Let’s Get It On! (24 page)

When Foster left the cage, I said, “What happened?”

“I didn’t see the tap.”

I wasn’t anyone to give instructions on refereeing, so I bit my tongue and walked away. Foster refereed one more prelim that night and was never asked back.

Returning from UFC 4 was alternate and future standout Guy Mezger, who was paired with a young Russian sambo master named Oleg Taktarov.

At the infamous swordfish dinner with future UFC competitors Oleg Taktarov and Guy Mezger

I’d been at Davie’s office when Taktarov had come walking in, clutching a black videotape sans cover. Taktarov barely spoke a lick of English, but he had a rugged, weathered look that said he’d been around the block a time or two.

The videotape featured grainy, black-and-white footage of Taktarov performing sambo and fighting in Russia. “I want to be a movie star,” Taktarov kept repeating in broken English as we watched. I guess Taktarov figured his sambo talent and the UFC might be an avenue to get there.

He was right. Six years later, Taktarov would get his big break when director John Herzfeld, a die-hard UFC fan, would cast him in his first major film role opposite Robert De Niro in
15 Minutes.

Davie walked Taktarov across the street to Rorion’s academy to see what he could do. Pedro Sauer, the respected Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt instructor, happened to be there, so he gave Taktarov his audition on the mat.

Afterward, Rorion turned to Davie and said, “He’s no good,” and walked away.

“What do you think?” Davie asked me.

“He’s pretty damn good.”

Aside from some rough technique here and there, Taktarov was strong and had given Sauer a good match.

Rorion didn’t want to use him because Taktarov knew his way around the mat. The guy could roll, and that was that.

Taktarov didn’t make me a liar at UFC 5. He swam past Ernest Verdecia in the quarters, but the returning Severn sliced Taktarov’s forehead open with a knee in the semifinal match, and I had to stop the bout. Taktarov was what you’d call a bleeder. Some guys open up, and the blood just can’t be stopped.

Severn advanced to the finals and took out Beneteau to become the UFC 5 tournament champion, winning $60,000 in the process.

The highly anticipated superfight between Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock died on the vine. It was scheduled for thirty minutes, and boy, did they waste every single minute and then some. The fight actually went for thirty-one minutes, until Art Davie, of all people, jumped onto the apron to tell me through the fencing that it was time to stop it.

The fight was restarted for a five-minute overtime period, which saw Shamrock land the only serious blow of the night. Still, after a total of thirty-six minutes, the bout was deemed a draw.

The fight was simply coma inducing, but I was able to laugh in the middle of it all when Bob Shamrock, Ken’s feisty adoptive father, finally grew frustrated with his son’s tactics and yelled, “Well, if you’re just going to lay there with him, you might as well start kissing him.”

The always stoic Royce looked at the elder Shamrock and then at Ken and said, “Please don’t do that.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last time I’d referee Royce in the UFC, at least for a while.

The North Carolina district attorney’s earlier reaction to the UFC wasn’t an isolated incident. Opposition to the “barbaric” and “brutal” UFC was forming in other states as well.

Art Davie observed all of this, and I think he knew it was his cue to make a move. He went to Rorion and suggested they sell their shares of the UFC to Bob Meyrowitz and SEG on the premise that they’d just branch off and start another show from scratch on their own.

Rorion was discouraged that his vision had been tampered with anyway. He wanted to preserve the no-rules, no-time-limit vale tudo fights that had made his father, Helio, a legend in Brazil. Rorion agreed to go along with Davie’s plan.

What Davie didn’t tell Rorion was that he was going to sell his piece and then take a job with SEG as the UFC matchmaker for $25,000 a show. When I saw this all shake down, I felt that Rorion had been duped by Davie. He was talked into selling his share of the UFC without knowing what Davie was up to.

It was kind of surprising that Rorion had chosen to walk away. UFC 5 had sold about 300,000 pay-per-view buys—astronomical numbers for that time.

Bob Meyrowitz was the first to call me after the ink dried.

“I don’t know if you know this, John, but I bought the UFC,” he said in his nasally voice. “You’re a big part of the show, and I want you to stay. Is this something you’ll do for me?”

“Yeah, no problem, Bob.”

A couple days later, I went down to Rorion’s Torrance gym to work out, and he called me into his office. He had a sober look on his face.

