It's Time!

by Bruce Buffer

  And let’s face it: I’m human too, and although it’s rare, I have made mistakes. If and when that happens, you’d better believe the fans let me know. One time I introduced GSP as being five feet tall, not five-foot-ten. I didn’t know I’d done that until I watched the replay. Oh Lord, I thought, did I really screw that up? I apologized to Georges later, and he admitted jokingly that he had a lot more on his mind at the moment than to notice or care. Another time I mispronounced the city of Decatur, Illinois. “We love you, Bruce,” citizens of that city Tweeted me, “but it’s pronounced Deck-kay-tur, not Deck-uh-toor.”

  One night, I flubbed Rashad Evans’s introduction to the main event. I got the name of his home city wrong.

  I was sitting in my living room that Sunday after getting home, and I see there’s a text from Rashad:

  LOL How many years have you been introducing me? No worries. It’s cool …

  I dialed his number immediately.

  “Who’s this?” he said groggily.

  “Bruce!”

  “Bruce, man, thanks for calling. But it’s like, twelve-thirty in the morning.”

  Oh, shoot, I thought. I thought he was still in Vegas. Turns out he’s lying in bed in Michigan and I just woke him up.

  I stammered out an apology. “Geez, I screw up your intro and now I’m waking you up!”

  He cracked up. “It’s okay, man. How’s it going? Good to hear your voice.”

  Beyond Twitter, when a fan asks for a photo or an autograph, I happily comply. But what a lot of people don’t get is that I’m not just doing it for them. Some of that good feeling feeds me, nurtures me, lifts me up on days when I’m maybe feeling down. That’s the beautiful thing about fandom.

  A woman once sent me a photo of her two-year-old niece holding a teddy bear, and told me the story behind the image. Turns out that bear, whose name is Bruce, has a voice chip embedded in its fluff. Squeeze the bear and it says—you guessed it—It’s Time! Think about it: For this little girl to receive a gift like this, it must mean that everyone in the family is watching the UFC. All it takes is one member of the household to tune in, and the rest are converted to the sport, down to the littlest toddler.

  Some of my fans have actually educated me. A while back, one fan wrote me via Twitter to say that he couldn’t help noticing that my tuxes had three buttons. I guess he worked in a men’s shop. He wanted to give me the heads-up that three-button jackets were no longer in style. Believe it or not, I had actually heard this previously from my brother Michael, the dresser of dressers. But I hadn’t researched the issue. But now, with this fan’s Tweet fresh in my mind, I asked around in the shops where I was buying my clothes in Los Angeles, and it turned out that Michael and my fan were right.

  Fans often write with requests for personalized Bruce Buffer voice recordings, which they intend to use for weddings, birthdays, and special events. Honoring those requests takes time out of my workday, so I do charge for that service, but I try to keep it affordable. I don’t want to gouge couples who are spending so much on their special day, or families who are springing for special events such as birthdays and anniversaries. The thank-you letters I have received after weddings, in particular, are always awesome. I’ve watched some wedding videos that my fans have posted on YouTube, and frankly I’ve sometimes been reduced to tears that these people have incorporated my work into their special day.

  One day I got an inquiry from a high-school basketball team in Illinois. The coaches asked about our rates because a lot of the kids on the team were UFC fans. It moved me to think that my voice would be kicking off these young athletes on their home courts; I sent them a recording for no charge. They sent me a signed photo of the entire team.

  Occasionally, some fans just don’t know how to respect the boundaries. One time I accidentally Tweeted my personal mobile number, thinking I was sending a private direct message. Next thing you know, I started to get these phone calls.

  “Hello?”

  A timid voice on the other end would say, “Yeah, um, hi. Is this Bruce Buffer?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “Are you the real Bruce Buffer?”

  “Yes, now who is this?”

  “Oh, you don’t know me. My friends and I were wondering if you would just say ‘It’s Time!’ for us. Just once.”

