Flashback: The Old Politics of MMA

[LWPD]

This week there has been mainstream coverage of the UFC in both Sports Illustrated and the NY Times. Here's a reminder of how things were back in the days before money took MMA mainstream. Never forget!

NY Times Dec 10, 1995 letter from John McCain

To the Sports Editor:

I am writing in response to Ira Berkow's column ("Better Than a Stick in the Eye," The Times, Nov. 14) on the extreme fighting event initially scheduled to occur in New York on Nov. 18.

I have not had the displeasure of viewing extreme fighting, but I have seen segments of its reprehensible predecessor, the "Ultimate Fighting Championship." These repugnant events should be banned because they pose unacceptable risks of severe injury to the participants, and for their glorification of cruelty.

Contrary to Berkow's comments, these events definitely have a harmful impact on "innocent bystanders" when young children are welcomed to cheer on the bloodshed and violence. Sanctioning such competitions merely because some people willingly participate in them is an abrogation of even the lowest standards of public decency.

Berkow is correct in saying education and health care are more urgent priorities for our society. However, our society is unnecessarily degraded when public officials turn a blind eye to dangerous blood sports, and others defend them as legitimate entertainment.

JOHN McCAIN Washington

The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.
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NY Times January 16, 1997

Giuliani to Try to Prevent 'Extreme Fighting' Match

By DAN BARRY Published: January 16, 1997

Just three months after New York became the first state in the nation to sanction an attraction known as extreme fighting, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other New York City leaders are banding together to try to prevent the no-holds-barred matches from taking place within the city.

Mr. Giuliani and the City Council Speaker, Peter F. Vallone, said they had agreed in a telephone discussion yesterday to explore ways to block a match scheduled to be staged in Manhattan on March 28. But they also acknowledged that the city may be powerless to counter a law, which Gov. George E. Pataki signed reluctantly in October, that places so-called extreme or ultimate fighting under the regulatory auspices of the State Athletic Commission.

''I think extreme fighting is disgusting, it's horrible,'' Mr. Giuliani said. ''I happen to be a boxing fan, have been all my life. And I know there are issues regarding boxing, and they are serious ones. But this is way beyond boxing. This is people brutalizing each other.''

Meanwhile, in Albany, the opposite argument was being presented by Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Bruno, a Republican, said that he had been instrumental in drafting and overseeing a bill to regulate the competitions. He said he had studied statistics indicating that extreme fighting was less dangerous than boxing, but he did not reveal the source of those statistics.

''We ought to regulate it in the same way that we regulate boxing,'' Mr. Bruno said. ''If someone can prove me wrong, then we will revisit the issue.''

The differing views reflect the debate over extreme fighting, as well as the puzzlement over how it became regulated in New York when other states, including Illinois and Missouri, have banned it as too violent. In a typical match, two fighters use tactics derived from various disciplines -- boxing, martial arts and even street brawling -- against each other. Although bloodshed is common, promoters say most matches end when the loser surrenders by tapping three times on the mat.

In late 1995, a company called Battlecade Inc. announced plans to hold an extreme fighting match at the Park Slope Armory in Brooklyn. But its promoter, Donald Zuckerman, met with immediate resistance from city officials, including Mayor Giuliani and State Senator Roy M. Goodman of Manhattan. Then Governor Pataki stepped in by revoking the permit for the state-owned armory, forcing Mr. Zuckerman to stage the pay-per-view event in Wilmington, N.C.

Senator Goodman and Governor Pataki both proposed legislation to ban the sport. At the same time, SEG Sports Corporation, which produces extreme fighting tournaments, hired a prominent Albany lobbyist, James D. Featherstonhaugh, to argue its case before legislators and state officials. According to the State Commission on Lobbying, Mr. Featherstonhaugh ranked third on its 1996 list of lobbyists who had earned the most money through August.

