So in early March I flew to Las Vegas to see McGregor (then 7–0 in the UFC) fight Nate Diaz at UFC 196—that is, the 196th major event staged by the company. It was primary season in America, right between the 11th and 12th Republican debates, and as turbulence spanked the plane and the tray tables rattled, it occurred to me that we might have flown into a stray pocket of Trumpian oratory, Trump-breath, a little verbal chaos-cloud unmoored from its source and drifting hazardously at 32,000 feet. Hot air surrounded the fight, too—most of it McGregor’s. “I’m certainly going to toy with the young boy,” he said of Diaz (three years his senior) at the prefight press conferences. “I’m going to play with him.” He ungallantly mocked Diaz for his work teaching jiu-jitsu to kids—“He makes gang signs with the right hand and animal balloons with the left hand!”—and then, more Tyson-esquely, promised to eat Diaz’s carcass in front of his “little gazelle friends.” Diaz, rhetorically overmatched, sensibly confined himself to some villainous scowling and swearing.

You probably didn’t read about McGregor-Diaz—or about Holm-Tate, the equally sensational women’s MMA bout immediately beneath it on the bill at UFC 196—in the sports section of your Sunday paper. And yet there were 15,000 howling fans at the MGM Grand and some 1.5 million pay-per-view buys at $49.99 a pop or more. That’s the UFC in 2016: ubiquitous, but not fully visible, like tattoos, or Paxil. It’s come a long way from its circus-of-violence origins. At the promotion’s maiden event—UFC 1, in 1993—boxers fought grapplers, sumo guys fought karate wizards, and gorillas fought octopuses. Okay, not the last part. But it was cartoonish and impure and very, very brutal.

Thus inspired, people, fighters, maniacs began mixing it all up, and competition-level MMA entered a new phase. Blood flowed, unregulated. Joe Rogan, the versatile stand-up comedian who also works as a UFC commentator, has talked about the days when telling people you were associated with the UFC was like telling them you were in the porn industry. Slowly, out of the primordial blitzing and gouging, rules emerged. No head kicks to a downed opponent. No hair-pulling or groin strikes. Small padded gloves were introduced. Today, every UFC event should by rights begin with a short, hats-off-please-gentlemen prayer of thanks to Blessed John McCain, who famously decried MMA as “human cockfighting” and whose senatorial intervention in the late ’90s—when he persuaded 36 states to ban it from cable TV—obliged the UFC to clean up its act, thereby setting it on the road to mass appeal. Since the early 2000s, the sport has consciously counterbranded itself against the larger, less organized, and slower-moving boxing industry: The UFC, with its near-monopoly on MMA, can crisply and dramatically give the fans the fights they want.