Issue 048

April 2009

Herb Dean’s involvement in mixed martial arts came at the very beginning of the sport.  

Now one of the sport’s top referees, Herb helped Zane Frasier to prepare for competition in the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship. Though his training partner was on the receiving end of an awful beating, Dean knew that the sport had a bright future. 15 years of hard work and dedication down the line, the Californian has officiated well in excess of 4,000 fights and is recognised the world over as one of the most respected figures in the sport. 

During his virtually unparalleled tenure as one of the sport’s most active referees, Dean has personally overseen some incredible fights and witnessed many bizarre occurrences. “I’ve seen lots of different strange things, a lot of times when fighters have been dazed, they are not totally conscious, not everything is firing properly. You know, they say and do strange things. I’ve had fighters wake up and start fighting me; I’ve had fighters tell me things that make no sense.” 

Dean marvelled at one odd situation where a concussed fighter earnestly warned him to avoid the fish that were floating around the cage; however, as he explained, temporary hallucinations are not uncommon for the victim of a heavy knock out. “I’ve had a fighter tell me that the reason why he lost was because the promoter gave him really bad seats and he couldn’t see the punches coming. ‘How could you expect me to fight when my seats were so far away?’” 

Humorous anecdotes aside, the former outreach councillor for troubled teenagers takes the safety of the combatants as seriously as any responsibility which has ever been placed on his wide shoulders and does not let his personal feelings towards any of the fighters enter into his decision-making process. “The trust of being a referee is a sacred trust, I believe. I take it very seriously. People trust their lives, their careers, their dreams and aspirations to me, to give them a fairly arbitrated match. I’ve always had jobs where I have had to put personalities behind the principles, so I’m used to doing that. 

“I’m not very judgemental. If someone has a really bad attitude, it’s not necessarily because they are a bad guy, they just have to get hyped up a certain way. It’s a rough sport, whatever mindset they have to get themselves into to get into that ring, I don’t judge them for it. At the end of the day, they deserve a lot of respect because they are getting in there and doing something that most people can’t do.” 

As Dean knows only too well as the man in charge of such a heated competition with so much at stake, this respect is not always returned in the first instance. On the odd occasion, fighters that only seconds ago were plainly looking for a way out of the contest vociferously blame the referee for stepping in to stop the bout. A chorus of unfair criticism can follow from fans and promoters alike. 

While he accepts these tidal waves of abuse as part of his job, Dean is not immune to what can be very personal attacks. “Sometimes you feel like you’ve been hung out to dry. I’ve had promoters say that I’ve made bad calls and then later say, ‘Hey, I’m just doing what it takes to sell the next fight’ and he really believes that I’ve made a great call. I’m not going to mention any names, but from everyone from the lowest promoter to the highest promoter has done things like that,” he said, adding a thinly veiled reference to the criticism he received from Dana White after his controversial yet potentially life-saving stoppage of the Tito Ortiz-Ken Shamrock fight in July 2006. 

An often-overlooked fact that can work to the favour of referees in the United States is that they receive their pay cheque from the relevant athletic commission, rather than the promoter of the show. Although clearly in favour of this set up, Dean is all too aware of an inherently negative aspect which comes with it. 

“No arrangement is perfect. One thing that I don’t like about it is that it was something that was put in place because the sport of boxing had become so corrupt that they needed intervention from the government and these mechanisms were established. Well, our sport came in under these mechanisms without ever having been corrupt, we never had a chance to regulate ourselves and show what an honourable sport it can be. So I feel that a lot of time they are watching out for us doing something that we have never done, because people in other sports have done it.”

Dean accepts that legitimacy is a valuable commodity and sees a bright future ahead for the sport. “I think that as it is accepted more in the mainstream, I think we should continue to develop our amateur divisions so that it is something that people can continue to relate to. I think that the amateur has to be a little less brutal, a little less rough, because not everybody wants to do something as rough as that. I think MMA is going to continue to grow. It’s a great sport.”