There was an almost reverential glee that colored discussions of Tyson in his prime. It approached the damn-near mythical, this perception that as Heavyweight Champion of the World he was the undisputed baddest of the badasses around. And despite the oft-asserted riposte, “Well, for that kind of money I’d fight him,” from both armchair athletes and journeymen alike, there was no money where those mouths were and this unspoken half-truth went relatively uncontested.
Until the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
What started as a scheme cooked up by the many-numbered boys from Brazil known as the Gracies—a long-revered clan of jiu-jitsu fighters who had for years offered large sums of money to ANYone who could beat them—ended up making good on the male instinct to quantify quality and figure out once and for all, for those who cared, who were the best baddest men alive.
Like some crazy Wild West deal, fighters, tough guys, boxers, and bouncers from all over the globe convened in an eight-sided ring to settle the world’s longest running bar bet. No rules, no time limits. The understanding was pure Mad Max: two men enter, one man leaves. While neither Tyson, nor indeed ANY boxer of significant stature, put it on the line by showing up, there was one representing the sweet science, a ranked heavyweight who outweighed the Gracie he faced by some sixty-five pounds. Said heavyweight glowered at the smaller man from across the Octagon.
Later, some twenty-eight seconds later to be exact, the fight was over. The stunned boxer barely limped out of the Octagon and it seemed like, for fans of mano-a-mano, the world had changed just a little bit. You see, mixed martial arts (MMA)—a Frankenstein monster of wrestling, jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, boxing, and karate had been born, and the Heavyweight Champion of the World now seemed like a quaint misnomer. What tough used to be and what it was now were very different things.
I mean, sure, there had been those P. T. Barnum attempts to mix the martial arts before. Ali fought Inoki back in the 1970s on network TV, with Ali trying vainly to put together combinations that worked, and Inoki rolling on the floor trying some sort of karate that most Americans had heretofore only seen in badly dubbed Saturday-matinee showings of Fists of Fury or Five Fingers of Death. But this was clearly not the ticket, especially when you witnessed how quickly the big money walked. Even Don “Only in America” King wasn’t interested.
What a difference twenty years makes.
The first UFC was an unqualified success when it hit in the mid-1990s. Subsequent matches were filled to the brim with glitterati—from Dennis Rodman and Jim Brown (who later moved into doing color commentary for the UFC) to Joe Rogan from TV’s News Radio (and, later, Fear Factor) and the strangely placed David Hasselhof and Baywatch entourage. All were drawn by the promise of full-contact fighting without the shadiness of boxing or the sham of pro wrestling. And America responded similarly—whether it was because it offered white men the briefest of opportunities to see a combat sport where white fighters still had a chance, or whether it was because it REALLY answered the king-of-the-hill question, pay-per-view went nuts. Blood on the screen was like blood in the water. And out came the sharks.
Lobbyists of various stripes at the behest of, some would say, Don King and Vince McMahon, the current market-cornerers on sports violence and entertainment, were tugging on the coats of their congressfolk, who were officially “appalled” at what was sound-bitingly referred to as “human cockfighting.” Cable stopped carrying it, only a few southern states would license it, and pay-per-view was effectively stalled.
A West Coast ad rep for TCI cable who asked to not be identified stated that they were getting pressure from “back East on the grounds that the UFC was not suitable for family viewing and we were not to accept advertising from them.”
“If you knew the difference between shit and Shinola,” says Paul “The Polar Bear” Varelans, early UFC competitor, occasional Dennis Rodman running buddy, and former college football player who easily tips the scales at well over 300 pounds, “would you still really want the shit?” The powers that be weren’t chancing it and continued the UFC witch-hunt. But despite all of the backroom dealing, something amazing happened.
Its rabid collection of fans and fighters prospered. On a circuit that includes Brazil’s UFC cognates, Vale Tudo and Luta Livre, Saudi Arabia’s Abu Dhabi Submission Fighting Tournament (sponsored by a sheik and recalling nothing if not Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon), and Japan’s Shooto and Pride fights (where winners swing some serious celebrity in Tokyo) not to mention a raft of imitators from the Extreme Fighting Championships and a whole amateur network of men whose desire is to measure their skill, their mettle, their MANhood—a new testing ground sprang up.
