Let’s Get It On! (19 page)

From UFC 2 on, I handled all of the fighters’ rules meetings. (UFC 25, April 2000)

Remco Pardoel vs. Ryan Parker at UFC 7: trying to look like I know what I’m doing (September 1995)

The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Two weeks following the first UFC, Rorion called me at home. “Will you be coming to the academy anytime soon?” he asked. “I have something important to speak with you about.”

I assumed he wanted to talk about the application I’d filled out and dropped off on Kathy Kidd’s desk. If the UFC was going to continue, I wanted to fight in the next tournament.

When I came in for my next jiu-jitsu class, Rorion said, “What are you doing? You’re with us, and Royce is doing this. You can’t fight Royce. You can enter when Royce leaves.”

I hadn’t realized Royce would fight in the next UFC, and I certainly wasn’t entering to challenge Royce. At the time, I hadn’t thought so much of the UFC as a vehicle for the Gracies. But to Rorion, that’s exactly what it was: an infomercial for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.

And what an audience he already had. UFC 1 had already surpassed all expectations with its initial pay-per-view numbers—it ended up with 86,000 buys—and SEG had given Rorion the green light to begin planning a second event.

Rorion had other designs for me. “John, how would you like to be the referee at the next show? You know what the fighters are supposed to be doing, and you can react in a split second to stop the fight if anyone taps out.”

Rorion explained how the Brazilian referees at UFC 1 hadn’t followed his directions. When Tuli took Gordeau’s foot in the face and his tooth went airborne, the referee had stepped in to protect Tuli, but he didn’t have the power to do so. Rorion wanted the fights uninterrupted, the way they had been for his father in Brazil.

To make sure it went right at the next UFC, Rorion had a few changes in mind, and he wanted me to help institute them. “John, we’ll have you sit in a lifeguard chair outside the cage, and when the fight is over, you’ll throw a red towel in so the fighters will know when to stop.”

I had zero experience refereeing anything, but I’d seen enough street fights to know the idea was preposterous. Two guys going at each other wouldn’t see the towel, let alone obey it. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

However, I wanted to be involved in the UFC whatever way I could. I felt it in my bones, so I made a deal with Rorion. If I could stay in the cage with the fighters to monitor the fights closely, I’d give refereeing a try.

Rorion finally relented.

At first, I didn’t put much thought into refereeing. At the police academy, my good friend Joe Hamilton and I talked about it as casually as we would the weekend’s upcoming football game.

“John, you ever referee a boxing match or a jiu-jitsu tournament?”

“Nope.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“I’ve got no clue.” I laughed. “I’m just going to stand back and try to look like I know what I’m doing. It’s No Holds Barred. Man, there’s no rules, and they don’t want me to stop it.”

I really didn’t think I’d have much to do come fight night. None of the matches at UFC 1 had gone five minutes.

My plan was to move around and act like I was doing something while really just watching two guys go at it from the best seat in the house. All I had to do was stop the fight when a guy tapped out or his corner threw in the towel. Other than that, I’d make sure nobody bit or eye-gouged, which wasn’t hard to pick out. Pretty easy, I thought.

Everything else was legal. Groin strikes, which had been banned in the first event, would be admitted at UFC 2. A few of the applicants claimed they were a vital part of their disciplines and if they were allowed to execute them, they would perform better. Most of the fighters were wearing steel cups anyway, so Rorion said, “Why not?”

Rorion had an easier time scouting for the second event, I think because he now had something to show prospective fighters. Word spread through the martial arts community, and they came to Rorion like moths to a flame. Martial artists couldn’t resist the opportunity to prove their discipline was the be all and end all.

With more fighters to choose from, Rorion decided to expand UFC 2 to a sixteen-man tournament, a dream he hadn’t been able to realize with the first event. In keeping with the Brazilian marathon fighting tradition, Rorion also decided to get rid of those pesky rounds.

One of the common misconceptions of the early UFCs was that time limits and rounds weren’t instituted until later. UFC 1 was actually scheduled for unlimited five-minute rounds separated by one-minute rest periods until a winner was determined. But because no fight had gone past the five-minute mark at UFC 1, Rorion and SEG didn’t see the point of having rounds at all. It was decided that time limits wouldn’t be necessary for UFC 2. The fights would go on for one endless round until one man tapped out or his corner threw in the towel, no exceptions.

Again there would be no weight limits, but all the sumo wrestlers must have been fond of their teeth because UFC 2 had no one to follow in Tuli’s footsteps. The largest fighter weighed 275 pounds, and the lightest was 20 pounds below Royce’s 176.

With the lineup set, Rorion moved on to the next details.

Though UFC 1’s pay-per-view numbers were promising, the live event itself had failed to muster up enough of a paying audience to justify using Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena again. On top of that, in the first of many political interventions to come, the mayor had said he didn’t want UFC 2 there. So we packed up the circus and moved about seven miles down the road to the 2,000-seat Mammoth Events Center.

