It’s not every day that a new sport becomes a major cultural force, especially when it comes to martial arts; after all, people have been fighting for a long time. In America, MMA jumped into the void left by boxing, which had begun waning in popularity, and now threatens to topple the "sweet science of bruising" from its long reign as the preeminent combat sport.

The UFC version of mixed martial arts has only been around for 15 years, but its history is already being written. In "Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC," Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim follows the evolution of MMA by way of Pat Miletich, an early champion. Wertheim pays full attention to the UFC’s gruesome inauguration and aftermath. The blood-flecked freak show lurched on through the '90s -- John Wayne Bobbitt even tried to get in on the act -- providing a Macy’s parade-size piñata for politicians to bash in their requisite displays of moral rectitude. John McCain, a devoted boxing fan, became the most conspicuous critic of MMA, declaring it to be "human cockfighting."

Lost in the spectacle was the fact that the sport was developing rapidly and leaving the grotesqueries of its earliest days behind. An increasing number of fighters, especially former wrestlers -- Olympic-style wrestlers, not the dudes in spandex -- were making MMA their profession. Although the political persecution almost drove MMA out of business, it managed to survive and then thrive through canny marketing, a successful reality TV show ("The Ultimate Fighter") and capital infusions from the Fertitta family (billionaire casino and amusement park owners). More subtly, the introduction of weight classes and rule changes made bouts more competitive and fighters no longer had to face multiple opponents on the same night. Head butts, fishhooking, groin strikes and hair-pulling were banned, as was "small-joint manipulation" -- that is, snapping fingers. The fighters also began to wear light gloves to protect the delicate bones of the hands. (Some MMA leagues banned elbow strikes to cut down on bleeding, as elbows break skin more easily than gloved fists.) The new standards also made the fights more fun to watch.

Pat Miletich gives "Blood in the Cage" a soul. People fight for all kinds of reasons -- they love contact, or they need money, or because they’re filled with rage. A miserable childhood threw Miletich face first into that last category. An Iowa native, Miletich and his family were first abused then abandoned by an alcoholic father. Two of Miletich’s brothers died violently and another spent an extended stint in prison for armed robbery. An indifferent student, Miletich was a gifted athlete and even more gifted street brawler. Martial arts saved him by directing his aggression into the discipline of the gym. However, it wasn’t until the UFC came along that he started getting paid to do what came naturally.

Wertheim’s early chapters are disfigured by the clichés and lad-speak that have become the degraded baseline for prose in men’s magazine. Themes are "kicked around" and novice competitors "beat a hasty retreat." Fighters have "testicles the size of cabbages" and, "In the Octagon, no one gives a shit about your satirical blog ..." Even a little of this goes much too far. Yet Wertheim is a capable journalist and when he turns to Miletich and the development of MMA, the narrative settles down. Although a relative newcomer to the sport, Wertheim knows the difference between a chokehold and a kimura and he deftly balances the business history of MMA with colorful characters like 280-pound Henry "Tank" Abbot, self-declared "master of the ancient martial art of kicking ass" and possessed of a lengthy criminal record for assault and battery. Most important, Wertheim gives insight into the spirit of men who subject themselves to intense pain and suffering to become successful fighters.

Wertheim’s analysis of the rise of MMA is extensive, if often superficial. He credits the fact that "violence sells," and that MMA meshes with YouTube and video game culture ("the actual fighting ... often assumes the feeling of a video game, with its spasms of action and multiple ways of winning and losing"). In MMA, Wertheim writes, the stars remain approachable by fans and are less pampered than the icons of mainstream sports. For Wertheim, real men have long been under attack by a "feminized" culture that wants to put bubble wrap and knee pads on everything. He also links the popularity of MMA to an uptick in American machismo post-9/11. I have mixed feelings about Wertheim’s sociology. After all, it's only upper-middle-class kids whose mommies keep them out of the mud, and if there is a "war against the boys," the boys seem to be holding their own with SpikeTV and "Girls Gone Wild" videos.

