Let’s Get It On!
Page 25
From the early UFCs until now, I’d rolled and trained with them at events. My thirst for jiu-jitsu hadn’t subsided when I’d left Rorion Gracie’s gym in 1995. I’d continued to study with other respected Southern California black belts like Joe Moreira and Jean Jacques Machado and had worked my way up to brown belt status over the years. As we’d waited for shows, we’d all gravitated to the gyms or workout areas provided in the hotel, exchanged techniques, and goofed around. I’d rolled with anybody who’d wanted to, experiencing the moves I’d have to identify and anticipate while refereeing.
Because everyone at a UFC event shared a common passion, it would also be a normal occurrence for me and Elaine to have dinner with some of the fighters and their camps.
I understood those days were now over. It wasn’t as if rolling with fighters or eating dinner with them would sway me in the cage, but I understood it was up to me to protect the image of fair officiating in the sport. That didn’t mean I had to be stern or cut myself off from everyone, but my interactions had to be on a professional level only.
At the surprise fortieth birthday party my wife threw me—when Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz were still friends
With the newly minted Unified Rules, UFC 31 “Locked & Loaded” was the third in four events to take place at the Trump Taj Mahal and the first run solely by Zuffa. I was challenged as a referee in the main event, a heavyweight title bout between UFC champion Randy Couture and Brazilian striker Pedro Rizzo. I don’t like to throw the word “war” around, but there doesn’t seem to be a more appropriate one to describe this twenty-five-minute battle I saw firsthand. To this day, it’s one of the best fights I’ve ever officiated. It took a lot out of both fighters and presented multiple moments when I was on the verge of intervening.
In the first round, Couture took Rizzo down and stacked him on the fence. Couture unleashed punches and elbows into Rizzo’s guard, opening up the Brazilian’s face. Rizzo wasn’t hard to cut because he had a lot of scar tissue on his face. I didn’t stop it because Rizzo was fighting back; he was trying. I’d told the fighters that if they were at least attempting to move or slow their opponent, whether or not they were successful, I’d let it continue.
I could tell Rizzo knew where he was and his mind was still in it. He couldn’t get out from underneath Couture, but he was fending off a few of the punches and staying alive. Couture kept swinging away till he’d virtually punched himself out by the end of the round.
The next round was a complete turn of the tables, primarily because Couture had used up his gas tank in the first five minutes. Rizzo started connecting some big, damaging leg kicks, which made me wonder how Couture would walk afterward.
After the second round, I went to Couture’s corner and asked if he wanted to continue. I was concerned.
He and his corner said, “We’re good,” a few times, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d gotten his ass handed to him for an entire round. I was trying to give him a way out, but he didn’t take it. Certain fighters can pull it out when they have to, and Couture was that guy in this and a majority of his fights.
In the third round, Couture took Rizzo down again and managed to control positioning for a few crucial moments to get some strength back. It really was the third round that determined the outcome of that fight because Couture was able to get back into the game.
For rounds four and five, they traded uppercuts and hooks, shot and avoided takedowns, and pretty much made each other’s life miserable.
I knew the fight was close, but I thought the judges would give it to Rizzo because of the greater damage he’d inflicted over the course of the fight. However, when the scores were read, Couture was given the nod. I was fine with that and could see how the judges could have gone either way.
I think Couture might have been surprised by it, though. When I raised his hand, he looked confused.
As a small footnote, UFC 31 also marked the debut of a twenty-three-year-old Hawaiian named B. J. Penn on the undercard. Penn took down opponent Joey Gilbert and ground-and-pounded him into submission from back mount as if it were nothing. When the referee stepped in, Penn looked up with the most innocent of expressions. This was Penn’s first professional fight, but you could tell his skill far exceeded that of many of the veterans on the card. Talk about a prodigy.
