Issue 129

June 2015

Mixed martial arts has a long and (in)glorious history of fearless people trying new things to appeal to the sport’s existing fans, and pull in new ones. And as a sport that developed very much in the public eye, it makes the inevitable madcap failures all the more memorable. Here, we both celebrate and cringe at some of the more unforgettable moments when MMA went bat-s**t crazy.

Shamrock vs. Kimbo

First up, something that hasn’t happened yet, but a fight whose very announcement should have the entire sport shaking its collective head. At a combined age of 92, UFC Hall of Famer Ken Shamrock (51) and internet gimmick Kimbo Slice (41) are scheduled to fight each other in the ridiculous, dangerous and thoroughly unnecessary main event of Bellator 138 in June.

That’s Ken Shamrock and Kimbo Slice. In 2015.

That this fight is marginally better than Shamrock’s previously planned outing (a bareknuckled dust-up with an Irish gypsy) isn’t exactly saying much. Both events would be an embarrassment to MMA, but thanks to both competitors’ name value, ratings-pulling track records and Bellator’s deal with Spike TV, this will almost certainly gain one of the sport’s biggest television ratings of the year.

But that doesn’t mean it should happen. The last time Shamrock beat anyone in a major MMA fight was when he made quick work of Kimo Leopoldo at UFC 48, which was more than a decade ago, in June 2004.

Shamrock hasn’t fought since 2010, and from 2005 to 2008 he lost five straight, all by first-round stoppage. Since quitting MMA, Kimbo has amassed a 7-0 record in professional boxing, knocking off nobodies to very little interest. In MMA, he was a huge disappointment to those who convinced themselves a huge, muscular streetfighter could genuinely compete in high-level MMA. But Slice can at least punch. And at 51, Ken Shamrock should absolutely not be taking punches from any kind of heavyweight fighter.

Renowned MMA and wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer has covered Shamrock’s career since 1990 when he was an indie pro wrestler named Vince Torelli. He said it best in his Wrestling Observer Newsletter: “Fights like this are why we have athletic commissions, because sometimes a fight that will garner interest and be successful shouldn’t be allowed.” This could get very ugly and very sad, and simply isn’t worth the risk.

YAMMA Time

Back in February 2008, I wrote an opinion piece for Fighters Only about YAMMA, the promotion dreamed up (perhaps after a night on the peyote) by former UFC boss Bob Meyrowitz. I slated the ‘revolutionary’ fighting surface, the ‘Masters’ fights that meant fans could see their over-the-hill heroes from the ‘90s wheeled out for another shot at the big time, and the return of that old favorite, the one-night tournament. That piece was written and published several weeks before YAMMA’s first (and only) event, but everything I said ended up being true.

What I hadn’t bargained for was what a monumental and, at times, utterly hilarious fiasco the show would be. To run his precious tournament in an age of athletic commission oversight, Meyrowitz had to agree that no fighter could actually compete for more than five rounds during the evening, which meant each contender could fight only one round in the quarterfinals, one in the semis and three in the final. 

Guess what? The first man to score a takedown, in most cases, and usually aided by the ludicrous ‘banked’ surface that made proper balance and takedown defense almost impossible, won by virtue of holding their opponent down and doing very little for five minutes. This made for boring fights.

The commentary was horrendously outdated and the ring announcer was sports talk radio DJ Scott Ferrall – a man with a voice like rusted industrial machinery who came out with some utterly ridiculous pre-fight shtick. 

YAMMA became something of a cult classic as fans took to online message boards to debate what the best and worst bits were, laugh at it all and congratulate themselves on surviving it.

Afterwards, Meyrowitz gave a bizarre video interview that suggested he’d been watching a completely different show, from a different planet. He insisted there would be a second installment. There wasn’t.

A Team Sport?

“I’ve said it a million times: team tennis doesn’t work, and team fighting doesn’t work. They have, like, the Woodchucks vs. the Crazy Beavers; is that what you want to see?” – Dana White, UFC president, May 2007.

“The original idea of having the Happy Woodchucks fight the Angry Beavers flew in the face of everything combat sports are about.” – Jay Larkin, IFL CEO, June 2008.

Later, in the same Entrepreneur magazine article, Larkin said: “This isn’t my idea of fighting. To me, the idea of two guys rolling around on the floor is tedious, like watching gay foreplay.” With friends like the late Larkin – the man who was in charge of Showtime Boxing for quarter of a century – who needed enemies like White? 

At the time that article was written, publicly-traded IFL shares were going for two cents, down from a ridiculously inflated $17 per share just 18 months earlier. That was thanks entirely and coincidentally to a feature on the explosion in popularity of the sport by the influential 60 Minutes in a January 2007.