Any discussion of MMA's rise has to also include one of boxing's fall (in the U.S. if not in Britain and Latin America). At this point, it’s difficult to understand just how important boxing was in this country through the 1960s -- on par with baseball and far overshadowing upstarts like basketball and football. Wertheim makes the excellent point that MMA, for all the blood spilled in the octagon, is less dangerous long-term than boxing (pace Sen. McCain). This is because MMA fighters, who get hit in the head less than boxers, suffer less brain damage (though how much less will only be known as this generation of fighters ages).

"Blood in the Cage" is less convincing when Wertheim insists that boxing has fewer exciting fights than MMA. While it’s true that the UFC holds its fighters under tight contractual restraints and can force them to compete whenever it wants, the sport seems just as reliant on the star system as boxing. For all the greed of boxing promoters, there’s been no shortage of riveting matches in the past decade.

Wertheim claims that "boxing is still populated largely by reformed thugs" and/or people of color who don’t necessarily resonate with a mainstream audience, while MMA fighters tend to be college-educated and better behaved. Wertheim fails to explain why people don't mind watching thugs of the unreformed variety run amok in, say, the NFL, since Plaxico Burress’ nightclub adventures didn’t have anyone tuning out the Super Bowl. While boxing’s fall does involve race and class, the story is more complex than Wertheim is ready to admit. Quintessentially urban, boxing thrived during the Depression, both because there were a lot of desperate young men and because the culture celebrated working-class heroes. (Boxing drew its top fighters from the tidal wave of immigration in the first part of the century. It’s always the guy just off the boat who has the most to prove.) After the Second World War, the city played a smaller role in the American story. The cultural focus turned to the suburbs and boxing was left behind. Suburban folk wanted their kids to be doctors, lawyers and businessmen, not fighters.

The suburban white-picket fence turned out to be hiding the same poverty, dysfunction and drugs as the cities, and all the old impulses still drove young men to fight. Yet it was impossible to go back to boxing -- the infrastructure of boxing gyms and school boxing programs had never been created in the suburbs. To succeed as a professional boxer, you have to start by age 12 or so, preferably earlier. By the time some angry teenager in the exurbs wanted to learn how to use his fists, it was already too late, even if he’d had somewhere to go.

What the suburbs do have in abundance are wrestling teams and the martial arts schools that became a suburban staple in the chop-socky craze of the 1970s. (No strip mall is complete without a karate, akido or jujitsu dojo.) Former high school wrestlers found that they had been given a good foundation for a successful MMA career. Even now, a talented athlete with a background in martial arts or wrestling can pick up enough skills in a year or two to compete in MMA -- something impossible to achieve in boxing. MMA gave white people a way to fight again. In the octagon, fans see men who they can imagine aren’t really all that different from them. As the sport becomes ever more professionalized, we’ll see if middle-class men will continue to be able to compete against those for whom fighting provides the only way out.

I don’t find MMA as visually compelling as boxing; unless you have a technical understanding of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it often looks like two sweaty guys rolling around on the ground. (As a longtime prizefight fan and former amateur boxer, I have to admit a bias.) But the fact that MMA fighters generally aren’t very good at avoiding punches does lead to spectacular knockouts. There are plenty of boring boxing matches too, and I think that over time, MMA will continue to tweak the rules to make the sport easier on the eyes. Even without such changes, it could be that MMA has already permanently eclipsed boxing. Recently Oscar de la Hoya, the most recognizable boxer in the world after Muhammad Ali, was promoting two cards on the same night -- one a boxing title fight in Los Angeles, the other an MMA event in Anaheim, Calif. Which one did de la Hoya attend? Oscar went to Anaheim.

