Let’s Get It On! (34 page)

—Confucius

If I had to pick one of the fights that made a huge impact on mixed martial arts, it would be the heavyweight championship bout between Bas Rutten and Kevin Randleman at UFC 20 “Battle for the Gold” on May 7, 1999, at the Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama.

Senator John McCain’s smear campaign had cornered the UFC in the Deep South, and Alabama had no athletic commission at the time. It was the ninth UFC event in a row that wouldn’t air on the major cable platforms, and viewership had taken a nosedive far below the 300,000 pay-per-view buy-rate heyday four years earlier at UFC 7. We began to refer to this time as the Dark Ages of MMA.

With millions of dollars in potential pay-per-view income gone, SEG depended on its live audiences, but we weren’t even filling 5,000-seat arenas. It wasn’t long before we saw the writing on the wall.

Still, amidst all the turmoil and uncertainty, this is when the sport made some of its greatest developmental strides. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

The Rutten-Randleman fight marked the conclusion of the promotion’s “Road to the Heavyweight Title” tournament, which had been held over the last few shows to crown a new heavyweight champion. Randy Couture had won the title from Maurice Smith fair and square at Ultimate Japan, but Couture had left the promotion because of a pay cut from his previously agreed-upon contract.

Though SEG had been talking about implementing five-minute rounds between the last couple of shows, it was decided that this championship bout would remain one fifteen-minute round to be followed, as necessary, by two three-minute overtime periods.

John Perretti, the UFC’s matchmaker, knew Rutten was a striker and Randleman was a wrestler. He told Meyrowitz that since Randleman would be forced to stand at the beginning of the two overtime periods, this would give Rutten a better chance to implement his striking.

None of that made sense to me since five five-minute rounds would have given Rutten even more opportunities to start from his feet. I also wasn’t into the idea of them even thinking they should give one fighter an advantage over another, but I wasn’t the promoter.

For the first ten minutes of the bout, Randleman, one of the most explosive wrestlers ever to enter the sport, took Rutten down at will and beat the crap out of him from top position.

Randleman broke Rutten’s nose within the first five minutes, which demonstrates how lopsided the match was. I had to stop the bout momentarily and bring Rutten to the doctor to have his nose checked.

Rutten is a jocular guy, but he was pretty serious as the doctor looked him over. I’ll never forget what he asked. “If I get punched again and the bone pushes farther into my brain, will it kill me?” I’m not making this up. When I told him, “No,” Rutten seemed satisfied and said he could continue.

For the first ten minutes, Randleman really poured it on and dumped Rutten to the mat every time he tried to kick him. However, as the wrestler’s conditioning started to peter out on him, Rutten slowly began to fight back. It went into the two overtime periods, and Rutten began to score from standing and from his back. By the end, Rutten had made a strong comeback against an exhausted Randleman.

After the twenty-one-minute fight, two of the three judges awarded the bout to Rutten.

The audience went wild when the highly controversial decision was announced. It seemed the judges had forgotten Randleman had handily dominated the first part of the bout. Perhaps watching the Dutch fighter come back and take control in the latter periods had swayed two of the three judges to award him the fight.

Mark Coleman, who’d attended Ohio State University with Randleman and was in his corner, stood on the cage’s lip and nearly shook the Octagon wall from its posts as the crowd egged him on.

I had no official stance on the decision, but I knew that six minutes were not fifteen minutes. In this case, the judging system wasn’t working fairly for the fighters.

Afterward, I told Meyrowitz and SEG they were asking too much of the judges to remember twenty-plus minutes of moves. If the fight were broken into five-minute rounds, the judges could weigh each one separately, write their scores during the one-minute rest periods, and hand them in for tallying at the end, just as it was done in boxing. It was agreed that three five-minute rounds would become the norm from here on out, while championship fights would be allotted five five-minute rounds.

