*“Sparring partner” struck me as an oxymoron, as if the two fighters had the same objective.
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*Like most fighters, Rothwell’s “walking around” weight is roughly 10 percent greater than his fighting weight of 265 pounds.
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*Without a doubt, Rage is the official band of MMA.
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*Let’s get the disclaimer stuff out of the way: Ultimate Fighting Championship®, Ultimate Fighting®, UFC®, The Ultimate Fighter®, Submission®, As Real As It Gets®, Zuffa™, The Octagon™, and the eight-sided competition mat and cage design are registered trademarks, trademarks, trade dress, or service marks owned exclusively by Zuffa, LLC, in the United States and other jurisdictions.
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*Real name: Mirko Filipovic. When he’s not fighting, Cro Cop, a former Croatian antiterrorism officer, is a member of his nation’s parliament.
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*Consider this: in the summer of 2007, Johnny Morton, a former NFL star receiver, entered a low-level MMA fight. He was knocked out thirty-eight seconds into the fight and taken to the hospital, where he tested positive for anabolic steroids.
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*In 2007, seven of the top ten highest-grossing pay-per-view events were UFC fights.
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*Others contend that the first MMA fight was chronicled in Genesis 32:24, where Jacob wrestles all night with God at Peniel. Despite a dislocated hip, Jacob refuses to submit, and by sunrise he has won the Lord’s respect. “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
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*“I mean, it’s not like the other dude needed fewer strokes to hit the golf ball in the cup,” I said. “Physically, he imposed his will on you. He made you bleed. He broke you down.”
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*Thanks largely to the team’s creative offense, St. Ambrose had one of the highest scoring averages in the country at the time.
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*One night, Miletich went to an off-campus watering hole in Hawarden and struck up a conversation with the bartender. Before long, the barkeep was plying Miletich with free shots of Southern Comfort. Miletich stumbled off to the bathroom and, as he passed, a patron who looked like a biker laughed at the way Miletich walked. “Quit dragging your feet like an ape,” the man said. Miletich told the guy to fuck off. The guy followed him to the bathroom. Bad idea. Miletich spun, grabbed the heckler by the neck, and broke a toilet with the guy’s head. The next morning, Miletich woke up and realized that his necklace was missing. He wasn’t sure what had happened but had a vague recollection of being in the bar and drinking too much and then fighting. He returned to the bar in hopes he could retrieve his necklace. Walking in, he saw the owner cleaning up pieces of porcelain. “Hey, I’m looking for part of my necklace,” he said. The man stared coldly at Miletich. “Get the hell away from here,” he said, “and don’t ever come back.” “How come?” Miletich asked. “You don’t remember? You put a bunch of guys in the hospital last night. And you broke my damn toilet.”
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*Roberto Duran might have said “No mas” two words that, sadly, came to encapsulate his fighting career more than any accomplishment in the boxing ring. To some, that one remark unfairly branded him a coward for life. Likewise, the image of Sonny Liston quitting on his stool against Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) in 1964 is forever burned in the memory of fight fans. A jiu-jitsu fighter who taps out suffers no such loss of honor.
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*In the 1990s, submission fighting was slowly coming into vogue in American martial arts. One story that made the rounds of many dojos became a more convincing advertisement than any marketing campaign. Gene LeBell, a legendary stuntman and no-holds-barred fighter, was known as the Godfather of Grappling. In the early 1960s, he’d taken on heavyweight boxer Milo Savage and choked him out in the fourth round. Even at 160 pounds, “Judo Gene” fought as a heavyweight. In Hollywood, he appeared in nearly a hundred episodes of The Fall Guy, and in a triumph of cinematography he threw a chair at himself in Raging Bull.
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*In addition to boasting about the power of Gracie jiu-jitsu in the Playboy article, Rorion revealed some—how to put this?—traditional social views. At one point he exclaimed, “In the Gracie family, the men are peacocks. Women are along for the ride . . . Women become feminists because of men’s weakness. Every woman wants her man to treat her like a woman or he loses his position of strength with her. Women are meant to be mothers. Having kids is the only thing a woman can do that a man can’t. Most Gracie men do not believe in birth control. We believe sex is a holy thing. For procreation of the species. If [my wife, Suzanne] does not want to get pregnant, we don’t have sex. Before we got married, I told her that she was my vehicle for having sons. As many as possible. She said, ‘Would ten be enough?’ I want to have sons to keep the Gracie myth alive. I want to raise as many jujitsu champions as I can. We are like a family of Magic Johnsons. I told Suzanne that it is possible I may want to start another family, like my father. If I can find a woman with the right karma. But that would be hard. The only thing harder to find than a good woman is a good man.”