Two men pitted against one another in the squared circle -- or in the octagon -- provides the purest expression of struggle and competition. When the bell rings, all pretense falls away and we push up against the limits of brutality, endurance and courage. (Not for nothing did A.J. Liebling label boxing a "Jansenist sport.") For those who need to fight, or who need to watch fighting, MMA provides an outlet with a smaller cost in human suffering than boxing.

MMA has yet to find its great scribe, its Liebling, Pierce Egan or Norman Mailer, but it is young. Until that new bard of bloodshed comes along, "Blood in the Cage" will stand as a worthy introduction to the birth of something both awful and beautiful.

Russia. Jamaica's well behind Russia's 15 with 10 overall. Those two countries share the gold-medal lead with six, one more than the U.S.

Among the men, the U.S. is even more dominant in overall medals, leading the way with 13. Russia is second with five. Jamaica and the U.S. have each won three golds, one more than Russia. The Russian women have been the clear leaders with four golds and 10 total. The U.S. has eight medals, two gold, while Jamaica has won seven overall and three gold.

Nobody else is playing in the same league with those three.

But it has still been a debacle for the United States, which is supposed to dominate in the glamorous sprints and has not. When it comes to track and field, and really when it comes to the Summer Olympics in general, we Americans get to be like those insufferable Yankee fans who simply can't abide second place.

Well, we are Yankee fans, actually.

It's impossible to know if Warren could have landed the tying punch in those last 30 seconds if he'd only thrown one. But a bigger problem is that it would have been impossible to know if Warren could have landed the tying punch even if he had thrown some. Even if he'd landed one. Even if he'd knocked Lee down with it.

Warren and American coach Dan Campbell complained about the scoring in the fight, which saw each man awarded a point at least once when the other had landed a punch. Lee seemed to get a point every time Warren got one, whether a punch had landed or not. At one point, Warren got credit for landing a punch as Lee landed one and Warren, missing, fell to the canvas.

"It was just weird the way the scoring went," Campbell said. "It ain't right," Warren said. "It doesn't seem real to me."

Join the club. Ukraine has filed a protest over the scoring in a loss to a Chinese fighter, and Great Britain has groused publicly about the judging in a loss, also to China.

All of which means nothing more than that an amateur boxing tournament is going on.

Scoring in amateur boxing is about as absurd a thing as you're likely to see in elite sports. There are five judges at ringside with computers, and they're supposed to press a button when they see a legal punch land. If three of the five press their button within a second of each other, the fighter gets one point.

That's it. Counting punches. A knock-your-block-off blow is worth the same as a love tap, even if it knocks the guy down, though he can still be counted out, which happens about once a century since the best amateur boxers pitty-pat away in an effort to score points. Ring generalship, power, aggressiveness -- some of the big things that make boxing what it is -- are ignored. The judges aren't judges. They're a team of punch counters.

This system came into being in response to the crooked decision that robbed American Roy Jones Jr. of a gold medal in Seoul in 1988. The idea is a judge can't fix a fight if all he's doing is counting punches and two fellow judges have to agree with him within a second for a point to register. It would be difficult -- though it would seem there are people saying it's not impossible -- to arrange that in advance. There would have to be some kind of signals going back and forth.

So boxing is like gymnastics and figure skating in that the subjective scoring system has been tweaked in response to obvious and, let's face it, inevitable corruption. Let's hear it for the Olympic ideal of purity in sport.

Whether it's served that purpose is debatable, but what isn't is that in boxing the scoring system has devastated the sport. It's unwatchable.

The basic idea of amateur boxing is: Go out there and do your best, and the random numbers on the scoreboard might just go your way. Even if it's on the up and up, the scoring system rewards pot shots over combinations because single punches are easier to see. It rewards pitty-pats over power punches, because they're easier to land and worth the same. It rewards head-hunting over body punches because body blows are difficult for judges to see. You can spend a day in the Olympic boxing venue and never see a body punch rewarded with a point.

In other words, if you want to create a successful Olympic boxer, you would take any of the legendary trainers of the last 100 years or so and tell the kid, "Every thing this guy says, do the opposite."

