Theme Park at its Darkest

I first became aware of Andrew Tate during a particularly irritating conversation with a friend of mine who knows absolutely nothing whatsoever about kickboxing, beyond the fact that I’m involved with it.

She was relating the story of some online stoush between Andrew Tate, ‘World Champion Kickboxer’, and Greta Thunberg (another media ‘personality’ in whom I take very little interest beyond casual irritation).

I dismissed Tate as I had never heard of him and she insisted, ‘But he’s a world champion!’ The hype surrounding this person and his misdeeds – apparently, he had been convicted of human trafficking – seems to hinge on his status as a world champion.

I hate arguing on the internet; for some reason, the people I inadvertently insult, who respond by deliberately insulting me, are very hard to reduce to nothing in my mind. Having spent ten years as a fightsports journalist, a career that I earned my way into after being interviewed for International Kickboxer Magazine after I had successfully auditioned for Golden Glory, I am all about my readers.

Without a readership, I am nothing. And if I don’t have things to say that are based on insight and analysis, then I don’t deserve their attention. Strangely, if I offer a critical opinion of Tate, the simple, reasonable deductive process does not seem to apply to my antagonists’ line of argument.

When establishing the quality of any athlete, you can look at their qualifications in the organisation under whose aegis they have fought. In notoriously byzantine sports like boxing and kickboxing (to put it politely), the mass of organisations and sanctioning bodies requires that you square athletes in terms of their opponents.

It is clear that Tate has not fought anyone significant or dangerous within the course of his career, and there was plenty of active opposition about.

What I really loathe about Tate is that he reduces the sport of kickboxing to a soapbox to boost his click value in the minds of people who do not value or understand kickboxing as anything more than gruesome or lurid. This is the simplest and most literal example of drawing the sport into disrepute.

His whole plan is to generate argument and attract attention, which is something I generally avoid participating in, but it concerns me how the lie of his achievements is perpetuated. It also appears that some pundits think that if you’re not a ‘world champion kickboxer’, then you can’t read and form an opinion. 

Similarly, my qualifications are easy to find if you google me. I do not claim to be a world champion: I would not insult those who have achieved something of that status, like Peter Graham or John Wayne Parr, or even Semmy Schilt. I have written extensively and been published on the subject of all three, something I earned my way to doing through the fights I have had.

I can also comment on Saki and Corbett, as I have written about and been sparring partners to both.

Aside from shooting his mouth off about being a bullshit world champion, I knew very little about Tate, until I googled him this afternoon. The first article I opened was from the BBC News website, which I think can fairly be called a credible organisation.

In the article, Tate is quoted as saying:

‘He said he was “absolutely a misogynist”, and added: “I’m a realist and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist. There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.”

In that same video, he described women as “intrinsically lazy” and said there was “no such thing as an independent female”.

As a writer, I can also claim some understanding of language. The word misogynist literally means ‘woman hater.’

As a self-professed misogynist, Tate is insulting half the sport. He does not deserve to be discussed in the same space as any of the legitimate female world champions we all know and respect.

*The featured image is of my recent ankle replacement – I shattered the joint and tore all the cartilage out of it during my last fight. I won by a point, and it was probably the poorly executed axe kick that got me over the line. I have posted it because it earns credibility, but also be because even in a post about Andrew Tate, the less actual Tate-related material, the better.

This entry was posted on November 11, 2023 at 3:05 am and is filed under fighting, Kickboxing, Observation, violence against women with tags Andrew Tate, axe kick, BBC News, Gokhan Saki, Golden Glory, Greta Thunberg, human trafficking, International Kickboxer Magazine, John Wayne Parr, Journalism, Kickboxing, misogynist, Nathan Corbett, Peter Graham, Semmy Schilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.