Following the Rutten-Randleman decision, UFC commentator Jeff Blatnick and I were asked to assess what a judge should be looking for in a fight. Being an Olympic wrestler himself, Blatnick argued that Randleman had scored multiple takedowns and hadn’t been credited for them.

I could see his point, though I knew we’d have to create some kind of sliding scale based on where the effective action was happening in the fight. If it stayed on its feet, the judges should be looking at striking first. If it went to the ground, they should be primarily crediting techniques there. If it was a mix of both, wherever the majority of the active bout happened should be judged first.

We also came up with four terms judges would use to score the bouts: “effective striking,” “effective grappling,” “aggressiveness,” and “Octagon control.” I wanted to add “damage” to the list of criteria, but Meyrowitz thought that sounded too harsh. However, the main problem people had with the Rutten-Randleman decision was that Rutten’s face was a mess, while Randleman, other than a few small cuts on his head from Rutten’s elbows, barely had a mark. Who was really the winner there?

When people ask me who won that fight, I say, “Both men did their best, and I understand the decision.” I think history speaks for itself. That fight was a game changer, and it doesn’t matter who I think won it.

I’ll be honest, though. What I remember most about the fight was that Rutten was talking to Randleman the whole time, asking if he wanted to stand the fight up after a while because he thought it was getting too boring on the mat for the crowd. “You’re on top of me, but you can’t hurt me,” Rutten informed Randleman almost playfully.

Randleman didn’t answer him once.

The first preliminary bout of the night between Ron Waterman and Chris Condo also spoke for the times. Waterman was a competent, fit wrestler, but Condo was out of shape and far from ready to enter the Octagon. SEG was afraid Condo would get hurt, so they asked me to referee the fight, though I wasn’t scheduled to.

I thought it was ridiculous. If SEG was putting me in the Octagon to save this guy’s life, then he had no reason being in there in the first place.

But money was running short, which meant decent talent would start to run thin and the matchmaking would suffer.

Condo’s first and last career fight lasted twenty-eight seconds before I put a stop to it.

Bob Meyrowitz knew he had to turn things around or the UFC and the sport would likely die in the United States. The UFC’s only sustaining revenue was its pay-per-views. Meyrowitz went back to Leo Hindery, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, and showed him the progress the UFC had made with instituting rules. Hindery told Meyrowitz that if the UFC could get the sport regulated by a major state athletic commission, he’d put it back on the larger cable platforms. What Hindery meant was that the UFC had to get sanctioned in Nevada, the one state he considered major because of Las Vegas.

This was a tall order. Marc Ratner, the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s executive director, had gone on CNN’s
Larry King Live
a couple years earlier and said he felt MMA wasn’t a consideration for regulation in the state. Still, Meyrowitz had to make it happen somehow.

Two NSAC commissioners, Lorenzo Fertitta and Glenn Carano, as well as the commission’s chief medical advisor, Flip Homansky, were invited to the next UFC in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. UFC 21 “Return of the Champions” was held on July 16, 1999, in the 8,000-seat Five Seasons Events Center. The trio sat cageside, taking in their first live MMA event. It couldn’t have played out worse if Senator John McCain had planned it all himself.

In one of the middleweight bouts, Jeremy Horn weighed in right at the 200-pound limit, but his Japanese opponent Daiju Takase showed up to weigh-ins at only 169 pounds. Apparently something had been lost in translation, but both fighters agreed to continue with the bout anyway. Fighters rarely turn down bouts because of weight issues; they always want to fight because they want to get paid.

With the weight advantage, Horn took Takase down and manhandled him with elbows that opened the Japanese fighter’s face. Referee Mario Yamasaki was in a no-win situation. If he stopped the fight early because Horn was mauling Takase, people would complain. But if he let it go too long, he stood the chance of upsetting the Nevada commissioners, which meant another step backward for the UFC and the sport.

He let it go till Takase was drenched in blood. It got ugly, and you could tell by their faces that Carano and Fertitta weren’t happy with what they saw.