I figure maybe it takes an American getting screwed to force a change in the system. Roy Jones Jr. wasn't the first fighter who wuz ever robbed, after all.

So watching the Warren-Lee fight, with Lee seeming to get phantom catch-up points that had the Chinese crowd booing, it occurred to me that if Warren lost, this might be the bout to spark another change. Maybe the pendulum would even swing back to the old-fashioned boxing judging. There are other ways to combat corruption -- such as the figure skating system of having only some judges' votes count -- than by gutting the very nature of the sport.

But I've long since grown so bored with amateur boxing that I don't know if there's any serious momentum toward a change, and except for a few days every four summers, I don't care. At any rate, Warren's brain freeze, thinking he was ahead when he was behind, overshadowed the judging, so the craziness continues.

As for Warren, 21, who stayed in the amateurs to go to the Beijing games after losing in his first bout in Athens, he'll turn pro, where his quickness and slashing style figure to serve him well and the judging, while hardly free of corruption or incompetence, at least makes a modicum of sense.

That's about as strong an indictment as I can think of: For the kid to get a chance at some fair treatment, he should go into professional boxing.

Sikahema, a much smaller man than Canseco, is a former Golden Gloves boxing champion. Canseco has never been in sight when the words "gold" and "glove" were uttered together.

I'd write more, but I repeat myself enough as it is, so I'll point you to this column's deathless coverage of the epic 2002 bout between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones and ask you to adjust the details accordingly.

Experimental filmmaker from Azerbaijan? Subject of a wrenching family documentary made in a remote Colombian village? No and no. The speaker was former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, given a hero's welcome here for the premiere of "Tyson," the documentary about his life made by American movie maverick James Toback. On one level the reaction seemed bizarre; as Toback's film makes clear Tyson spent his entire athletic career psyching out opposing fighters and the public. But when I talked about it later over drinks with a few other critics, it dawned on us that Tyson has never before faced a crowd that was cheering for him as a person, rather than because they wanted to see him beat the living crap out of somebody.

The question of whether Tyson should be treated as a hero, in Cannes or anywhere else, is irrelevant to this festival, and also to Toback's film. Immense fame is amoral at its core, and so is the Festival de Cannes. Tyson has survived huge success and a dramatic fall, has endured the suffering he inflicted on others and on himself. Here he is, formerly a boxer of terrifying ferocity and an inordinately wealthy man and now neither of those things but not quite an ordinary middle-aged retired athlete either. That was enough for the Friday night crowd in the Debussy.

"Tyson" was one of the hottest tickets at Cannes so far, which may just reflect the fact that its subject is a worldwide icon whose meteoric career trajectory already seems ready for the movies. It combines Tyson's remarkably candid interviews with Toback with a quickie biopic that covers Tyson's life from his childhood in the crime-ridden Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Brownsville to his blossoming as a fighter under trainer Cus D'Amato (who virtually adopted him), two stints as the heavyweight champion, three years in prison and beyond.

Toback told us before the screening that he wanted to capture Tyson as a "complicated and in many ways noble human being." One can dispute the adjectives, but he certainly succeeds in rendering a man frequently depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood as a tortured and vulnerable person who has genuinely struggled to understand his flaws. For the most part Tyson discusses his failings frankly and with a striking degree of insight, but he still refuses to admit any wrongdoing in the 1991 rape case that sent him to prison, and has no idea how much money he has made and lost (at least $300 million, and conceivably much more). Tyson recently filed for bankruptcy, but my guess is his money's no good here this weekend. (Since he's both a Muslim and a 12-stepper these days, the rosé is officially off limits.)

Another famous American with a tabloid-heavy history who's coming on all friendly-like with the European public is Woody Allen, whose new film "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" debuts on Saturday night. As I write this in the festival press room, in fact, Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn, along with Penélope Cruz and British actress Rebecca Hall, are ascending the steps a few hundred meters away. (Scarlett Johansson appears not to be present.) Cruz has just told a television reporter that this evening's gray and rainy skies over Cannes are "beautiful in a different way."