  I laughed, and then complied with what seemed at the time to be an innocent request. What the hell. When I was done, I heard the fans on the other end giggling. They politely thanked me, and I hung up.

  Over the next few days, I started to get a couple of these calls—“Can you say ‘It’s Time!’?” “Can you say ‘We Are Live!’?”—and I began to suspect that these clowns were taping the call so they could make use of it in every way imaginable: ring tones, voice mail messages, you name it. Technically, such a use infringes on my trademark and could lead to painful legal action. (You hear me, guys?) But okay. I let it slide. It wasn’t important enough to sic on them the big, scary lawyers who spit flame and eat adolescents for lunch. (They really do, guys!)

  I ought to have changed the number, but it was one I’d had for thirty years in the business, and I just didn’t feel like breaking with tradition. For a while I basked in the glow of some pleasant calls from fans. But then the calls devolved into some dangerous, foulmouthed stuff, with one individual in particular calling and threatening to do unspeakable things to my nonexistent wife. I saw red. I turned the matter over to the police. The next time the guy called, I was ready for him.

  “Listen, shit-for-brains,” I said. “The FBI has all your information. You might want to change where you live. Oh, and one other thing. If you ever come near me or my family, I will beat the living hell out of you.”

  Never heard from the idiot again.

  See? There’s a fine line. You can be a fan or you can be an A-hole. Piece of advice: don’t be an A-hole.

  One fan who means a lot to me is a young man I’ve watched grow up. Stephen Quinn is a differently-abled young man in his twenties who is the UFC’s regulatory affairs coordinator. It’s his job to make sure that the fighters have all their medical and other requirements met so they are licensed to fight. He’s always sitting Octagon-side near Lorenzo, a family friend, and waves to say hi to me. Some years back, he made my day when he told me that he was getting a dog and was going to name it Bruce. At UFC 129, the night we had our largest attendance to date, he told me, “Bruce, I’m praying for a three-sixty tonight!” I said, “I don’t know about that, Stephen, but trust me, if I go off, it’s gonna be amazing!” Well, I didn’t know then just how much I was going to go off. That was the night I blew out my knee.

  Through Stephen’s efforts, we have been honored with visits from kids from the Make-A-Wish Foundation from time to time. Some of these children, I am told, have to get an organ transplant every ten years to survive. That’s something grown men don’t go through. And they don’t complain about it. They don’t carp or criticize. They don’t inflict their disappointment on others. All they want when they’re with us is a photo and the fan experience. The fighters and I are honored to help them achieve that wish. Years ago, such organizations would never have thought to bring their kids to the UFC. But look how much we’ve grown, to be embraced as role models for these young kids.

  At one UFC a middle-aged couple came up to me in the hotel lobby after the show, as I was signing for a number of happy fans, and asked if I would say hi to their son.

  “Sure,” I said. “Where is he?”

  The dad pointed down and to my right. Their son was disabled and got around in a wheelchair. He couldn’t move his hands, which were in UFC fighting gloves, and his head was bent to his chest. I could tell that meeting me made him happy because he was beaming happily. I kneeled down and made eye contact with him and thanked him for coming and asking to see me.

  Our encounter made the whole family very happy, and we spent a few minutes together shooting some photos. I probably gave them more time than I usually give t
o fans. The whole time I was doing so, I could see out of the corner of my eye that other fans were congregating on the side, waiting to talk to me. But I gestured to them that I would be just another minute.

  I found it hard to keep my composure in the presence of the young man and his parents. We who have our health and the full use of our bodies forget how blessed we are. This young man’s heroes were the men of the UFC. I was grateful that he included me in their number. And I was touched by the efforts his parents had made to indulge his interests and take him to these events.

  I was close to tears when they left me.

  The other fans rushed over and I just couldn’t deal.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said. “I just need a moment.”

  So I went off to the side and took a moment to feel what I was feeling. Then, after a bit, when the tears stopped coming, I dried my eyes. I’ve never been afraid to cry. I think it’s one of the things that make a man.