In a December 1995 letter made available by the State Commission on Lobbying, Mr. Featherstonhaugh laid out his proposed approach to his client, Robert Meyrowitz, the president of SEG Sports. Mr. Featherstonhaugh said his mission was to ''derail'' a plan to have ultimate fighting banned by meeting with legislators and by ''submitting proactive legislation'' that would lead to state regulation.

Mr. Featherstonhaugh said yesterday that his approach represented ''a case study for how to lobby on a piece of legislation.'' He said he first had to overcome the prejudices that many legislators had about the sport. He then encouraged prominent legislators to watch videotapes of entire matches.

''We succeeded in getting enough people to watch it,'' Mr. Featherstonhaugh said. ''Ultimately, we were able to get by what was really a great deal of misinformation.''

In exchange for his work, state records show, Mr. Featherstonhaugh received $48,000 plus expenses.

Mr. Bruno denied that lobbying had played a role in his decision to support extreme fighting. ''I've had a 10-minute conversation totally on it,'' he said.

He said his research discovered that while boxers have been killed in the ring, no one has died in ultimate fighting. ''You might say it is more humane,'' he said, ''even though the TV ads show blood, guts, gore all over the place. That's promotions.''

The new law opened New York to promoters of the sport. Next month, SEG Sports is staging an ultimate fighting match at the Niagara Falls Civic Center. Then Mr. Zuckerman, of Battlecade, is to return to New York City, with his plan to hold a tournament in Manhattan in March.

Mr. Zuckerman declined to disclose the location, saying that a contract had not been signed. ''Until the contract is executed, I'm not going to make an announcement,'' he said. ''I don't want politicians pressuring the venue. And I believe they will.''

His is an astute observation, said Mr. Vallone, the City Council Speaker. ''As soon as they disclose the location, you can be sure we will use all our resources to be present.''

[DUCE]

Controversy and reform

The UFC became a hit on pay-per-view and home video almost immediately due to its originality, realism, and wide press coverage, although not all of it favorable. The nature of the burgeoning sport quickly drew the attention of the authorities and UFC events were banned in a number of American states. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), was sent a tape of the first UFC events and immediately found it abhorrent. McCain himself led a campaign to ban Ultimate Fighting, calling it "human cockfighting", and sending letters to the governors of all fifty U.S. states to ban the event.[8] As a result, the UFC was dropped from the major cable pay-per-view distributor Viewer's Choice, and individual cable carriers such as TCI Cable. Thirty-six states enacted laws that banned "no-holds-barred" fighting, including New York, which enacted the ban on the eve of UFC 8, forcing a last-minute relocation of the event.[10]. The UFC continued to air on DirecTV PPV, though its audience was minuscule compared to the larger cable pay-per-view platforms of the era.

In response to the criticism, the UFC increased its cooperation with state athletic commissions and redesigned its rules to remove the less palatable elements of fights while retaining the core elements of striking and grappling. Weight classes were introduced at UFC 12; gloves became mandatory and kicks to a downed opponent, hair pulling, and groin strikes were banned at UFC 14. UFC 15 saw more limitations on permissible striking areas: strikes to the back of the neck and head, and small joint manipulations were banned. With five-minute rounds introduced at UFC 21, the UFC gradually re-branded itself as a sport rather than a spectacle.

As the UFC continued to work with state athletic commissions, events were held in smaller U.S. markets, including Iowa, Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming and Alabama. SEG could not secure home video releases for UFC 23 through UFC 29 in a period known by some fans as the "Dark Ages" of the UFC. With other mixed martial arts promotions working towards U.S. sanctioning, the International Fighting Championships secured the first U.S. sanctioned mixed martial arts event, which occurred in New Jersey on September 30, 2000. Just two months later, the UFC held its first sanctioned event, UFC 28, under the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board's "Unified Rules".

