UFC 147: Is the Fear for Chael Sonnen's Safety in Brazil Xenophobic?

It’s safe to say that, friend or foe, nobody is feeling good about Chael Sonnen arriving in Brazil to fight Anderson Silva for the UFC middleweight title.

Granted, not feeling good about it may be a cause for joy in some of the haters and cause for hand-wringing among Sonnen fans, but the fact remains that there is a serious sense of dread regarding the mouthy challenger’s chances of coming out of Brazil alive.

Coming out alive. Just think about that for a minute—people seriously think that, win or lose, Chael Sonnen’s final steps may happen on Brazilian soil.

Over a sporting event.

Come on folks. Let’s be reasonable here.

While the mythological Brazil of yesteryear is seen by many as a lawless land where you needed a jiu-jitsu brown belt just to survive a day at the beach, we live in 2012. The country, while still impoverished in many areas, has come a long way.

It has smartly rebuilt itself on eliminating police corruption, attacking crime and promoting tourism. Sure, there are still places where you wouldn’t want to be alone at midnight, but what place in the world’s “developed” lands can’t boast a few of those in their own right?

Would you want to stand in a dark alley in the Bronx all night? Probably not.

Would you expect Sonnen to fear for his life if UFC 147 was happening at Yankee Stadium and he’d been passionately anti-New York instead of anti-Brazil? The answer, again, is probably not. At least not to this degree.

The reality is that, while Sonnen has said some crazy things and laid some wacky claims, it’s not right for fans to assume the worst because he now has to go into the belly of the beast. Yes, some more hostile and outrageous fans have gotten attention for threats and actions, but isn’t that what the media often does? Finds the most sensational angle and then makes a story out of it?

Ask people who have travelled to Rio, or who are from the region, and they’ll tell you that it’s not what it was when Rickson Gracie was swinging logs at attackers in the name of the family. It’s full of passionate people and passionate sports fans, but certainly not fans that are any more prone to rush the cage if they don’t get a favourable result on fight night than those in another city.

Hell, this happened in Canada at UFC 129, and people think all we do up here is watch hockey and eat donuts. Still, you didn’t hear people claiming Montreal would riot if Josh Koscheck beat GSP when they met after his trash-talk campaign in 2010.

The bottom line is that, win or lose, Sonnen is far more likely to come out battered from the tools Anderson Silva has at his disposal than those at the disposal of the people in the stands. That’s what makes this fight so intriguing—the fact that, between his wrestling chops and willingness to absorb punishment to dish out some of his own, Sonnen is a truly viable candidate to dethrone the best of all time.

So let’s focus on that and get over the fact the fight is happening in a place that Chael Sonnen has made some brash comments about. This isn’t underground vale tudo contested on the caged-in concrete floor of a bar basement—it’s the biggest MMA promotion in the business doing the biggest rematch ever in front of the biggest crowd ever.

That crowd knows its place is in the stands and not in the cage. What country it's from has nothing to do with it.