The axiom that there is no accounting for tastes applies more aptly as other reasons for different opinions disappear. A Republican or a Democrat can list reasons to vote for the other party, even if he might not agree with them. Ask a NASCAR fan why people watch hockey or an NBA aficionado what's fun about golf, though, and you might get nothing but a shrug.

But that's OK, since those are not real sports. They're just games, played by little boys and girly-men who don't have what it takes to go mano a mano in a full-contact cage match. (Kidding! Sort of.)

Last weekend the cage match came to prime time: Saturday night CBS debuted the first network broadcast of mixed martial-arts (MMA) competition. For the uninitiated -- and that includes most people -- MMA is a few-holds-barred pit fight between gladiators with backgrounds in one or more of the combat arts, from boxing and Greco-Roman wrestling to tae kwon do and jiu-jitsu.

It can look like a bar fight. That's especially true if, as was the case on Saturday, the main event features a street brawler: Kevin Ferguson, better known as Kimbo Slice. Slice -- with his do-rag and bushy beard and mad-dog eyes -- gained Internet infamy as a bare-knuckle brawler before he moved into the more respectable, if only slightly more respected, world of mixed martial arts. Saturday night he stopped his opponent with a TKO and a bloodied cauliflower ear in the third round.

Promoters clearly chose to put Slice at the top of the fight card to appeal to the fans of World Wrestling Entertainment, which Saturday night's event occasionally resembled. Unlike the choreographed clown shows of the WWE, though, mixed martial-arts fights are real. (The U.S. armed forces have begun using MMA as both a recruiting and a training tool.)

PERHAPS THE best match of the night involved two women, Gina Carano and Kaitlin Young, both muy-thai kickboxing practitioners. Carano's a looker who is genuinely aghast, if not downright ticked off, that anyone notices her looks -- which don't count for squat in the ring. She brings the goods. Think of her as Danica Patrick with a fierce front kick and a mean right hook.

Strikers such as Slice and Carano make for better TV than grapplers, but the good grapplers often enjoy a distinct advantage once they smother the punchers and kickers and take the fight to the ground. Grapplers typically win by using a submission hold such as a choke or an arm-bar, forcing their opponents to concede by "tapping out" before they lose consciousness or gain an extra joint.

One of the greatest grapplers in recent years is Royce Gracie, a practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu who not only helped launch but also dominated the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Gracie routinely beat both grapplers and strikers weighing 30 to 85 pounds more than he did, sometimes when he was lying on his back and it looked to the untrained eye as if the bigger man had won . . . except for the way he was writhing in pain as Gracie bent his arm in a way Nature never intended.

The EliteXC (Extreme Combat) event Saturday night would have looked vastly different if Gracie or someone like him had been at the top of the fight card. A Gracie win doesn't seem that dramatic: a clinch, a squirm, a wiggle -- and suddenly the opponent is frantically tapping the mat to end the bout before his toes touch the back of his knee.

SOME PEOPLE dismiss mixed martial-arts matches, as Sen. John McCain once did, as "human cockfights." Violent they may be -- but they are far safer than, say, professional football.

Three years ago the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review examined four years of NFL injury data and found that "in the 2000 through the 2003 seasons, NFL players racked up 6,558 injuries. More than half the athletes are hurt annually, with the number spiking at 68 percent in 2003-04 . . . .During typical four-year careers, one of every 10 NFL receivers experiences a concussion. On average, seven pro football players a week face potentially life-altering head, spine, or neck trauma."

The Pittsburgh paper quoted Merrill Hoge, a former running back: "You want to know how hard you're hit? If you're a running back, and you're hit full-speed, he can literally knock the feces out of your bowels. You lose all feeling in your limbs. That's how hard they hit in the NFL." Hoge was forced to retire more than a decade ago because of multiple concussions.

Nobody calls football a human cockfight, but maybe they should: "We're modern-day gladiators, right now," the Tribune-Review quoted Oakland Raiders player David Terrell. "This is our arena, Sundays at 1 o'clock." Terrell played a position known as the safety. But he might have been a lot safer fighting in an MMA cage.

Unless of course he was squaring off against Royce Gracie, or Gina Carano.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.