Noting that more people get hurt playing football, boxing, or skiing, MMA fighters ply their trade while smirking at the highly paid glory-boy boxers they claim are owned by HBO and the moneyed Vegas set, smirking because the bragging rights to toughitude clearly belong to them. With boxing’s red-light-district status worsened by questionable rulings, underwhelming fights and more courtroom feinting than ringside slugging, and WWF and WCW seemingly the unrestricted province of people for whom sports entertainment is not an oxymoron, Mixed Martial Arts Is the Shit. And its fighters are, hands down, some of the toughest men alive.
Fast, furious, and too legit to quit, two of MMA’s early shining stars and bona fide Hall of Famers were profiled: the estimable Kevin Randleman, who is still fighting out of Ohio’s Hammer House (where the motto is “Ground and pound ’em), and Maurice Smith, a Seattle kickboxer whose easiness belies the fact that he’s absolutely destroyed some of the sport’s toughest before semi-retiring a few years ago.
Are you ready? Are you ready? Then let’s get it on.
Kevin with a “K”
Kevin Randleman, thirty-four, all frosted blond hair (his quicksilver fashion choices have seen the hair change multiple times according to his wildly changing whims) and 215-pound sculpted physique, had been touted as the newest phenom, the Dennis Rodman of the UFC. His mercurial post-fight pronouncements would do The Worm some justice. One week he’s quitting, the next week he’s fighting, the next he’s getting busted for using performance-enhancing substances. Allegedly. I was warned by Eddie Goldman, the Howard Cosell of Mixed Martial Arts, that he’d be just as likely to beat me as talk to me.
All lies.
Randleman, father of two and family man, was unfailingly cordial, and this stood in stark relief to the images that flooded through my brain pan of him riding astride a competitor that he was beating into the “loss” side of the equation. Wrestling from the age of ten and going on to fight in the Golden Gloves, win the Big ten championships three times and the NCAA championships twice, Randleman was maxing in the twilight that eventually claims most of our top wrestlers. Teaching, training, coaching and waiting, until one day the phones rings and it’s Mark “The Hammer” Coleman, president of Hammer House, former Olympian and once Randleman’s Ohio State Coach, and he’s asking the question to which the answer is almost always, Yes.
Do you want to make some money?
Randleman laughed. And then said, “Yeah.”
“I’m a monster,” says Randleman, “and I love this, and this might sound crazy because I don’t like to hurt people but. …” I’ll finish the sentence for him: If it happens, it happens.
And so it did—flights and fights in Brazil, a string of victories over the Brazilians, his UFC debut and a bloodline that goes like this: Mark Coleman beat the slop out of a bevy of brawn to take the title; Maurice Smith beat the slop out of him; and Randleman was set to go head-to-head with Smith. Randleman played giantkiller killer that day, beating the slop out of Smith and pronouncing, as no empty boast, “I’m afraid of no man.” Nice work if you can get it (and he did). But in a just world he’d be starring opposite Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone in some Hollywood musclecapade. He’d be training Madonna. He’d be Tae Bo fer chrissakes.
“Our society is so backward,” Randleman opines from his home in Columbus, Ohio. “The things that we should embrace and enjoy are the things that we think of as being bad.” Like, presumably, the good-ole Georgia head-whippings he’s been inflicting on a steady string of opponents, from Maurice Smith to Bas Rutten (whom he lost to in a controversial decision).
“Look,” Randleman says, “I’m not in a dangerous sport. Nobody ever left the Octagon in a wheelchair, and the only concussion I’ve ever gotten was from high school football. But I’ll tell you something sad. I met Jack Dempsey’s great-grandson, and the man cannot speak. It’s terrible. And that’s from boxing.”