By UFC 32, I felt optimistic. Some encouraging changes were already happening with both Zuffa and the UFC. Fertitta had opened offices in Las Vegas and had a staff coordinating upcoming UFC events and addressing questions and concerns. Medicals and necessary paperwork were being collected and handled well ahead of the event, leaving less chance for last-minute issues.
Schedules, flights, and hotel rooms were organized and disseminated promptly. Zuffa’s in-house publicity department distributed press releases with updates on each upcoming event and reached out to local and national newspapers and other media outlets to get press covering the shows. The UFC asked me to speak with too many reporters to count, but I never minded. It was an important educational process, and we all had to do our part.
Suddenly the UFC wasn’t a fly-by-night operation anymore. It was obvious that the little details wouldn’t fall through the cracks, but if they did someone would be there to pick them up.
However, not all of Zuffa’s initial changes were successful. For instance, Zuffa dropped considerable dough for a seven-figure advertising campaign featuring fighters like Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Pedro Rizzo, Carlos Newton, and Jens Pulver paired with models in a handful of prominent men’s magazines, including Maxim and FHM. Carmen Electra, who also starred in the ad campaign, was hired as the spokeswoman for the UFC. At a New York City press conference, when asked about her MMA experience, Electra told reporters she’d done Tae Bo. She seemed like a waste of money to me, but I thought maybe Fertitta had more experience in this than I did.
The campaign didn’t even make a dent in boosting public awareness of the UFC or the sport. That was clear from the turnout at the next event.
UFC 32 “Showdown in the Meadowlands,” held at the Continental Airlines Arena, now the IZOD Center, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was underwhelming for a number of reasons. While the event marked the UFC’s return from parking lot tents and run-down community halls to a state-of-the-art venue, Zuffa shot too high, and it was virtually impossible to fill the 20,000-seat arena.
Bernie Dillon, the original chief operating officer for Zuffa, handled the arena layout and priced the tickets, which ran from $25 for the nosebleeds to $300 for cageside seats. It didn’t seem super expensive, but the event sold only a few thousand tickets. Ticket pricing became an immediate issue between Dana White and Dillon, who left Zuffa after a few shows.
The real issue, in my opinion, was the weak main event, which paired Tito Ortiz against Australian grappler Elvis Sinosic. At UFC 30, Sinosic had pulled off a major upset in submitting Jeremy Horn, but he had little fighting experience in the United States and certainly wasn’t ready for headlining status.
The much larger and stronger Ortiz took Sinosic down and hammered him with fists and elbows. Sinosic’s forehead split open almost instantaneously, and the flaps of skin hung from his face. I try to let championship bouts play out as long as possible because there’s so much at stake, but Ortiz destroyed Sinosic to the point that I had to jump in three and a half minutes into the first round.
As Zuffa tried to find its promotional legs, progress was being made in Nevada. From his time as a commissioner, Fertitta had relationships with all of the NSAC’s players, and mixed martial arts was rescheduled to go to the commission for a vote.
I was flown to Reno to see Glenn Carano, the former football player who’d thought MMA was too violent for his tastes. I met him at the casino he owned there and wasn’t shocked to learn he still wasn’t thrilled with the sport.
After a while, when he was fed up with talking about it, he said, “John, I’m never going to like this sport, and it’s not what I consider a good athletic event, but
I am friends with Lorenzo Fertitta. He believes in it, and I will vote for it.”
On July 23, 2001, the Nevada State Athletic Commission voted unanimously to regulate mixed martial arts. They also adopted a set of rules nearly identical to the Unified Rules drafted in New Jersey a few months before.
It was obvious Fertitta had a lot of pull in town. Zuffa immediately secured a September 28 date for UFC 33 at the 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center on the Strip. As if that weren’t enough, Zuffa also negotiated the return of the UFC’s pay-per-views to iN DEMAND and all of the other leading cable providers that had jumped ship in 1997.
