actually want to know. Are there people out there who are like, ‘hell yeah Colby is my dude and I’d never miss one of his fights’? I’m not talking about people who will cheer for him when he’s fighting someone they dislike, or even people who only know him because he loudly supported the same political candidate and/or causes they did.
I’m talking about people who, when the conversation down at B-Dubs turns to MMA, will honestly and seriously answer the question ‘who’s your favorite MMA fighter’ with the straight-faced answer, ‘Colby fucking Covington, bro.’
It seems like, according to what we know of how MMA fandom works, those people should exist, right? There’s someone for everyone in this fucked up little fiefdom. And Covington has been a top guy in the UFC’s 170-pound class for at least the last four years or so. He also went sort of insanely out of his way to align himself clearly on one side of extremely divisive political issues – pro-Trump, anti-Black Lives Matter, pro-claiming that COVID is bullshit, anti-vaccine mandates – which seems like it should at least win over the people on his side of the aisle.
And to an extent, maybe it does. Covington does seem to make A LOT of appearances on the kinds of internet-only right wing talk shows that no one outside that particular echo chamber would ever even know about. And when he gets on his Twitter to post thoughtful political commentary such as “Fauci Lied & American Businesses Died,” he gets a few thousand likes. But does that mean there are thousands of people out there who are actually fans of Colby Covington the fighter? Or even, dare I suggest it, Colby Covington the person? Because it really doesn’t feel like it, at least within the MMA bubble.
Instead, Covington has become our cringey cousin. We see him at family reunions, clearly wearing a uniform he saw on TV or YouTube and then adopted in full as his entire personality. Occasionally we might be called upon by grandparents or confused uncles to explain his schtick – he’s acting like a dickhead on purpose because he feels he can reliably generate hatred but not admiration or affection, I guess? – but the gimmick itself is most embarrassing for how contrived it is.
For his first three or four years in the UFC, nobody really noticed Covington. It’s tempting to say it was purely because of his wrestling-heavy fighting style, but he had more finishes in those early years than at any point since, and still the MMA world was totally indifferent. So he took a page out of Chael Sonnen’s book and decided to form himself into a character that we had to feel some type of way about.
The character was that of an obnoxious Trump-supporting asshole – and the asshole part was definitely crucial to the whole thing. Simply being an MMA fighter who supports Trump is not in any way remarkable. To the extent that pro fighters notice or care about politics at all, they are on the whole waaay more likely to support Trump than any other political figure. But Covington’s thing was intentionally being a dick, sneering and chuckling the whole time, basically an ongoing impression of the dim-witted, buffoonish bully Biff Tannen from the “Back to the Future” movies. He even has the same fucking haircut.
But somehow Covington succeeded in making MMA fans hate him without actually making them care about him. As in, when he shows up for this UFC 268 fight week spouting prepared material about how “Cumshot Chimaev” nearly retired due to “the common cold,” it provokes exactly the eye-rolling revulsion he’s going for. But when he’s not around? When he essentially disappears from view, as he did while waiting for his title shot over the course of the last 13 months? It’s not like anyone appears to miss him. Instead of the man we love to hate, he’s the man we hate but could absolutely, unequivocally do without. So how did he fuck this up so bad?
Part of it is execution. If you’re going to be an effective bad guy, you have to also be cool or scary or funny or something. Someone like Ken Shamrock, at least in his prime, was scary. Conor McGregor, before he fell down the backside of a VH1 “Behind the Music” episode, was cool. Chael Sonnen was funny and even occasionally clever. The way Covington plays it? It just comes off dorky.
When he’s flanked by girls in bikinis in his low-budget videos, it gives off an ‘I have to pay women to even stand next to me’ vibe. When he comes up with Trumpian nicknames for opponents that only he ever uses – “Marty Fakenewsman” is a good example – it only reminds you that the core feature of good nicknames is that people actually want to use them.
He’s been kicked out of his gym. He’s been jumped in buffet lines. When he tried to claim that he’d been having sex with female fighter Polyana Viana, she quickly pointed out that she had a boyfriend and called the very suggestion of sex with Covington “revolting.”
In other words, if what he’s going for is cool, swaggering bad boy, it is failing on every possible front. He has become the MMA version of the kid who swears he has a hot girlfriend but you guys don’t know her because she goes to a different school. The response this provokes isn’t so much anger, which comes with at least some emotional investment. Instead it’s that special brand of second-hand embarrassment that makes you want to look away and forget you ever saw it.
There’s also the fact that, of all the sports in which to make ostentatious Trumplove your personal brand, MMA might be the worst choice. That’s because a lot of MMA fans and fighters already do genuinely like and support Trump. So not only does it fail to distinguish you from the pack when your whole thing is Trump cosplay, it also probably confuses the Trump supporters in the crowd when you try so hard to make clear that a) you’re on their side politically, but also b) you are supposed to be the villain, detested by everyone.
And Covington really does go hard after that particular villain narrative. He talks often about how hated he is, while in the next breath insisting that he doesn’t care. Take this tortured quote he gave to ESPN in the lead up to UFC 268:
“The most difficult thing to overcome is just myself. Everything that is stacked against me, all the people that hate me, all the people that try and think they know me. But no one really knows me. I let them see what I want to show them. I don’t show them the true me, they don’t know the true me.”
That right there? That is an individual who is at war with himself. Even within the context of this one brief quote we see him being torn apart by this emotional tug-of-war. The most difficult thing is … myself? But wait, it’s not so much me as all the people who hate me. But wait, they can’t really hate me because they don’t even know me. Because I won’t allow them to know me. I have a true self that is forever hidden and therefore cannot be judged. So for all you or anyone else knows the real Colby might be awesome.
That’s a deeply insecure dude. That’s a dude who signed up for a ride without knowing where the ride was going. Now he’s in over his head and he has no choice but to plow forward in the hopes that victory might eventually redeem him.
This is the other tricky part about being the Trump Guy in a sport that is already filled with and watched by a lot of Trump Guys. They might be persuaded to get on your team and hold you up as an example of how their side is strong and right and good – but only if you win. If you get your jaw broken by the Nigerian immigrant? If you then insist, contrary to several forms of evidence, that your jaw was never broken? If you go running in shame from the arena and then have to walk around with your sad flannel over your head because you can’t bear to show your face? No, man. They will not proudly proclaim you as one of their own. Not a chance.
That’s the bind Covington has put himself in. He’s bet everything on a gimmick he can’t fully sell, and the only chance he has to keep it all going is if he beats a dominant champion in a sport whose whole appeal is that the bullshit eventually stops when the fighting starts. That’s a tough place to be. But Covington put himself there with a series of calculated actions over a matter of years. It just doesn’t always seem like he really knew what he was doing, or that he’s always glad he did it.
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