  When I was in Atlanta for UFC 145, I had the honor of meeting Lance Corporal William “Kyle” Carpenter and two other U.S. Marines who had come to watch the fights. Carpenter is a Medal of Honor nominee who threw himself on a grenade in Afghanistan to protect a fellow soldier. He’s a young man, barely into his twenties, who has lost an eye, many of his teeth, and the use of one of his arms as a result of this heroic action. His face is covered with scars engrained with gunpowder debris. (Since we’ve met, Carpenter has regained the use of his arm, thanks to dogged rehabilitation.) At the UFC, I spent a few minutes speaking to Carpenter and another wounded Marine. They were attending the UFC with a sergeant who was dressed to the nines in Marine dress blues.

  At four-thirty the next morning, when I returned to an empty hotel lobby after a night of after-parties, I got on the elevator and held the door for a young man who was walking with his head down. When the doors closed, the young man asked me if I was Mr. Buffer. I said I was. The young man, still looking at the floor, said, “Thank you for such an exciting night of announcing.”

  I thanked him. And when he looked up and I saw his one eye and that the right side of his face was marred with scars, I realized that he was the other young Marine I’d met that evening.

  I thanked him and we spoke for a little while. When we reached my floor, I said good-bye and uttered the phrase I’d learned from my father: “Semper Fi!”

  “It was an honor to meet you, sir!” the young man said.

  When I left the elevator, tears filled my eyes. I have met many soldiers in my life at UFC events held on military bases and elsewhere, but this experience affected me more than any other. I call our fighters warriors and heroes, and I believe that they are. But they would be the first to admit that they are no substitutes for the true warriors—young men and women who put their lives on the line every day for the nation they love.

  I give everything to my fans because look at what they have given me: the chance to feel connected, the chance to peek into their lives and understand their stories. You can’t buy that. You have to earn it.

  18

  RAMPAGE

  “My nose hurts,” Rampage Jackson told me. “My jaw hurts. My leg hurts. Every part of me hurts, and I won the fight.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You did.”

  The two of us were settling into our airplane seats for the flight back to the West Coast following one of the most controversial UFC fights in recent history. The fight between Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Lyoto Machida had been the main event of UFC 123 in Detroit. We hadn’t had a fight in that city since the old days, since UFC 9. But what had transpired tonight would keep tongues wagging in Detroit and elsewhere for years after.

  It was definitely a fight people wanted to see. Machida has this invincibility about him; he’s great at keeping a distance between himself and his opponent with his style of karate and MMA. And here was a classic puncher in Rampage, who is a monstrous warrior.

  The main event didn’t look like much to start. The men danced around the Octagon for what seemed like an eternity, with not much action. But in the second and third rounds, Jackson opened himself up just enough to get knocked to the mat. The Dragon pounced, and tried unsuccessfully to get Rampage into some kind of a submission hold. Rampage twisted his way out of everything Machida threw at him. Those on-the-mat moments were frustrating to watch, because you could see both men still had a lot of fight in them, a lot of energy. But nothing was gelling for either of them. When the fight ended, the image of Rampage struggling on the mat through most of those rounds had been seared into everyone’s mind—including Jackson’s. Before returning to his corner, Rampage lifted Machida’s arm as if to say, “Here’s your winner right here.”

  But the judges had a big surprise for this heavyweight monster and victor of more than thirty fights: They declared him the winner in their decision. The crowd of 16,000 seemed shocked. Hell, even Rampage seemed shocked. He gave one of those Scooby-Doo looks, eyes bulging with almost comical disbelief, when I announced the decision.

  Anytime a close fight ends in decision, you’re going to make half the fans happy and half the fans pissed. That’s a fact of life. People tend to hate decision fights, and I understand where that comes from. We’d all prefer that a fight end in a spectacular knockout or submission, a clear, inarguable sign that one fighter utterly dominated the other. But life isn’t that simple, and you wouldn’t want it to be. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but it seems to me that when we have to go to decision, it means those fighters were so evenly matched, and fought such a close fight, that neither one was able to get it over on the other. That, to me, is a great fight. It may not be a great spectacle, but it’s an awesome display of skill, of technical maneuvering, of fighting prowess.