Mainstream emergence

After being featured in a reality television series, American Casino, and seeing how well the series worked as a promotion vehicle, the Fertitta brothers decided that the UFC should have their own reality series. Their idea, The Ultimate Fighter – a reality television show not unlike Survivor, but featuring up-and-coming MMA fighters in competition, with fighters eliminated from competition via exhibition mixed martial arts matches – was pitched to several networks, each one rejecting the idea outright. It was not until they approached Spike TV, with an offer to pay for the $10 million production costs themselves, did they find an outlet.[15] In January 2005, Spike TV launched the series in the timeslot following WWE Raw, and the show became an instant success, becoming one of Spike TV's highest rated shows, after WWE Raw which was the highest rated show on Spike TV and on Cable TV overall. A second season of The Ultimate Fighter launched in August 2005, and two more seasons appeared in 2006. Spike TV and the UFC announced plans for additional seasons airing in 2007 and 2008.[16]
Comedian Joe Rogan broadcasting as color commentator at UFC Fight Night 7
Comedian Joe Rogan broadcasting as color commentator at UFC Fight Night 7

Following the success of The Ultimate Fighter, Spike TV also picked up UFC Unleashed, an hour-long weekly show featuring selected fights from previous fight cards. Spike TV also signed on to broadcast live UFC Fight Night, a series of fight events debuting in August 2005; Countdown specials to promote upcoming UFC pay-per-view cards, and several other series and specials featuring and promoting the UFC and its fighters.

With the increased visibility, UFC's pay-per-view buy numbers exploded. UFC 52, the first event after the completion of the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, drew a pay-per-view audience of 280,000, nearly double their previous benchmark of 150,000 set at UFC 40. Following the second season of The Ultimate Fighter, the UFC's much-hyped rubber match between Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell drew an estimated 410,000 pay-per-view buys at UFC 57. For the rest of 2006, pay-per-view buy rates continued to skyrocket with 620,000 buys for UFC 60, 775,000 buys for UFC 61 which featured the second fight between Ken Shamrock and Tito Ortiz, the coaches of The Ultimate Fighter 3. [1] UFC 66, featuring Tito Ortiz facing Chuck Liddell in their highly anticipated rubber match, garnered 1,050,000 buy rates, the current PPV buy rate record for the UFC and MMA in general.[2] The UFC broke the pay-per-view industry's all-time records for a single year of business, generating over $222,766,000 in revenue during 2006, surpassing WWE and boxing. The UFC grossed more revenue in 2006 on PPV than any promotion in history. [3]

In March 2006, the UFC announced the hiring of Marc Ratner, former Executive Director of the Nevada Athletic Commission, as Vice President. Ratner, once an ally of Senator McCain's campaign against mixed martial arts, was credited as one of the people responsible for the emergence of sanctioned mixed martial arts in the United States. Ratner is expected to help raise the UFC's profile in the media and to help legalize mixed martial arts in jurisdictions inside and outside the United States that do not sanction mixed martial arts bouts.

As of 2007, Ultimate Fighting Championship programming is now shown in 36 countries worldwide.[17] The UFC currently plans on expanding internationally, running shows regularly in Canada and the United Kingdom, with an office established in the UK aimed to expand the European UFC audience.[18]

On March 27, 2007 The UFC and PRIDE Fighting Championships (Pride) (UFC's main competitor) announced an agreement where the majority owners of the UFC, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, would purchase the PRIDE organization.[19][20] While both organizations will be otherwise separately run, the two organizations will be aligned together and plan to co-promote supercards featuring champions and top contenders from both organizations.

(Without NSAC there would be no mainstreaming of UFC so in a way McCain helped MMA by giving it opposition. He has always stood up for human rights.)

[LWPD]

I've always found it to be intriguing that Senator John McCain was largely responsible for UFC losing PPV visibility back in the day. After all his father in law Jim Hensley was the owner of Anheuser-Busch....which 'just happens' to be boxing's largest corporate sponsor. The King of Beers' was also the employer of Senator McCain's wife...who worked 'wonder of wonders' as a 'lobbyist'. Not to mention the entity owned by his father in law and employing his wife has been a very generous supporter of Senator McCain's political career. Such is life...