Boxing. The usual suspect. Also under fire in what even Joyce Carol Oates thinks is a conspiracy against masculinity and race, is understood by Randleman as simply being the handmaiden of dueling business interests.
“I don’t have the official figures,” Randleman offers, “but the UFC at its height was grossing larger sales than things like Wrestlemania and Evander Holyfield-Lennox Lewis fights. All of that UFC money was just making UFC folks rich. It would be well worth spending $2 million on lobbyists to keep the UFC from taking $10 mil out of your pocket, I’d think.”
And so it goes. In the seesaw of history, power—that volatile mixture of might and money—resolves itself around its truest measure, cash, while the gladiators soldier on.
“I don’t fight to impress. I fight to get paid,” concludes Randleman. “And when I get paid I take the money and give it to my family and my kids. It’s that simple.”
And could not be simpler.
Back when I sported a konk, I used to have a hairdresser at Mrs. Blue’s shop up in New Rochelle, name of Maurice Smith. Nice gentleman, always smelled of Chanel No. 5. Wore angora. But, strangely, I don’t think this is him, so I check his vita. Bellevue, Washington, resident, 6′2″, 220 pounds, UFC Heavyweight Champion, Extreme Fighting (EFC) Heavyweight Champion, WKA World Heavyweight Muay Thai Champion, ISKA World Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion with 44 KO’s in kickboxing alone.
My guess? T’aint the same fella.
And when we speak, I know for sure that we’re talking birds of a different feather since words keep coming up in conversation that are remarkably unlike other conversations you might have with a hairdresser. Words like “brutal,” “violent,” and “deadly.” And sentences like “I would never say stomping a guy’s head on the ground is a good thing to do.” But they come so easily he could just as easily be saying almost anything else, and he homes into that strangely dissonant matter-of-fact.
Kevin Randleman (left) and Maurice Smith (right).
“Ninety-nine percent of the guys that I’ve met,” Smith’s says in his staccato delivery, “and fought with are actually nice guys. Decent guys. Much nicer-seeming than the boxers, who have these violent pasts. And they DO call what we do submission fighting, which sort of means to me that the guy at least has an out, before he’s permanently damaged. He can quit. Submit. In boxing the way out is usually when the lights go out. In mixed martial arts it’s not about killing the guy or whatever, it’s about winning the game.”
Winning is something Smith would know something about. After picking his way through a variety of martial arts between the ages of thirteen and eighteen (after having been inspired by Bruce Lee’s The Chinese Connection), the forty-four-year-old Smith began a competitive career that he ended in grand style when he hit the big life marker of forty. That’s twenty-two years of stepping into a ring and kicking ass like ass-kicking was going out of style. I mean, I like ass kicking as much as, well, almost as much as Smith, but, I wonder if it’s any wonder that the general public can’t quite slip behind the veil of why he does what he does.
“They may not understand what it is,” Smith says.
What?
“Competition. It all comes down to competition,” Smith riffs, “regardless of whether it’s ping-pong or volleyball or anything. It’s what you’re good at. What you may be the best at. And it’s human nature. It’s animal nature. To dominate. And we have a choice: to fight or not fight. I want to fight.”
So he has, as he worked overtime up to his forty-year-old end date, defeating the previously undefeated grappler and Olympic freestyle wrestler Mark Coleman, stopping heavyweight brawler Tank Abbott and eventually being stopped himself by Coleman protégé Randleman. Smith bristles at the suggestion that this was a classic case of the lion in winter, an older fighter staying in beyond his appointed time, and chalks the loss up to illness.
But then he steps outside of the pro-wrestling volume range by praising Randleman as “a young man of exceptional talent.” And there is, if not a warmth in his voice, at least a recognition of a fellow traveler on a road that’s clearly less traveled. When asked about the mystery of life beyond the fight, Smith, completely in sync with how his whole career has flowed, doesn’t miss a beat. “If I’m not fighting, I’ll be training fighters. Teaching younger fighters. Because I love the fight and the competition and there is just no substitution.”