Afterward, Meyrowitz asked me and Jeff Blatnick to join him for dinner with our Nevada guests. Surprisingly, Dr. Homansky wasn’t that averse to what he’d seen, but the Takase massacre was all Fertitta and Carano could talk about.

Fertitta, whose family owned a handful of Las Vegas casinos that catered to the local clientele, said he had a problem with the fighters hitting each other on the ground. He was a pure boxing proponent, so he wasn’t used to the image.

I said, “You’re always going to have a problem with it until you understand what you’re watching on the ground.” Society had trained us to believe it wasn’t natural or fair to fight that way, that it was dirty fighting. In the movies, John Wayne would land a punch, but then he’d pick the guy up before knocking him down again.

“Fighting on the ground is like a chess game,” I said. “It’s a systematic way of moving to either defend yourself or counter your opponent’s last move. The difference is that your pieces are your arms, legs, and torso positioned in various ways around your opponent’s body to secure chokes and holds to get the checkmate in the end.”

Fertitta wouldn’t understand that until he experienced it himself. He was poised and smart and admitted he didn’t understand MMA at all but that he’d like to look into the sport further.

Carano, who’d been a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, didn’t want to hear any of it. “Those guys were trying to hurt one another,” he said, which was pretty closed-minded considering his background.

I said, “If you drop back for a pass, isn’t linebacker Lawrence Taylor out to bury you?”

“That’s different,” Carano said.

Whether he wanted to admit it or not, though, football had a combative edge. I also pointed out that a majority of our fighters shook hands, hugged, and congratulated each other after their bouts.

Carano wouldn’t budge.

Ironically, years later Glenn Carano would sit in the front row at events cheering for his daughter while she blasted away on her opponents on live network TV. In 2008, Gina Carano would become one of the most popular MMA fighters on Earth.

With Fertitta willing to at least investigate the sport, I gave him the name of John Lewis, a UFC fighter and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt living and teaching in Las Vegas. If Fertitta was seriously interested, he could call Lewis and roll with the fighter to see what it was like for himself.

We ended the meeting, and the three commission representatives left.

I turned to Meyrowitz and said, “You’re screwed.”

Dr. Homansky was the only one of the three who seemed to like the sport, but he was also the only one who didn’t have a vote. It wasn’t going to happen right now.

The Nevada commission was far from giving the sport a chance, one of many factors spelling the UFC’s impending demise. SEG had long before cut costs by scaling down the show’s pageantry and using cheaper talent in the preliminary fights to save up for the main events they thought the fans would want most, much like a boxing card.

At the same time, many of the best fighters, like Mark Coleman, Vitor Belfort, and Mark Kerr, were being lured away by outrageous cash-and-carry paydays from rival promotion Pride Fighting Championships, which had deep financial backing from a TV channel and the Yakuza mob in Japan. Pride was really starting to pick up steam in terms of popularity and soon began to surpass the UFC in attendance numbers, drawing nine to ten times more spectators at some events, up to 50,000 at a time.

Pride even made a play for me, first as a referee and then as a fighter. I was contacted to possibly fight in Pride against popular pro wrestler Nobuhiko Takada, who would later become the figurehead for the organization. I priced myself out of the offer, though, by asking for $250,000. I knew if I fought, it would be the end of my reffing for the UFC.

I thought the whole thing was a bit ridiculous, anyway, especially when Pride said I’d have to throw the match so Takada won. There was no way I’d do that. The sport didn’t need that type of attention.

I did approach SEG with Pride’s offer to get them to compensate me when payments started to lag. Meyrowitz threatened to sue if I left for Pride, but it was all bluster.

As for the others, SEG’s accountant, Steven Loeb, was highly skilled at stalling people as they came looking for their money. SEG used a production team comprised of brothers Al and Bruce Connal, and they were always three shows behind getting paid, so they had to either keep coming back to produce the shows or risk losing it all.