In the year 2005, legendary sports writer and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson decided that he’d lived long enough, and ended his own life with a .45-caliber handgun. To those who knew Thompson well, his suicide was not much of a surprise

“He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn’t know that he could commit suicide at any moment,” said artist Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s long-time friend and best-known collaborator. “I don’t know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable.”

Whether it was a surprise or not, Thompson was gone, and his sudden absence ripped a giant chasm into the intersecting worlds of journalism and literature.

A lot has happened in the 13 years since Thompson left us, and as a bottomless jug of potent opinions, you better believe he’d have plenty to say about most of it. I for one, have often found myself wondering what he’d have to say about the testosterone-soaked world of mixed martial arts.

At the time of Thompson’s death, MMA was already a well-established fringe sport with its tattooed forearms wrapped around the collective neck of the valuable 18–34 demographic. The UFC had just promoted UFC 51, while Japan’s Pride Fighting Championship promoted its 29th event on the very night that the writer pulled the trigger. Despite the fact that the final years of Thompson’s life overlapped with the early years of MMA, however, he never really spoke about the sport.

So what would Thompson have thought about MMA if he’d watched it often? Better yet, what would he have written about it, if he’d covered it as he did other sports? Well, that’s surprisingly difficult to say.

We know that Thompson enjoyed the wild category of pseudo-sports to which MMA belongs. In a hilarious installment of his ESPN column Hey Rube, he recounted an energetic 3:30am phone call with Bill Murray, during which he pitched the actor on an invented sport called “Shotgun Golf.” Thompson also liked boxing and football, close relatives of MMA, and at the height of his sports-writing career, covered both sports often.

At the same time, I have some doubt that Thompson truly liked sports at all. He certainly didn’t think highly of the profession of sports writing.

“There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for,” Thompson said in the 1979 Rolling Stone article Fear And Loathing At The Superbowl: No Rest For The Wretched. “None of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…”

“Sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover,” Thompson said later in the same article.

Interestingly, Thompson also would have been denied membership in the Mixed Martial Arts Journalists Association — a phoney and elitist circle he almost certainly would have loathed anyway.

Item number 9 on the Association’s Rules/Regulations page states explicitly “no working under the influence of drugs or alcohol. No drinking alcohol on press row.” This would have been a problem for Thompson, who was known for his love — nay, copious overuse — of drugs and alcohol (usually combined), on the job or otherwise.

“We could always load up on acid and spend the day roaming around the clubhouse grounds with sketch pads, laughing hysterically at the natives and swilling mint juleps so the cops wouldn’t think we’re abnormal,” Thompson said in his famous 1970 article, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, recounting his thought process when he failed to acquire press credentials to cover the event. In the same article Thompson deliberated firing mace into the throngs of fans at the Derby… No, he would not have been embraced by many of the fun-killers who currently cover MMA…

Now that we’re firmly on the topic of things Hunter S. Thompson wouldn’t like about MMA, I can also say with confidence that he would have disliked UFC President Dana White, not just for the UFC boss’s greed, but for his howling, spittle-ridden endorsement of then Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

If Thompson were alive today, in this grim era when the Free World is ruled by a Twitter-ranting racist, well, he’d be unhappy. That unhappiness would ooze into his writing constantly. Even in his coverage of MMA, there would be Trump tie-ins galore: furious rants on the President’s buffoonery between rounds, frenzied ravings on his policy as judges’ decisions were read… By outwardly supporting Trump, White would have joined former presidents Richard Nixon and George Bush (H.W. and W.) on Thompson’s long list of enemies and adversaries.

When it comes to Joe Rogan, the UFC’s foremost color commentator, and one if its most recognizable faces, I’m not sure where Thompson would have stood. It’s easy to imagine Thompson as a guest on Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, swapping conspiracy theories and talking fights in a thick haze of pot smoke. In many ways, they would seem to be kindred spirits. At the same time, I believe Thompson would have found Rogan a little inauthentic. While the UFC commentator can be quite candid and honest at times, he’s also been criticized for his inability to switch out of hype-man mode. On the clock or otherwise, he’s the UFC’s carnival barker, and I think this might have driven Thompson insane.

“Great Jesus, Joe… get it together man,” he might have hissed as Joe Rogan wept over the greatness of Ronda Rousey on his podcast. “There are people watching this racket!”

While it’s easy to pick out the things that might have bothered Thompson about the sport of MMA, particularly the UFC, this is not to say there aren’t things he wouldn’t have liked about it.

One of the first things that jumps to my mind when combing MMA for the things that Thompson would have enjoyed, unsurprisingly, are the athletes. A few athletes in particular.

I believe Thompson would have loved the Nick and Nate Diaz, not because they are brazen pot-smokers, but because they are fearless in their shared approach to fighting and life. He would have loved their rebellious sides, their trademark Stockton slaps, their failures to show up at press conferences, their “fuck you”s to their opponents, the media, and most importantly, the UFC.