LWPD (there were very clear winners when politicians were successful in forcing UFC off of Viewers Choice PPV and into the dark ages...and 'as luck would have it' nobody won bigger than McCain's allies and benefactors)

[LWPD]

Flashback: Senator McCain and The Dity Politics Against MMA

Courtesy of Phoniex New Times

John McCain Breaks Up a Fight

The senator says extreme fighting should be banned. You got a problem with that? Eddie Goldman does.

By Amy Silverman

Published: February 12, 1998

Senator John McCain likes to play on the national stage; that's why
many of his constituents were startled January 30 to find him taking off after a local entertainment event. An upcoming match in a blood sport called cage fighting, he declared in a letter to his pal Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, was "repugnant." Romley wasted no time making sure the owner of the Celebrity Theatre--where the event was to take place--comprehended the senator's sentiments. The next week cage fighting was front-page news here, three days out of four. Days before the event, the state attorney general granted the Arizona Boxing Commission authority to determine whether the event should go on, but the commission chose not to act. It didn't matter. Celebrity Theatre owner Bill Bachand canceled the sold-out show hours before the bell, explaining to the Arizona Republic, "I'm not going to take on the U.S. Senate."

That left 2,600 ticketholders (who will get their money back) and 24 would-be fighters in the grip of profound disappointment, McCain constituents all. One of the fighters, Lyman Markunas, 29, a brown-eyed chef at Wild Oats grocery, looks more like your yoga instructor than a guy who could beat the shit out of you. His cage nickname is "Doomsday," and he was scheduled as an alternate in last month's cage fight, a copycat of the popular Ultimate Fighting Championships shown in millions of homes via pay-per-view. UFC is a trademarked name, but it's come to describe the entire fighting style, also known as "shoot-fighting," "submission fighting" and "extreme fighting." In Portuguese, it's called "vale tudo," which means "anything goes."

For simplicity's sake here, let's call it "extreme fighting." All of the versions incorporate judo, jujitsu, tae kwon do, karate, kickboxing, boxing and wrestling into a style that's an approximation of street fighting by trained martial artists in a ring--or a cage, as the plastic-coated, chain-linked, barbed-wire-decorated, metal contraption Markunas was to fight in is called.

"I am kind of disgusted, because of all the training I do," says Markunas, who studies boxing and judo. He wants a chance to put it to the test. He and his trainer Walt Sweet, coach of the Scottsdale Judo and Jujitsu Club, were taken by surprise. Until last month, they, like most other Arizonans, didn't know that John McCain was opposed to extreme fighting.

Eddie Goldman wasn't surprised at all.

Go online to the address www.tapout.com, and you'll find out who Eddie Goldman is; you'll also find Goldman's informal history of Senator John McCain's crusade against extreme fighting. Goldman, a sports journalist and extreme-fighting evangelist, has been tracking the senator's successful attempts to snuff out this sport for two years. Goldman sounds like Rocky Balboa and writes much better than he sounds. He recently became editor of a small extreme-fighting publication; now he has a pulpit.

The guy is hardly making ends meet. He has no financial interest in the bouts. Nor is he even proficient in the sport. But, as they say in more delicate forums, you've got to follow your bliss, and Goldman's bliss is extreme fighting. He views himself more as an activist than a journalist, which is reflected in his magazine and Web site.

A quick news database search confirms that for years now, John McCain has railed against extreme fighting, regularly calling for the sport's abolition with appreciable success. McCain labels the sport human cockfighting, and he's taken out after it in his trademark bullheaded fashion. At McCain's urging, many states have banned it.

Extreme fighting lacks some of the gentility of, say, professional wrestling. But why does McCain care so much about a sport that, arguably, isn't much bloodier than hockey or football or McCain's personal sport of choice, boxing?