As a Los Angeles police officer, I was required to apply for a work permit to referee the event because I was going to get paid. On the form I wrote that I would be officiating a martial arts event. When my superiors asked me what kind, I told them, “It’s mixed martial arts. It involves jiu-jitsu, karate, tae kwon do, wrestling, boxing . . .” I doubt they understood it was a combination of all those arts in one fight, and I wasn’t about to overcomplicate things.

Satisfied with my answer, they finally signed off on it.

About a week before the show, I flew out to Denver with Elaine, who’d been asked back to help Kathy Kidd set up. In my new role as referee, I didn’t seem to have much to do, so I hung around the production office with Elaine and worked out at one of the local gyms commandeered for the fighters. I had a few officer friends with me, too, who Rorion had flown in as extra security to work the event night.

A day before the show, we had our second rules meeting. The fighters sat anxiously at long tables set up classroom style as the matchups were selected randomly with the numbered balls pulled out of the bingo machine. Art Davie introduced me to the room as “Big” John McCarthy and asked me to come to the podium to go over the rules, or really the lack of them.

This was the first time I’d been called “Big” John in front of the fighters. My mother had called me “Big” John all the time when I was younger, but it was Art who reintroduced it a few weeks earlier at the WOW offices in Los Angeles.

The WOW offices were out the back door of the Gracie Academy, across the parking lot on the other side of the street, so I found myself there a couple times a week. On that day, Art and I had gotten into a little back-and-forth discussion. I don’t remember what we were talking about, except that I told Art to shut up and when he wouldn’t, I lifted him off the ground and over my head.

“Big John, Big John, let me down, let me down,” he yelled, until I obliged him.

In this playful interaction between two smart-asses, I was marked for life.

“‘Big’ John. That’s what you are from now on,” Art said. And sure enough, each time he introduced me, a few other people would start calling me it, until the name finally etched its way into the sport’s vernacular.

Standing at the podium in front of all of the competitors in UFC 2, “Big” John didn’t know what the fuck to say. I was nervous, but from my years on the police force, I knew I had to at least give off the vibe that I was in control.

Certain things just stuck out in my mind that I had to get across. I remembered Jason DeLucia getting cut by Trent Jenkins’ toenails at the first event, so I drilled home that the fighters had to cut their toenails and fingernails.

Then I said, “Look, if you want out, tap the mat.” I hit the podium for emphasis. “You can tap the mat, your opponent, or even yourself if that’s all you can reach. If your hands are tied up, you can tap out with your feet.”

I also addressed the cornermen. Nobody had asked me to do this, but since the corners had the ability to stop the fight and I didn’t, I figured communication between us all was probably a good thing. “If I think your fighter’s in trouble or starting to have a problem, I’m going to point to you and say, ‘Watch your fighter.’ If they’re really in trouble, I’m going to say, ‘Throw your towel.’”

Soon the fighters were dismissed for their last-minute preparations. As they poured out of the room, Rickson Gracie walked up to me and said, “Hey, John, you’re scaring everyone.”

Apparently my nerves, stern delivery, and podium slamming had made an impression.

UFC 2 introduced another new player to the mix: Bob Meyrowitz, the owner of SEG. He’d watched UFC 1 on his couch back in New York City, and the smell of greenbacks must have wafted right out of his TV. He flew all the way out to Denver to see the second show firsthand.

I was sitting in the hotel restaurant’s bar when Bob approached me for the first time. “John McCarthy, how are you?” he asked, extending his hand. Bob was a decent-sized man, maybe six feet and 200 pounds, with a distinguished salt-and-pepper beard, but his nasally voice didn’t match up.

Truthfully, I had no idea who he was at the time. All I knew was that he owned the TV production company SEG. I had no idea that SEG might have ownership stake in the UFC.

Bob started describing to me what he wanted to see happen during the fights, as if I was the puppet master controlling the strings. “I want you to make sure the fighters are fighting good.”

I wondered how the hell I was supposed to do that. Little did I know that TV producers and promoters would be saying the same stupid thing to me eighteen years later: “Make sure it’s an exciting fight. Don’t let them lay on the ground too long.”

Here was this fortysomething TV guy doing what TV people do—trying to make the show better any way he thought he could—but I didn’t understand any of that at the time. I just thought a lot of what he was saying was pretty ridiculous.

Rorion had never really spoken of Bob, so I just wanted him to go away. When it came to the show, I didn’t take orders from anyone except Rorion. He was my boss.

There was one request that I did fulfill for Art Davie, though, and it was something that would become fairly synonymous with, well, me. A couple days before the show, Art asked me to come up with a catchy way to begin the fights. He thought a slogan and some sort of hand gesture would fit well.

“Christ, Art, I’ve got two guys standing in a cage waiting to knock the shit out of each other. I’m just going to ask this guy if he’s ready and then ask the other guy if he’s ready and then tell them, ‘Let’s get it on.’”