Allen has always had a different status on this side of the Atlantic than at home, but the contrast has grown ever starker in recent years. At age 72, he gets the prime spot on opening weekend in Cannes for a film that's likely to be a fleeting afterthought in the American indie marketplace. (If all goes as planned, I should have brief interviews with Allen, Hall and Cruz up in this space in a couple of days. After a long career of Garbo-like reticence, Allen is suddenly Mr. Availability.)

Maybe Allen is another of those Jerry Lewis figures in American culture who just reads differently in Europe (see also Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara and, increasingly, Quentin Tarantino) but I'm inclined to believe that both sides are wrong about him. Allen seems to me to have been punished unjustly by his former American admirers for perceived failings in his private life, and it's no good judging an artist on that basis. On the other hand, I don't see how anybody can argue that his recent films -- while they're far from being terrible -- support the widespread European view that he remains a major figure in world cinema.

I caught "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" at Friday's press screening, and it's a pretty good late Allen film, meaning that it's a competent, entertaining blend of sweetness and misanthropy, and that the director seems enormously far away from his characters. Johansson and the British actress Rebecca Hall play Cristina and Vicky, two young Americans spending their summer together in I-bet-you-can-guess-which Spanish city. Neither character is all that interesting; they're like ideas about "today's girls" rather than the real thing. (Are we really supposed to believe that Vicky, who is writing a master's thesis on "Catalan identity," speaks no Spanish or Catalan? That's knockoff Tom Wolfe satire about the degradation of American education, not Woody Allen.)

At least Hall's gawky good girl, engaged to a chino-wearing business-school twerp (Chris Messina), actually seems alive with unconscious yearning and tormented by her post-graduate contradictions. This is one of Johansson's dullest roles; Cristina may be blonde and hot, and may think of herself as an artistic and sexual adventurer, but she seems profoundly bored with herself and with life. As with so many of Allen's pictures since the '90s, it's impossible to say whether he's fully aware of his contempt for his characters, or precisely what it's expressing. (Oh, OK, we can guess. But I'll leave that to you.)

What Allen's got here is something like a lightweight reworking of "Portrait of a Lady," or one of Henry James' other moral fables about American innocents abroad. Vicky and Cristina's Mephistophelean seducer is a bedroom-eyed Barcelona painter named Juan Antonio, and if the role is pretty close to Latin-lover caricature, Javier Bardem certainly digs into it with relish. Juan Antonio immediately tells our heroines that he wants to sleep with both of them. Vicky blows him off and Cristina is hot to trot, but if you're guessing that A) he'll get what he wants and B) none of it will quite work out as expected, then I guess you've seen movies before.

Anybody who knows Allen's films can see him projecting himself into these characters, or trying to. Sometimes it seems like fantasy wish-fulfillment, and sometimes like self-judgment. When Cristina imagines herself escaping the Puritanism and provinciality of America for a European artist's life (or at least a European artist's mistress' life), you think, oh, OK. When Juan Antonio proves so charismatic that beautiful women flock to his bed in multiples, you think, oh, OK.

All these people will in fact be disappointed, which may be the most honest aspect of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," if not the most enjoyable. That property belongs to Penélope Cruz as Juan Antonio's demented ex-wife, a free-floating agent of chaos whose only role is to disrupt and destroy all possible manifestations of the central triangle.

Allen admitted at today's press conference that he made this film because Spanish financiers invited him to shoot in Barcelona; perhaps in the last stage of his career he'll become an itinerant artist who hires himself out to tourist boards in picturesque locations. One journalist from Uzbekistan invited him to come work in her country, and brought down the house by observing that this movie ought to play well in Central Asia, "where in our tradition we still have many women in the house as wives."