What Eddie Goldman knows about John McCain fits onto about two typewritten sheets of paper. But that's enough to impel him to go after McCain the way McCain has gone after extreme fighting. Goldman is angry, for sure, that his favorite sport is under siege, but he's angrier still because he believes McCain isn't acting in good faith.

In Goldman's eyes, extreme fighting is being harassed. And he says the story behind the harassment is rooted in McCain's self-interest. It's about a conspiracy involving Senator McCain, professional boxing and Anheuser-Busch, the brewing company.

Here's how Goldman's theory works: McCain opposes extreme fighting because it threatens the boxing industry's hold on the pay-per-view TV audience; boxing's largest corporate sponsor is Anheuser-Busch, whose second largest wholesaler in the country is owned by Jim Hensley, the father-in-law of Senator John McCain. Theoretically, says Goldman, what's good for boxing is good for McCain.

Goldman's railings against McCain look convincing on his Web site, which gets about 6,000 hits a day. But scores of interviews with extreme-fighting promoters, fighters and fans, pay-per-view executives, analysts and observers reveal that Goldman, as most conspiracy theorists, stands alone in his contentions. While many interviewed admitted they thought McCain's interest was illogical, few had stopped to think about it much.

But Goldman's theory meshes with much that Arizonans already know about their senator, about his style and about his finances. And that invites closer inspection.

The style is familiar. Digress, for a moment, and consider McCain's move for campaign-finance reform. The senator takes a reverent position on the side of the gods--skipping the details that his legislation has a rat's chance of passing, and that it would do very little to change the system. By ignoring the facts, he gets lots of media coverage, and actually hosts record-setting campaign fund raisers at which he preaches about campaign-finance reform. What's good for John McCain's coffers is good for John McCain.

Similarly, no one could take issue with a man who's against the notion of people beating each other to a pulp for fun and profit. Again, with this issue, McCain doesn't dally with the details. Never mind that in the years since McCain first struck his anti-extreme-fighting pose, the sport's organizers have scrambled to clean it up. McCain will continue to posture, and continue to make headlines.

Could John McCain be a hypocritical, grandstanding bully? His continuing battle against extreme fighting--which his constituents noticed for the first time only last month--seems to have been proving that theory for years. Again and again, in interviews, McCain has played loose with the facts. He has vastly exaggerated the extent of the violence associated with extreme fighting, and has refused to acknowledge
rule changes and safety precautions that make extreme fighting far less dangerous than it was when he first logged his complaints.

Peculiarly, McCain is no wimp when it comes to other violent sports. He was a boxer in the Navy; he's a follower of professional boxing and, in fact, no stranger to pugilistic violence. McCain was ringside at the 1995 boxing death of Jimmy Garcia; he has seen the ultimate brutality of boxing and, yet, remains a fan. He has sponsored minor legislation to promote boxing safety, requiring such measures as the presence of a physician and other conditions that are already common practice in extreme-fighting bouts.

McCain's position doesn't make sense, says Goldman, who had been
trying to figure out the senator's motivations for years. Then he 'net-surfed upon a snippet from a November 1995 Mother Jones article that mentions John McCain's ties--via campaign contributions and his in-laws' business--to Anheuser-Busch, the single biggest corporate sponsor of professional boxing. What if McCain was trying to quash UFC, Goldman wondered, for fear it might one day threaten boxing's market share and thus hurt Anheuser-Busch's interests?

"We've been starting to put the pieces together in the last couple of years," Goldman says, "because the question is: If nobody's been killed in this sport, nobody's been seriously injured, why does McCain get so obsessive about this? Why is it so important to him, as a U.S. senator, to do this kind of stuff?"

