Talk Trashy To Me

Written by Lucy Dunnet, Tuesday 30 July 2024

Should female grapplers ramp up the trash talk to increase viewership and potentially improve competitive outcome? 

Trash talk, smack talk, sh*t talk, whichever your term of preference, has been used in sports for decades. From heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali in the 60s, to today’s no-gi GOAT Gordon Ryan, many of the most well-known male fighters are also renowned for their trash talk. It begs two questions: is the potential value of trash talk worth the risk of overstepping boundaries, and should more female grapplers adopt trash talk as a characteristic to increase hype around themselves to further their career in the same way many of their male counterparts do?

A time and a place for trash talk

“If this is a professional event, that is trying to attract viewers, then athletes must behave in a way that attracts viewers, while still maintaining a level of common human decency.” Matt Benyon, Creative Director at Scramble and Polaris

We have seen it time and again in other sports, most relevantly in MMA, that drama sells. If you are an exciting fighter off the mats, as well as on them, then people are more likely to engage with your journey, want to watch you fight and pay to see you. Following that is the snowball effect of promotions wanting to book you and other grapplers vying to fight you. Should more female grapplers sell their souls to the trash-talking devil to bring more excitement and hype to their fights and subsequently money in their pockets? Or, should the quality of fighting skills, combined with personality traits that don’t include a desire to trash talk one’s opponent, be enough to entertain? While many detest the idea of trash-talking, saying it is lowbrow, has a harmful effect on younger grapplers, and runs diametrically to the values of traditional martial arts, it cannot be contested that trash talk can sell.