The invocation of God's will in victory is a divisive feature of mixed martial arts. For many fighters, a celebratory shout-out for the Almighty is as intuitive as acknowledging the input of a strength and conditioning coach. But expressions of faith in such a violent, relatively trivial context tend to be polarizing, as a cursory glance at Twitter on any given fight night will confirm. It's not difficult to see why. Attributing athletic success to divine will appears ripe for ridicule for any number of reasons.
Consider, for example, the implications of voicing the belief that your cage fight tops the list of a deity's priorities. Such a claim seemingly betrays an almost pathological self-obsession. One might also question the fighter's sense of sportsmanship, given that he is knowingly entering the cage with an omnipotent tag team partner. Until we devise a test that can identify unnatural levels of the Holy Spirit, testosterone to epitestosterone ratios and IV bans would appear to be the least of our worries.
But in all fairness, it isn't particularly charitable to go with the most ludicrous interpretation of an individual's beliefs. Caricature of this sort presupposes all sorts of things about the religious fighter's perspective. The truth is we often don't know enough about the worldview that underpins any given post-fight declaration of faith, and said worldview will likely vary from fighter to fighter.
"I would say God both inspires me and intervenes in my contests," says UFC bantamweight Michael McDonald. "You can't put a limit on God in any way, shape or form. If he chooses to intervene in the fight, that's fine. In my first professional fight, I was caught in the deepest guillotine that I've ever been caught in, and I was about to pass out, and the guy just lets go for no reason. Things like that have happened, where it doesn't make any sense to me.
"Take my second fight with Cole Escovedo, for example. In our first fight, he took me down and beat the living crap out of me, so it was obvious what he was going to do next time. He's going to try and do the same thing. Why would he try and stand with me when that's what I'm best at? But he chose to not try a single takedown and tried to stand with me the entire time, and he ended up getting knocked unconscious in the second round. Those are just a couple of examples of things I can't explain, or don't understand, why it happened like that. So in a sense you could say yeah, there was some intervening."