Goldman has tried to get answers to his questions. McCain's office has refused Goldman's requests for an interview. Similarly, the senator's press office did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

Athletes have been mixing different martial arts in Brazil and Japan
for decades, but it wasn't until Robert Meyrowitz created UFC in 1993 that extreme fighting became known in the U.S. UFC is a trademarked name, as is the Octagon, an eight-sided steel arena--designed (a la Conan the Barbarian) by UFC's "creative director" filmmaker John Milius--where the matches take place.Meyrowitz, whose background is in radio syndication--he created the King Biscuit Flower Hour--owns a company called Semaphore Entertainment Group. It produces programs that are sold to pay-per-view providers; Meyrowitz has the distinction of having brought Ozzy Osbourne into America's living room. UFC was an instant pay-per-view success. That was no small feat. Meyrowitz and others had been trying for years to create a pay-per-view hit. Music
concerts weren't clicking in a market dominated by boxing and wrestling; extreme fighting was a natural, albeit brutal, choice.

The only real rule, at first, was no eye gouging. In the first UFC matches--now available on tape at your local video store--it's not unusual to see a contender kick out his opponent's teeth, or beat continuously on his head, closed-fisted. The blood flowed, and so did the money. In 1994, according to Paul Kagan Associates, a media research firm, "combat sports"--of which UFC takes the lion's share--grossed $11 million. In 1995, the figure rose to $25 million; combat sports represented almost 10 percent of the entire pay-per-view event market.

On top of that, UFC promoters pushed the no-holds-barred imagery, and snagged themselves millions of dollars in free press. From Esquire to People to Mad, everyone was writing about UFC. The creators knew they'd made it into the public's consciousness when the popular sitcom Friends set up character Monica with a boyfriend who longed to be a UFC participant.

In the real world, people like Lyman Markunas were tuning in and joining up, too. A friend lent Markunas a UFC tape in 1994. "I watched it, I was like, I was made for this sport," Markunas says. Markunas began to train locally.

Around the same time, someone lent John McCain a tape, too. In 1996, McCain and his colleague Colorado Republican Senator Ben Nighthorse-Campbell wrote to the governors of all 50 states, calling UFC "a brutal and repugnant blood sport . . . that should not be allowed to take place anywhere in the U.S." State and local politicians joined the senators' crusade.

[LWPD]

Continued

Eventually, by McCain's own estimate, the boxing regulators of 40 states banned extreme fighting. By 1996, profits had plummeted, says Paul Kagan Associates analyst Bill Metti. And UFC sustained a TKO in 1997, when two of the biggest cable distributors--TCI and Time Warner--dropped it.

Players in the cable industry are hesitant to characterize McCain's influence in their arena. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he has tremendous power--theoretically, at least. ("I don't fart without calling McCain," one insider reportedly confided to another.) Tom Ulmstead, who covers the pay-per-view industry for Multichannel
News, was surprised to see events pulled because they were too gory.

"It was strange. Everything goes on pay-per-view," he says. But without a policy reversal from the states that have banned UFC, cable operators won't carry the events, Ulmstead says. He estimates that UFC loses $1 million in possible revenue every time an event airs.

To some extent, UFC was a victim of its own hype. The original bouts were marketed with catch phrases like "No-Holds-Barred" and "There Are No Rules" and "The Most Controversial Event of the Decade!" Such excesses provided McCain with easy targets. In the wake of McCain's attacks, UFC's organizers acknowledged the criticism by dimming the hype and establishing a set of rules. Bouts are now timed, and weight classes have been established. Light gloves are now required.

There are no groin strikes, no head butting, no blows to the back of the head, no biting, no joint manipulations (meaning, you can't try to break your opponent's fingers). From the start, UFC has required HIV testing and has always had referees and medical personnel standing by. But the senator persists. And the prohibitions continue. Semaphore has resorted to scouting international sites for its UFC bouts.

Multichannel News reporter Ulmstead, who says he hasn't spoken to
McCain's office since the early days of the senator's opposition, says he assumes McCain has changed his stance on UFC.

"Does he realize that there are rules now? Because I think if he takes a closer look at it, I think he'll realize that there are rules now and it may not be as violent as he initially perceived it to be."