Spending money like drunken sailors ticking off their bucket list, the IFL started up in early 2006, booked huge arenas and maintained a bloated roster of artificial ‘teams’ (with only slightly better names than the ones White and Larkin mocked) coached by MMA legends; and those teams would then compete in five-on-five ‘games’ consisting of individual fights from lightweight to heavyweight in cities that often had no connection whatsoever to the competitors. With a season, playoffs and a grand final, its first year (2006-07) produced some hugely enjoyable fights under the most wrongheaded promotional concept in MMA history.

Confusingly, the IFL retained the team format and crowned individual champions, including heavyweight Roy Nelson. Its main television show from March 2007, IFL Battleground, was a jumbled mishmash of seemingly random, badly-edited fights on America’s short-lived MyNetworkTV. Its debut episode tried to play up the dangers of the sport with an intro sequence that included ambulance sirens and a ‘flatline’ audio effect dubbed over knockouts. That repelled just about everyone and led to groveling apologies.

By the time Larkin was brought on board in September 2007, the IFL was in serious trouble. It was well on the way to losing a total of

$36 million, but fittingly, just before the end, it announced that just around the corner was the answer to its problems – The HEX. No, the IFL didn’t curse its competitors; it had a new secret weapon. Shunning its boring old four-sided boxing ring, it commissioned a six-sided ring that sadly never saw the light of day. Its debut event, in August 2008, was canceled and the promotion slipped into myth and memory.

Incredibly the team MMA concept has more recently been revived in Europe in a truly literal sense. The Team Fighting Championship (TFC) now offers, according to its website “a new approach to martial arts where you can enjoy the exciting moments of a group street-fighting transferred to the sport grounds.” Quite. You can catch its gang fights on YouTube.

Who Needs Referees Anyway?

In his excellent book, Is This Legal?, Art Davie details the history of the first UFC event and explains one of the most terrifying ideas of the entire enterprise – that the referee was powerless to actually stop the fight. “I’d seen far too many boxing matches end in controversy because the actions of the ref overshadowed the actions of the fighters,” wrote Art. “No way did I want an early stoppage or a bad judgment call to start derailing our fights.” No, but the potential for someone to actually die on his show wasn’t as much of an issue.

In his autobiography, Let’s Get it On!, iconically referee ‘Big’ John McCarthy describes how, as the official in the UFC 2 Octagon, he realized just how truly terrible an idea this was. Before the show, McCarthy instructed cornermen to throw in the towel if he pointed to them, but as their man was taking a brutal beating, Robert Lucarelli’s corner refused to do so. 

McCarthy recalled: “Even when I started yelling for the cornermen to throw in the towel, they just stared at me.” Later in the show, when Patrick Smith was savaging Scott Morris, again McCarthy tried to intervene, but without much success. 

He wrote: “I was pointing and screaming to Morris’s corner to throw in the towel for their fighter, who had essentially been punched unconscious. The cornerman looked at me, turned his back and threw the towel into the audience.”

After the event, McCarthy gave Rorion Gracie, still in a position of serious power in the fledgling organization, an ultimatum: “Either I can stop the fight as soon as a fighter can’t intelligently defend himself, or I’m out of here.” Gracie eventually relented and from then on, McCarthy had the power to intervene. 

But in subsequent years, as the mainstream media decried the ‘brutality’ of MMA, the embarrassing truth was there were a total of 23 fights inside the Octagon where the referee was officially powerless to step in and rescue a man from being beaten to death.

Equality?

Ronda Rousey’s utter dominance of her division – including finishing her last three fights, all against credible challengers, in a combined 96 seconds – has stirred all kinds of chatter about how she’d manage in a fight against men in her weight class.

UFC color commentator Joe Rogan speculated before the Cat Zingano fight that Rousey “might be able to beat 50%” of the UFC’s male bantamweight division. Tempering his praise with a discussion about a horribly uncomfortable incident in 1994 when a man vs. woman Muay Thai exhibition turned ugly, Rogan noted some very important physical differences between men and women – like testosterone levels, bone structure, etc. – but nonetheless spearheaded a lot of foolish talk that Ronda might actually face a man in a UFC fight.

Aside from the fact that no athletic commission would allow it, the UFC would never risk it and the mainstream media would never let them get away with it, even if they wanted to do it. Furthermore, Rousey herself said “there should never be a venue where we’re celebrating a man hitting a woman,” but ‘what if’ talk rumbles on.

That 1994 Muay Thai fight saw female wrecking machine Lucia Rijker – who, if she was born 20 years later would likely have been a major player in women’s MMA – taken apart and knocked out by a far-less experienced, mediocre male fighter named Somchai Jaidee. 