In six months, Zuffa had accomplished a number of the goals SEG had been chipping away at for the last few years. Things were changing fast, and I wasn’t immune. MMA was now regulated by two key state bodies. As a referee, I would now report to the commissions, not the promotion, and the days of my officiating events from top to bottom were over.
MMA referees made anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars per event, but I’d been on a $75,000 annual salary with SEG for all the additional work I’d done in drafting its original rules and lobbying and defending the sport in the courtrooms.
Since I’d now be hired to referee through each state commission, Fertitta told me he couldn’t put me on Zuffa’s payroll. Zuffa planned to hold six events a year initially, so it would have been a loss of nearly $70,000 a year for me. It wouldn’t be financially feasible for me to get the time off from the police academy, so I’d have to consider giving up refereeing. It was nobody’s fault. I’d been hired at a time when regulatory bodies had no interest in the sport, but now the sport was evolving.
I was touched and grateful when Zuffa figured out a way to keep me around. Since they felt I’d become fairly synonymous with the UFC, they offered me a yearly licensing contract for my name and likeness, as well as the right to use my catchphrase “Let’s Get It On,” which I’d trademarked through boxing referee Mills Lane in the late 1990s. I’m told Marc Ratner, the NSAC’s executive director, was aware of the arrangement, though he never asked me about it. It was also understood that I’d assist the UFC in educating additional state commissions on the sport.
I was licensed as a referee in Nevada for UFC 33. When it came to combat sports, Las Vegas was considered the preeminent destination. As a young boy by my dad’s side, I’d watched monumental boxing events broadcasted live from Las Vegas. Now I would be a part of it. To say it was a huge moment and victory for me would be an understatement.
UFC 33 “Victory in Vegas” was held on September 28, 2001, at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. Refereeing at the event should have been more thrilling, but two weeks earlier two commercial airliners had flown into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. As the nation mourned, we were uncertain if the show would happen at all. Many people were recommending that Zuffa reschedule, but Zuffa decided to go ahead as planned.
The other shoe dropped days later when Vitor Belfort, who was challenging Tito Ortiz for the light heavyweight title in the main event, injured his arm in a freak accident. While training in Brazil, Belfort was pushed into a window next to the ring, sustaining a deep laceration that required surgical repair. Zuffa now had to find a new opponent to take on Ortiz. With little training time, Belarusian fighter Vladimir Matyushenko agreed to step into Belfort’s headlining shoes.
It was Zuffa’s third event since taking over the UFC, and the promotion spared no expense. They bought billboard ads and put the fighters and officials up in the host hotel, which was one of the nicer ones on the Strip. Just as they were at the big boxing events, the weigh-ins were opened to the public and press. Everything within Zuffa’s control was managed with style.
Still, the variables of the night that couldn’t be accounted for were the fights themselves. In an effort to stack the event, three five-round championship bouts were added to the card, and all three fights went their full twenty-five-minute duration as the athletes cautiously fought to not lose. This caused the pay-per-view to run over its time limit, and the broadcast cut out during the main event between Ortiz and Matyushenko.
Despite their best efforts, Zuffa had repeated the mistake SEG had made at UFC 4 in 1994. Many customers asked for refunds, and the event was considered a financial disaster. The fights weren’t considered particularly interesting either. Of the eight bouts offered, six went to anticlimactic decisions.
Zuffa wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet, though.
A few days before UFC 34, the promotion and the NSAC jointly announced another rule change at a press conference in Las Vegas. I was flown out early during fight week to speak at the podium, where I told the press that if a bout stalemated, referees would now be allowed to restart a fight from standing position. This new rule would speed up the action and prevent a fighter from stalling, a major issue at UFC 33.