  Now, if you’re going to hand decisions off to judges, you have to be willing to accept their calls. Nothing heats up the Internet faster than fans who think their favorite fighter’s been robbed. You could practically hear the fiber-optic cables sizzling all night. How could it be that Rampage spent so much of the fight on the ground, in the all-too-careful grip of Machida, and walked away the winner? It didn’t make sense.

  But now, away from the cameras, here I was, sitting on a plane with the man at the center of this amazing controversy, and he was confiding in me that he, too, was puzzled by the outcome. He hurt all over. Wasn’t winning supposed to feel a little … better?

  “Of course you won,” I told him. As the plane raced down the tarmac, I enumerated a couple of the things I’d seen that night that convinced me that the decision was a fair one. Later, I was even more convinced. In the days that followed, Rampage was telling the press that he now saw it that way, too.

  For my money, what I saw that night was pretty much confirmed in the replays I watched in my den. Again and again, I was impressed by the way Rampage controlled his space. For a lot of the standing moments of the fight, he kept Machida where he wanted him, at the fringes of the Octagon, on the outside looking in. It reminded me a little of walking a dog on a very tight leash so the animal only marches down the narrow patch of sidewalk where you, the master, want him to be. He can’t even think about going beyond those bounds, because he just doesn’t have enough play in the leash to permit him to go there.

  Later, when Machida got him on the mat, Rampage proved to be an elusive quarry. Machida may have been able to keep him down, but he couldn’t do anything to him. He couldn’t lock him down. Couldn’t shut him down. And he sure as hell didn’t get him to tap out. The fight never escalated into the danger zone for either man. Whatever Machida, the presumed dominator, pulled, Rampage was able to handily evade and slip out of.

  He won because he controlled the space. This is only one reason why Rampage is one of my all-time favorites. We go back a ways, to the King of the Cage 4 in June 2000, which he lost to Marvin Eastman. He went on to win all the other matches he fought that year—all six of them. That’s what fighters had to do back then to make a living. He was probably fighting for $1,000 a fight, $
5,000 if he was lucky during that year. He was legendary during those Japanese Pride competitions for his body slams. He fought Chuck Liddell twice and TKO’d him both times—no mean feat.

  As for myself, I came to appreciate him for his striking ability. I’ve got a lot of love for boxing ability in MMA fighters. Very few UFC fighters have the boxing skills needed to compete in the squared ring against a boxer. In the Octagon, often you don’t see fighters use the jab effectively. It’s a strike that is hugely valued by boxers, and by MMA fighters who capitalize on it to set up another punch or a takedown. UFC lightweight champion Frankie Edgar, for example, is a fighter who could compete in boxing, as he works the jab and moves like a boxer, making him one of the most complete fighters pound-for-pound in MMA history.

  Outside of the fights, Rampage and I bonded, and for a little while he was dating one of my old girlfriends, a beautiful young Asian woman. Because of this, he sometimes jokes that we’re “blood brothers.” If so, we didn’t have to cut our hands to prove it.

  BUFFERISM NO. 13

  “FUN TO PLAY WITH, NOT TO STAY WITH.”

  I use this to remind myself that there are always fun people to date who might ultimately be wrong for you. If you detect that the person’s selfish, say, maybe you need to give them a pass. But you can still have a couple of great dates and beautiful nights together. Just be honest with yourself and your partner about where it’s going.

  I’ve always admired his ability to crack jokes. That’s one reason I think he has clicked with fans. He has a quick wit and a great sense of humor. When I see him on Kimmel or Leno, I have to marvel at his easygoing manner, and the hilarious facial expressions like that moment in the Machida fight. When he appeared in the film remake of The A-Team, playing Mr. T’s old role of B. A. Baracus, I thought he was the best thing in the movie after Liam Neeson.