Issue 033

January 2008

Nevada State Athletic Commissioner

MMA may be expanding across the globe, from London to Belfast to Montreal and more, but the home of the biggest organisation and the juiciest fights still take place in Las Vegas, Nevada. Heading the state’s athletic commission is long-time boxing fan and MMA enthusiast Keith Kizer.

A Las Vegas attorney, he worked in a Nevada law firm for almost seven years before jumping to the attorney general’s office. A month or so into the job, Kizer was told the office represented the athletic commission, a big thrill for him, being a boxing fan who sparred regularly at the time. Kizer worked his way to become the attorney for the athletic commission, and served in that role for a little over five years.

When Marc Ratner stepped down from the role of executive director of the commission to join the UFC in March 2006 he recommend Kizer to replace him, even though he hadn’t thought about the role. “I was more than happy being the chief legal counsel for them, and I was also the chief legal counsel for the gaming commission, and being in Nevada it’s like ‘wow, I get to be the main attorney for the best gaming commission in the world and I get to be the main attorney for the best boxing commission in the world’, I didn’t know if I wanted to pass that up to be an administrator,” recalls Kizer.

“But if you get an offer to be the executive director of the athletic commission for Nevada, it’s something you don’t so no to,” he says with laughter before adding, “even though I got a minor pay cut because I was going from an attorney’s position to an administrative position, but I went for it and I’m happy I did it.

Day to day work for Kizer depends. “If we have a show or shows on the weekend the staff mainly handles all the medicals, that’s the top requirement, the pre-fight medicals,” says Kizer. “I get the match-ups and records from the promoter, I do research if I’m not familiar with the fighter, whether or not to approve the fights.” Most of the time Kizer approves the fights, but every now and then there’s an issue where he has to step in and not allow a fight. It’s a rare instance but researching on match-ups is not. Case in point is when Sokoudjou was set up to fight Antonio Rogerio Nogueira in Pride in Las Vegas.

“I initially looked at it and saw he (Sokoudjou) was 2-1, and he was fighting one of the best light heavyweights in the world. Of course you saw what happened. I give matchmakers a chance, in MMA it’s a lot better, in boxing you’ll see guys try and keep their record at 15-0 and they’ll want to fight a guy who’s 5-20; unfortunately I get too many of those, I don’t get a lot of those, but one is too many of that.”

Revamping regulation and conducting studies to make the sport safer come with the territory for Kizer too. The sports he deals with are always going to be dangerous, but the commission try to revamp their pre-fight medicals, post-fight care, and equipment. For example, tinkering with the number of sides in a cage can be beneficial as MMA is still a young sport. “A caged fence had to be a minimum of eight sides because you didn’t want the corners to be too tight”, comments Kizer an old NSAC regulation. “You could never had a four-sided cage because if you get stuck in the corner you’re wedged in there, but the six and seven-sided ones they tried in other states and there wasn’t a problem, so we tweaked our rules recently.”

Another instance of tweaking the rules emanating from the ending of the Gray Maynard / Robert Emerson bout that witnessed Emerson tap out and Maynard knock himself out with the same move. “In boxing it’s a double KO, which is a draw”, says Kizer. “We didn’t have a rule that applied to it so by default it was a no-contest; so we just cut and pasted the boxing rule which will make it a technical draw.”

As the sport continues to flourish, up and coming promoters are jumping on board for a share of the gigantic MMA pie being served in Nevada, but Kizer has been very stringent on who get their promoters license. “We make sure they have the business acumen to run a show right and can afford to run a show”, says Kizer. The brand recognition of a league such as the UFC has been the fruit of years of labour, and the discriminating public isn’t rushing to watch a fight run by any promoter. “I tell people, you and I can come up with the best tasting cola in the world, we’re not going to have the Coke or Pepsi revenue”, analogises Kizer. “You’ve got to be involved for the long run.”

Kizer has been involved for the long run and has witness the sport grow exponentially over the past few years, and is amazed at the sort of revenue the UFC is generating. “Now it’s to the point where it’s just amazing the amount of money they do – this is not an underground sport, this is not a minor league sport, this is big time.”