UFC 34
“High Voltage”
November 2, 2001
MGM Grand Garden Arena
Las Vegas, Nevada
Bouts I Reffed:
Matt Lindland vs. Phil Baroni
Josh Barnett vs. Bobby Hoffman
Matt Hughes vs. Carlos Newton
Randy Couture vs. Pedro Rizzo
The welterweight title bout fight between Newton and Hughes went down as a classic with a controversial ending. Newton had latched on a triangle choke in the first round, and Hughes countered by lifting the champion, resting him high on the cage, then slamming him down in a last-ditch effort as the choke drained Hughes of his senses. The slam knocked Newton unconscious, and he didn’t come to for a good forty-five seconds. As I pushed a dazed Hughes off Newton, I noticed he was blinking to clear his vision, something I’ve done myself after a choke. I have both choked and been choked out too many times to count, and I’ve never seen anyone blink while out. Hughes was close, but only one fighter went out that night. Hughes was deemed the winner and the new welterweight champion.
To be honest, it was something I and the other referees had already been doing since UFC 15, but now it was a rule. If a fighter was in his opponent’s guard throwing little punches now and then, it wouldn’t be enough to keep him in that position. I got the drift that Zuffa wanted stand-ups to happen more because they were looking for more action in their fights.
Back at the police academy, my involvement with the UFC was getting noticed. I had to start my course by allowing the class to get their questions about the UFC out of their systems. I understood people were curious, and there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Still, I wanted the cadets to concentrate on the more important materials at hand, like learning how to handle violent suspects in life-or-death situations, and they couldn’t do that until they got the UFC off their brains.
When I’d started refereeing for the UFC, the LAPD hadn’t said boo about it, other than asking me to get the appropriate work permits. My superiors all knew what I was doing with the UFC. Even the chief at the time, Bernard Parks, had stopped me once to talk about it. He wanted to attend a UFC, and I said I’d be happy to buy him some tickets.
So after I’d gone unnoticed for years, my LAPD superiors began to recognize me from my UFC appearances, which wasn’t necessarily good for me. One thing you learn with the LAPD is that it’s all about egos, and when someone thinks you have something over them, jealousy will rear its ugly head. People can be vindictive, and if they have power to use against you, sometimes they will. And if they don’t have it, they might go to someone who does, which is what happened to me.
At that time, my dad was working for Safariland, which produced body armor and police duty gear. The company had asked if he could get me to model a new vest in their ads because of my visibility as a UFC referee. The company also wanted to use the slogan “Are you ready?”
I said, “Is it a favor for you, Dad, or for them?”
“For me.”
“Then, of course, I’ll do it.”
I didn’t need to apply for a work permit. I was
n’t getting paid to pose in the ad. Safariland asked me to wear my badge to the shoot, but I told them I couldn’t. LAPD officers were strictly forbidden to wear their badges on film, TV, or in any type of advertising, so I told them I’d get a fake one to wear.
During the shoot, I even requested that I hold a glock, which the LAPD didn’t use at the time. I didn’t want the department associated in any way or for them to think I might be trying to make money off them.
When I put on the vest, I asked the photographer to get the prop badge from my bag for me. As he mounted it to my bulky gear, I couldn’t really see it.
When the ad came out a short time later in a police magazine, someone in the department complained that I shouldn’t be allowed to pose in advertisements. When I was confronted about it, a superior asked why I hadn’t filled out a work permit. I explained that I hadn’t gotten paid for it, but a complaint was filed against me, and an investigation was opened to unearth my evil modeling career.
The next thing I was asked was if I’d worn my badge during the shoot. You couldn’t even see the badge in the ad because it was half cut off by the gear. I told them I hadn’t worn my own badge anyway but a prop one.
“It looks a lot like an LAPD badge,” they said.
I insisted I’d gotten a fake one from a colleague.
I’ll be damned if they didn’t blow that picture up 800 times until they could read the last number on that badge. Sure enough, it matched the one on my own badge.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said when they handed me the picture.
I was accused of lying about the whole thing, and lying could’ve cost me my job.
My accusers treated me like one of their suspects, going after any shred of evidence they could find to prove my guilt. I was “big time” in their eyes, after all, and some of my superiors couldn’t have that.