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*Ironically, in other fights a jiu-jitsu master might apply intensely painful knee locks and heel hooks and triangle holds. The referee, however, clueless about jiu-jitsu, would allow the fight to continue, even as the beaten man was repeatedly tapping out.
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*Editors at Sports Illustrated were so appalled by the descriptions of violence that the story would never run in the magazine.
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*According to McCarthy, in one instance a fighter’s cornermen tossed a towel into the audience beforehand to show that they weren’t going to intervene.
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*Imagine, perhaps, a group of wealthy French investors running NASCAR.
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*Leon Spinks, the tooth-deprived former boxing champ, was a notable exception.
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*Classic UFC story: Later in his career, Abbott was allegedly owed money by the Semaphore Entertainment Group. He is said to have sent one of the company’s bean counters an envelope with a bullet inside. He was paid shortly thereafter.
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*An underrated aspect of fighting is learning how to take a punch. The fighter who announces “I’ve never been hit” is usually in a world of hurt the first time he catches a shot square on the chin.
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*The cards are held mostly in backwaters in the Midwest, and Dore is a master of sidestepping regulations. One of his ploys: to avoid falling under the jurisdiction of commissions that regulate professional boxing, he doesn’t pay prize money but gives the winner a satin jacket instead.
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*Unlike the UFC, the executives at Extreme Challenge had the good sense to institute weight classes.
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*According to John McCarthy, the referee that night, the rule was “very loosely interpreted.”
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*Theory: Another possible factor in the backlash against MMA: in the mid-nineties, the sport seemed culturally out of place. It might have been different in the eighties, a decade of military buildups that began with the taking of American hostages in Iran in 1979 and ended with the fall of communism. The eighties were full of cowboy boots and muscle and Mike Tyson—that decade could easily have accommodated two men head-butting in a cage. But in the eco-friendly, high-tech, Clinton-era 1990s, cage fighting and the UFC seemed to clash with the national vibe.
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*What’s more, McCain’s wife, Cindy, was an heiress who inherited her father’s beer distributorship, one of the largest in the country.
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*If you wanted to guarantee yourself a heaping ration of shit from the other fighters, you preened at your reflection.
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*Their business arrangement was simple: Cox wouldn’t accept a manager’s fee until he got Miletich his first fight in the UFC.
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*Gracie would later recall that every time he was pushed against the fence, Tadeu supporters would reach through and jab him.
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*Earlier in the evening, McCarthy had stopped a fight when Lion’s Den fighter Jerry Bohlander had grabbed Kevin Jackson’s right arm and twisted it between his legs as if he were unscrewing a bottle top. When Jackson protested, McCarthy responded, “I can’t stand by and let him break your arm, Kevin.”
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*Pulver recounts this in his fine biography, Never. While Pulver escaped, as did his brother Abel, currently a schoolteacher in Washington state, a third brother, Dustin, once appeared on America’s Most Wanted and is now in jail on his sixth felony conviction.
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*UFC 17.5 was punctuated by the spectacularly unsuccessful debut of the 205-pound Wanderlei “the Axe Murderer” Silva, who was knocked silly by fellow Brazilian Vitor Belfort.
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*The competition was so shocking and controversial that when Frye returned home to Tucson, he was promptly barred from his job as a firefighter.
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*This was thrown into sharp relief when heavyweights Pedro Rizzo and Mark Coleman fought a close match that resulted in a split decision, both journalists siding with Rizzo while the judge-by-trade chose Coleman.
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*Why would any no-holds-barred fighter be so dumb/careless/arrogant as to wear jewelry into the ring?
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*In fact, in 2008 the UFC middleweight champ, Anderson Silva, expressed interest in fighting the legendary boxer Roy Jones Jr. The UFC immediately vetoed the idea.
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*It says plenty about the state of the UFC at this time that a young fighter making his debut could be in the mix for a title shot.