David Isaacs, Semaphore's chief operating officer, is fully aware that McCain hasn't changed his mind. Isaacs doesn't get it."Look," he says, "we've got Olympic-quality athletes participating and have a show that is distributed via pay-per-view, so that people only receive the show when they specifically request it. Given those two facts, I really don't understand Senator McCain's interest in banning what has proven to be a relatively safe sport."

Like his student, Lyman Markunas, Scottsdale's Walt Sweet, by appearance, wouldn't seem to be an extreme fighter. He's pink-cheeked and puffy, has a Santa twinkle in his eye. His firm handshake, in fact, comes as a surprise--along with his black belts in judo and jujitsu. He earnestly refers to his sport of choice as "submission fighting."

Sweet is obviously trying to undo the sport's bloody image. He carries with him a dog-eared list of rules for submission fighting--the rules that had been adopted for the Celebrity Theatre's January 30 event, which Sweet would have refereed. The three sheets are crisscrossed with yellow highlighter, and in the upper corner of one, Sweet has neatly written his crisp mantra, which sounds like an explication of Nike's "Just Do It" slogan:

Everybody say:
Pain is good.
Injuries are bad.

The idea, in Sweet's brand of extreme fighting, is to force your opponent to submit without injuring him. To that end, Sweet's rules are far more comprehensive than those used in even the kinder, gentler version of UFC. For example, closed-hand strikes to the head, face, neck, groin, spine and kidneys are prohibited.

No head butts.
No strikes using elbows or knees.
No biting, scratching, spitting, hair pulling or eye gouging.
No kicks, punches, finger-thrust strikes, hand edge chops, backhand
punches or forearm strikes to the head, chin, neck, groin, spine or
kidneys.
No hyperflexion of the neck/spine in a "rapid, cranking" movement.
Any of the above results in an automatic forfeiture.
Cups and mouthpieces are mandatory, as are gloves--of the lightly
padded, open-fingered "grappling" variety.In other words, your great aunt Betty could like this sport. None of this is very sexy, which is why promoters come in and drape barbed wire around the ring and run around shouting, "Anything goes!"

"We made it all macho and hairy-chested," Sweet says, adding that
now his job is to educate the public about the sport's safety.Bill Bachand, owner of the Celebrity Theatre, and Tom Gaffney, one of the show's promoters, say they contacted officials at the Arizona Boxing Commission last November, in an attempt to address any safety concerns early. The commission wasn't concerned, they say they were told.

"We asked the boxing commission, come down and look at the cage," Gaffney says. "Tell us what you'd like padded. Tell us what rules you'd like us to enforce. Tell us what you'd like us to do to comply. We couldn't get answers from them. We couldn't get any of them to come down to even take a look at the cage."

Bachand says he spent $4,000 on the padded, rubber-coated, eight-foot-tall chain-link fence wrapped around a boxing ring. He was convinced of the event's safety.

"I'm not into legislating morality, like some other people may be," Bachand says, "and I saw a list of rules of regulations from the promoters that seemed to be pretty safety-conscious."

Then, just 10 days before the event, John McCain dropped a line to his friend Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, expressing his concern that the boxing commission may not have jurisdiction over this "repugnant" event because contestants were not paid.

"Unlike boxing or traditional martial arts contests," McCain wrote, "unrestricted or ultimate fighting competitions are not legitimate sporting contests. They pose a great risk of serious injury to the contestants, and present excessive brutality to the public as entertainment."

On the day he canceled the event, Bachand announced he did not want to take on the U.S. Senate. A week later, he had mellowed.

Bachand now tells New Times it was safety concerns that caused him to cancel the event. He was worried that the boxing commission or law enforcement authorities might try to shut down the fight in the middle of the show.

