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While development of martial arts in the twentieth century represents a cogent example of what Norbert Elias has called the process of ??sporvitization.' The emergence of ??Cage Fighting' in the 1990s can be seen as a tendency going in the opposite direction, a kind of ??de-sportivization.' As suggested by the analysis of such fights, both ??sportivization' and ??de-sportivization' depend primarily on the interests of the organizers, and in particular on the way in which they take into account the expectations of the fighters, the attending public, and the remote spectators. When a new, less regulated media market emerged during the 1990s in the United States with the pay-per-view channels, media corporations jumped on the opportunity to commercialize illegitimate fights targeting an audience less interested in the particularity of a given sport or art than in the antinomic excitement triggered by the transgression of the rules and the convention of everyday life. The emergence of fights enclosed in a cage or an octagon shows that the new broadcasting markets were an important factor in the evolution of sport events and of sport-related forms of entertainment. It also suggests that political regulation plays a crucial role in the changes that these markets may induce. The pressure exerted by public opinion eventually led to the termination of cage fights on the main US cable networks. Several initiatives have responded to this by seeking a new legitimacy for these fights, that has recently turned them into ??mixed martial arts.'