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*Hallman trained for the match with Matt Hume, the Washington fighter who had defeated Miletich. Hume would later tell Hughes’s manager, Monte Cox, that Hallman had been practicing that move for weeks. “Hughes is a creature of habit. We knew when he went for that body slam he was vulnerable.”
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*The timing has been a source of controversy. In the December 13, 2007, airing of the CNBC documentary Ultimate Fighting: From Blood Sport to Big Time, Meyrowitz intimated that when serving on the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Lorenzo Fertitta had voted against the UFC’s bid for sanction because he had wanted to buy the organization himself.
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†That was then. Now it’s reportedly in excess of $1 billion.
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*It was also Zuffa’s good fortune that by 2001, John McCain was gaining prominence in the Senate and had more important issues to address than the morality of cage fighting.
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*Like Dana White, Frank Fertitta Jr. was a former bellman who worked his way up.
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*Like the decision to hire Carmen Electra as the organization’s spokeswoman—not exactly ideal for a brand trying to extinguish the notion that its product is for knuckle-dragging degenerates.
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*Why Penn never took the nickname “Hawaiian Punch” is an enduring mystery of MMA.
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*In my town, New York City, twenty years ago, there were more than 150 gyms scattered through the five boroughs. Today there are 7.
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*In fact, he believes his cutting weight as a young wrestler was what stunted his growth.
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*A less conventional technique for cutting weight: profuse spitting. At one card I attended in 2008, a featherweight tipped the scales at half a pound over the 145-pound limit. He walked around the perimeter of the arena, letting loose a steady flow of loogies. An hour later, he had lost almost 9 ounces.
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*All the more so with kicks. One of the truisms of MMA: a leg can generate more force than an arm. And unlike a fist, a fighter’s leg isn’t padded in the equivalent of a glove.
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*It’s reasonably clever, as these things go. Like mobsters and pool hustlers, fighters haven’t truly been “made” until they take on a nickname. Most MMA handles derive from either geography (“the Huntington Beach Bad Boy,” “the Alaskan Assassin”) or death/pain (“the Executioner,” “the Axe Murderer,” “the Terror”). My personal favorite is the handle of the Miletich heavyweight Brad Imes. Calling yourself “the Hillbilly Heartthrob” suggests an irony appropriate to the whole nickname tradition.
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*In April 2008, Matt Serra, the opinionated New Yorker, took on Georges St. Pierre in St. Pierre’s hometown of Montreal. Asked how he would cope with being booed relentlessly, Serra shrugged and said, “It’ll be like what Tim Sylvia experiences every time he fights.”
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†“I didn’t know what I was taking” (Marion Jones). “I thought it was flaxseed oil” (Barry Bonds). “The testing was botched” (Tour de France winner Floyd Landis). My best friend “misremembered” details when he implicated me (Roger Clemens).
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*At least he kept his sense of humor. The story goes that as paramedics frantically cut away Mir’s pants, he asked for a towel. “The grass is cold and wet,” he told the EMTs, “and I don’t want people to get a false sense of me.”
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*One recalled this episode in 2008 when Leben, by this point a top UFC fighter, was jailed in Oregon for a parole violation stemming from a DUI offense.
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*In a memorable scene from season four, contestant Mikey Burnett—an early UFC opponent of Pat Miletich; see chapter 7—lost his fight and, before his formal elimination from the show, put on a pair of goggles, inserted a mouth guard, and hurled himself into the door of the house. Never once was it mentioned that his father had died that night.
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*The son of a surgeon, Florian gave up a banking job in order to fight for a living.
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*In 2007, Big John retired from the UFC to—what else?—think about starting his own MMA organization. He is also working on an autobiography.
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†In the winter of 2007, a Texas fighter, Sam Vasquez, became the first mixed martial artist to die from an injury sustained in a sanctioned MMA fight. A thirty-five-year-old father who trained when he wasn’t working as a restaurant manager, Vasquez never recovered from a third-round knockout sustained in an Extreme Fighting show in Houston. While the UFC endured some backlash, it seemed to be mitigated by the fact that the fight had been sanctioned, the promoter was reputable, and the fighters had been screened in accordance with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which oversees combat sports in the state. In a perverse way, from a public relations standpoint a death that occurred on an un-sanctioned, unregulated amateur card could have been worse for the sport. Surprisingly, few seemed to make the opposite case: if a fighter can get killed in a sanctioned fight, imagine how dangerous the unsanctioned ones must be.