"My decision was made based on the fact that if they shut it down, I would have 2,600 beer-drinking, angry people in my venue, and it could have gotten very ugly and somebody could have gotten hurt. I wasn't as concerned for the participants as I was for the general public," Bachand says, adding that his decision cost him as much as $50,000.

Bachand and Gaffney say they never heard from McCain, or anyone in his office, regarding the safety precautions taken for the event. The men have no explanation as to why McCain intervened via a letter to Romley in their business venture.

"I'd like to know why," Gaffney says. "[McCain] has yet to give us answers."

Three days after the canceled Phoenix cage fight, Eddie Goldman muses via e-mail:

It is a classic case of abuse of power. It is about a brooding, obsessed Senator interfering in a local affair, somehow scaring off a local theater owner into canceling a sold-out show a few hours before the doors were to have opened, and issuing defamatory statements about a sport he knows next to nothing about.It is about a Senator with a huge stake and fortune in Anheuser-Busch, the prime commercial sponsor of boxing, using his bully pulpit of the U.S. Senate to condemn--without one single fact, without even the pretense of an investigation--an entire genre of
sports as posing "a great risk of serious injury to the contestants." Oh yes, these sports just HAPPEN to be the main competition to boxing on pay-per-view.

Eddie Goldman may have been shocked, but Arizonans remember John McCain's ties to Anheuser-Busch.

On his 1996 financial-disclosure form, McCain acknowledges owning between $1 million and $5 million in Anheuser-Busch Company stock, along with significant interests in Hensley and Company, his father-in-law's Anheuser-Busch distributorship.His wife Cindy McCain is listed as an employee of Hensley and

Company, at an annual salary listed mysteriously as "more than $1,000"; she also has a company car. Anheuser-Busch and Hensley and Company have given generously to McCain's campaigns.

For example, Anheuser-Busch's political action committee donated $2,000 to McCain's initial Senate campaign in 1986, and another $2,000 in 1992.During the 1995-96 reporting period--a nonelection year for McCain--Anheuser-Busch's PAC and individual employees contributed a total of $4,000 to McCain's campaign. Hensley and Company contributed $7,200.

So far, this election season, Anheuser-Busch's PAC has donated $1,000 to the McCain reelection effort.It's no secret that Anheuser-Busch is a huge corporate sponsor of boxing. Just go to the Budweiser Web site and click on "boxing":Budweiser, the King of Beers, is the long-time king of corporate boxing sponsorships, bringing fans the greatest bouts in history.

Not limited to the high-profile championship bouts, Budweiser also sponsors pro boxing on the major sports networks and national televised cards on premium cable and pay-per-view television.

Whether it's professional, amateur or Olympic boxing, Budweiser is almost always part of the action. Budweiser has gone from being involved in the sport of boxing to being a part of the bouts themselves. Budweiser's presence is now synonymous with boxing.

Okay, okay, we get it.

Goldman emphasizes how important that presence is to the brewer. "Beer is sold as an image," he says. "They spend a fortune to create the image of these things as being tough, being cool, being associated with their favorite athletes, and if I'm drinking a Budweiser, I'm like one of the tough guys."

Anheuser-Busch did not return calls seeking comment. Has McCain ever let his personal business interests influence his official actions before? Could be. In 1992, the McCains owned more than $1 million worth of stock in Hensley and Company. At the same time, the Senate Commerce Committee, on which McCain sat, steadfastly refused to consider beverage-container-recycling legislation--legislation strongly opposed and lobbied against by the beverage industry, including Anheuser-Busch.

[DUCE]

After all that now we have no headbutting and Keith Hackney tactics.
Should there be more?

Where should we draw the line in who should fight in MMA? Look at (the late)Phil Ensminger or Kimo Slice or some other people that some would deem questionable to be allowed to legally fight. As in they are not all there and someone is taking advantage of them.

"Human cock fighting"

There are some fighters that seem like they are just off in there own world like Matt Horwich. Maybe they have brain damage and don't know any better. Pre 1995 it would have been easy to pull shit off like that.