Other man vs. woman fights have been less brutally unpleasant: Ediane Gomes defeated a man under Vale Tudo rules in Brazil in 2007 and Dutch fighter Irma Verhoef went to a draw in an MMA fight with a male Muay Thai fighter in Holland in 2004; but that doesn’t make them good or remotely feasible ideas.

Testing, Testing

After a few weeks that saw Jon Jones test positive for cocaine, Anderson Silva’s pharmaceutical shocker, yet another Nick Diaz marijuana episode and Hector Lombard’s post-UFC 182 urine-test failure, the UFC announced a major overhaul and heavy investment in a large-scale testing program on February 18th 2015, which will begin later this year. About time too, since relying on inadequate athletic commission testing was clearly not deterring drug use.

Consider this damning quote: “It was also absolutely clear that... they were aware of the problem. If they had wanted to do something about it, they would have done out-of-competition testing. Their in-competition testing was a complete waste of time.” 

So, was that from an outspoken critic of the UFC? No, that’s Bob Armstrong, lead counsel for the Dubin Inquiry, set up by the Canadian government to investigate steroid use in international sport – in 1989 – a few months after Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m Olympic gold medal.

Armstrong was criticizing the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations). Johnson’s team had been carefully cycling him on and off steroids for several years by that point, which is ample evidence – from almost 30 years ago – of how a determined drug cheat can easily pass day-of-competition testing that’s been the backbone of MMA for many years.

And the fact it’s taken MMA this long to catch up with things, which were well-known in the sporting world years before men first fought in cages on pay-per-view, is mind-boggling. Even more incredible is that the day before the UFC’s big announcement, Greg Alvarez, the Texas Combative Sports program director said: “Nobody has ever brought (out-of-competition testing) up... When we test, we test whether it’s going to affect their ability that day in that fight... We don’t do that pre-testing beforehand.” Amazing.

Let’s Play Promoter

Unsurprisingly, given the explosion of UFC popularity in 2005-06, the bandwagon quickly attracted some new passengers; and two of the most notable, BodogFight and EliteXC, tried to pull off some spectacularly mad stunts.

First came Bodog: a vanity project for the super-rich Calvin Ayre, the promotion ran shows, from August 2006 to November 2007, in Costa Rica, Russia, Canada and the US. Ayre also appeared in the opening moments of one of its TV shows driving a tank – because he could – and gave significant airtime to hyping up Canadian-based punk singer Bif Naked, since she had a contract with his Bodog Music record company. 

While BodogFight had some quality fighters and entertaining shows, everything was geared towards promoting his gambling empire and something nebulously based around a ‘Bodog lifestyle’. It even once produced a piece of advertising for a live event that listed no competitors, no fights, no location, no time and no date – just a link to the website. Its most glorious failure, a costly pay-per-view event in St Petersburg, Russia headlined by a heavyweight contest between Fedor Emelianenko and natural middleweight Matt Lindland, was a financial disaster. It pulled in just 13,000 buys across North America, but gave Ayre the chance to hobnob at ringside with Vladimir Putin and Jean-Claude Van Damme. 

Sadly, Bodog’s maddest MMA idea, a PPV entitled ‘Night of a Hundred Fights’ that was set to have three cages and fights going on simultaneously, never took place. If nothing else, it would have been a sight to behold.

Running a total of 20 shows that included its ‘feeder’ promotion ShoXC, boxing promoter Gary Shaw’s EliteXC certainly made a major impact between February 2007 and October 2008. It put women’s MMA on the big stage with Gina Carano, pulled off a major network TV deal with CBS, and for a while at least, looked like genuine competition for the almighty UFC. 

Sadly, the men in charge also made some stupendously inexplicable decisions. Maintaining a hugely expensive New York office was one, another was buying up MMA organizations all over the world for ‘co-promotions’ and video libraries while running up enormous debt. But perhaps its biggest blunder was building so much of its marketing around a visually-impressive internet ‘phenom’ who couldn’t actually fight very well. Yes, it’s that man again, Kimbo Slice.

Despite boasting an impressive roster that included the likes of Carano, Robbie Lawler, Frank Shamrock, Jake Shields and Nick Diaz, Shaw and his son Jared – who went about the place pretending he was a rapper named $kala – seemed overly enamored with Kimbo. True, he pulled in some huge TV ratings, including then-record 6.51 million for his fight with James Thompson. But when late-replacement light heavy Seth Petruzelli took 11 seconds to knock him out with a jab while hopping on one leg, EliteXC’s shaky house of cards started tumbling down. Already shunned by CBS after a post-fight Diaz brothers fracas, widely-publicized intimations that EliteXC had tried to rig the fight in Kimbo’s favor finished the organization off.