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*Good news: he got the story. Bad news: he absorbed a series of stiff right hands and was counted out by the ref.
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†Another example of how rapidly the plot can shift in this sport: M-1 Global essentially collapsed under its own weight before it ever staged a card. Cox then became CEO of a spinoff league named Adrenaline.
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*Kerry Schall was the victim of one of Cox’s few whiffs. A six-foot-five, 300-pound heavyweight from Ohio, Schall was rising quickly in the ranks. Cox landed him a fight on a King of Rings card in Japan. The opponent was a pudgy Russian who was barely six feet tall and weighed 235 pounds. “This one will be easy,” Cox assured his fighter. “Those Russians are usually just big, strong guys with no skills.” Unfortunately for Schall, the obscure, lumpy opponent was Fedor Emelianenko, who would later become a legendary MMA figure, arguably the best fighter ever. He needed less than two minutes to bloody Schall and force a submission.
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*Iowans call this “the Curse of Gable.” Dan Gable, the iconic I-eat-barbed-wire-for-breakfast wrestler, had four daughters, more proof that someone Up There has a sense of humor.
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†Lewis, you’ll recall, was the UFC fighter who introduced Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta to mixed martial arts.
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*Indulge this further digression; the payoff is worth it. On the night of February 21, 2006, the branch manager of a Securitas bank depot outside London was stopped by what he thought were policemen. They were impostors who kidnapped the branch manager. Separately, the man’s wife and son were kidnapped too. Once together, the family was taken to the bank depot—basically, a warehouse for cash—where the manager opened the vault. The robbers saw before them £200 million (roughly $350 million) in used bills. Unfortunately, they could fit only £53 million in their truck. Still, the haul was the largest cash robbery in history.
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*A few weeks later, during a 60 Minutes segment on the emergence of mixed martial arts, Gracie was asked about that grotesque photo. “I saw the ligaments going,” he explained with no trace of exaggeration. “And I embraced that as punishment for the mistake I had made.”
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*For some reason, I never quite got over this: Pat Miletich, once the baddest motherfucker in America, now is a member of the local country club.
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*The more the UFC succeeds, the more casual White’s attire becomes. His suit and tie were replaced by a sportcoat and an open collar. Today he’ll show up for interviews wearing a form-fitting T-shirt, tattered jeans, and a belt buckle adorned with a skull.
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*Theory: because fighters wear neither uniforms nor shoes, tattoos have become almost a fashion accessory to them.
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*On this night, Sakara, the Italian, won the award for Most Creative Entrance Song when he selected the theme music from Phantom of the Opera.
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†The UFC’s sponsor policy, in fact, is a hot topic. Not unlike the NFL or NASCAR, the UFC athletes—or their managers, anyway—contend they could make a ton more money if the conflicts policy weren’t so restrictive.
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*It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t unique to the UFC. For instance, NASCAR went through the same dilemma when it exploded in popularity. The latter organization came to the unhappy conclusion that criticism and scrutiny are byproducts of growth.
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*According to Forbes, the UFC did 145,000 pay-per-view buys in 2001; in 2007 they racked up more than 5.1 million buys.
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†The UFC contends that the test of a fighter’s worth is how many tickets or PPV buys he generates. At the time, Jardine was not a big draw.
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*In September 2008, Couture abruptly reversed course and announced that he would return from exile and once again compete in the UFC—another example of the plot twists endemic to the sport.
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*Acknowledging that Lesnar needed some seasoning, the UFC announced that his next fight would be against Mark Coleman, the “early era” UFC champ, who was in his mid-forties.
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*Silva’s manager, Ed Soares, told me before the fight that Silva had recently applied for a green card. “Anderson knows that the United States is where it’s happening for him. He’s already more recognized in New York or Miami or L.A. than in Rio!”
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*Though MMA’s status may have changed by the time you read this.
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†Because of his noncompete dispute with the UFC, Couture’s camp was renamed Team Tompkins. Looking remarkably fit and trim for a forty-four-year-old man who hadn’t fought in months, Couture was at the event, but the IFL did not advertise his presence in the arena. Don’t ask.
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*Lennox wrestled at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids—where Miletich had made a cameo appearance as a student in the late 1980s—before fighting on one of Monte Cox’s cards and being discovered as an MMA prospect.