I believe Thompson also would have loved Jon Jones. Not just because Jones is clearly one of the greatest fighters ever, but also because he’s squandered his tremendous gifts with his antics outside the the cage. Thompson loved a good riches-to-rags story as much as everyone loves the reverse. He would have found Jones’s fall fascinating.

“Once a towering titan of the sporting world, Jon Jones has been swallowed whole by a hellish vortex of cocaine, steroids and boner pills,” I can imagine Thompson writing of Jones. “In that way, he is a metaphor for America, a country that is being ripped asunder by its grotesque gluttony for war and oil and power…”

Then, of course there’s Conor McGregor, a name Thompson would have typed often if he had covered MMA over the last few years. What would the writer have thought about him?

McGregor has been compared to Muhammad Ali several times over the course of his illustrious career. These comparisons, of course, are based solely on the Irishman’s transcendence of his sport, not on any kind of social or political moving and shaking. While I don’t imagine Thompson would have ever outwardly compared McGregor to Ali, I do think he would have described him with similar language, particularly if he got any actual face time in with the MMA megastar and his tight-knit entourage.

“Life had been good to Pat Patterson for so long that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be anything but a free-riding, first-class passenger on a flight near the top of the world,” Thompson said of Ali’s bodyguard in the 1978 Rolling Stone Article Muhammad Ali: Last Tango in Vegas. “It is a long, long way from the frostbitten midnight streets around Chicago’s Clark and Division to the deep-rug hallways of the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan…. But Patterson had made that trip in high style, with stops along the way in London, Paris, Manila, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and almost everywhere else in the world on that circuit where the menus list no prices and you need at least three pairs of $100 sunglasses just to cope with the TV lights every time you touch down at an airport for another frenzied press conference and then a ticker-tape parade along the route to the Presidential Palace and another princely reception. That is Muhammad Ali’s world, an orbit so high, a circuit so fast and strong and with rarefied air so thin that only ‘The Champ,’ ‘The Greatest,’ and a few close friends have unlimited breathing rights.”

You can imagine Thompson writing about a member of McGregor’s posse — and thereby McGregor himself — in the same tone. Just swap in “Crumlin” for “Clark and Division,” “$1000” for $100,” “Champ-Champ” for “Champ.” No matter how you feel about him, McGregor and his cohorts do fly in “rarefied air”, and Thompson would have written about him accordingly.

Then again, there are parts of McGregor’s character that Thompson would have disliked. Thompson was sickened by greed, and while McGregor does make quiet (and significant) donations to a Children’s Hospital in his hometown, he is as money-crazed as a person can get.

McGregor was also one of the first fighters in MMA history to truly capitalize on a gift of gab, to foreshadow his walk with talk, and to make the big bucks for it. When McGregor began to rake in the millions, countless other fighters began to mimic his shtick — though not one has succeeded. The sport has plunged into an era of unprecedented trash talk, bravado and saber-rattling as a result — so much so that actual fighting seems to have taken a back seat to the antics beforehand.

Thompson witnessed similar transformations in other sports, particularly boxing, and they always seemed to make him sick.

“I liked it when Ali was there,” Thompson said of the state of boxing in a 1998 interview with Charlie Rose. “I don’t like it now.”

“I believe that boxing and wrestling are about to kind of merge… There are all these thugs being thrown out of the NFL, people that slit roommates’ throats in college, and can still run for a thousand yards. I think they’re all going to be in some sort of wrestling league,” Thompson continued, speaking in a way that seemed to presage the current era of MMA, when former Carolina Panther and proven wife-beater Greg Hardy is now 3–0 as an amateur mixed martial artist…

Now that I’m quickly closing in on the 2000-word mark, I’m inclined to pump the brakes on this thing. So few people actually like to read anymore, and if I continue for much longer I’ll lose the few brave souls who have made it this far…Besides, I could ramble on for paragraphs about the various features of MMA, and how Hunter S. Thompson may or may not have felt about them, but the truth is that, the more I write, the more it becomes clear to me that any potential relationship between Gonzo journalist and blood-sport would have been complicated. Like all of his relationships were.

Whatever the case, I am confident that MMA is a sport with enough jaw-dropping beauty and conflicting ugly truths to keep Hunter S. Thompson interested, excited, and most importantly, inspired. If he covered the sport in the year 2016, 2017, or 2018, he would surely have fresh and fiery opinions on it every day, and each paragraph of his writing would surge with just the kind of violent and pithy language his readers love him for.

All this to say that, whether he was typing furiously amid a clutter of empty beer cups and judging colleagues on press row, or raving away in a blog post penned inside his “fortified compound” in Colorado, he’d make an interesting sport even more interesting just by being a part of the scene. Unfortunately, he lost the will to live before he was ever exposed to MMA in a meaningful way. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended his life with a handgun.