“Meyrowitz called and requested that I stay on with the show,” I said.

“What are you going to do? You can’t fly two flags.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t do it for a little while—that’s part of the deal—but we’re going to do another show, and it’s going to be bigger and better. Just because they were the first doesn’t mean they’ll be the best. We’ll do something much, much better.”

All I could think about in that moment was how Rorion had always gone on about having his family to look after.

“Rorion, I’ve got babies to feed,” I said, stealing one of the lines I’d heard him use. I wasn’t making much money refereeing the shows, but with a seven-year-old, four-year-old, and one-year-old at home depending on me, every cent counted.

“Well, you can’t be with them and me.”

I wasn’t a fan of ultimatums. “No problem.” I got up, walked out the door, and never went back. I wouldn’t talk to Rorion, my teacher and friend, for the next four years, until we ran into each other at a party for the Japanese promotion, Pride Fighting Championships, in Hollywood. Rorion never launched his new promotion.

There were other casualties in the shake-up as well. Kathy Kidd, who’d served as event coordinator for the first five shows, decided to jump ship and go work for Chris Peters, who launched World Combat Championship. The WCC would promote one event, which featured Renzo Gracie, Royce’s cousin. Kidd married UFC matchmaker Art Davie in December of 1996. A small world, I know.

After Kidd’s exit, Elaine accepted the role of UFC event coordinator, which meant she’d be running the show from UFC 6 on. She’d continue to do all the preplanning from home, which would also give me a sneak preview of the new fighters Davie and Meyrowitz would be bringing in.

UFC 6 “Clash of the Titans” rolled into the Casper Events Center in Casper, Wyoming, on July 14, 1995. It would be the first UFC without Royce, who’d obviously parted ways along with his brother Rorion. But it just so happened that there was another star waiting in the wings.

David “Tank” Abbott wasn’t as much protagonist as antagonist. For every man who scoffed at the hours of training some stalwart martial artists had put into perfecting their katas and techniques without actually having been in a real fight, Tank was their antihero. Abbott actually had some previous wrestling and submission experience, though the myth was that he rolled off his barstool and into the Octagon relying on the strength of his fists and cojones and the experience of over 200 street fights. Brimming with arrogance, Abbott would resonate with a good portion of the UFC’s fan base almost immediately.

I was sitting with Davie in his office the day he got the call from Dave Thomas, one of Abbott’s friends and soon-to-be manager who’d been trying to get him into the show. Davie turned on the speakerphone so I could listen.

Thomas started talking about Abbott, a fighter out of Huntington Beach, California, who benched 600 pounds. “He just beat up four Samoan guys. He’ll crush everybody you have.”

Four UFCs in, we thought we’d already heard it all, so Davie and I were trying to hold back our snickers. Davie pointed to the phone and mouthed, “Can you believe this guy?” But playing along, Davie asked Thomas, “Where does he fight?”

“Well, he fights on the streets,” Thomas stammered. “We’ll go to a construction site and set up fights for him.”

“Construction sites?” Davie asked. “You mean down where the bulldozers have been? In a pit down there? So he’s a pit fighter.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I told Davie, “Sounds kind of like the character in
Every Which Way But Loose.”

Davie agreed. “So this guy is like Tank Murdock?”

“Who’s Tank Murdock?”

“From the Clint Eastwood movie, that pit fighter Clint challenges.” Davie drilled it home. “Tank Abbott, the pit fighter.”

And that’s just what the UFC called him.

In person, Abbott certainly had the bravado down. I’d met him at the after party for UFC 5 and realized the barstool story probably wasn’t far off. Abbott was a drunken mess.

“These guys can’t fight.” He slurred the words. “Wait until they bring in a real fighter like me. I’ll destroy these guys. If someone puts me in guard, I’ll slam his head until his brains fall out. Only pussies fight like that. You don’t fight like that in a bar where someone will stomp your head in.”

Abbott reminded me of all of the guys I met who were full of themselves and talked a much better game than they played. I would soon get to see if Abbott was the real deal or just another fool I’d get the satisfaction of watching as someone made him look silly.

I didn’t get that satisfaction, at least not in Abbott’s first fight. He faced John Matua, who, with ten bare-knuckle victories, had been listed in the program as a first-level Kuialua, which was an ancient Hawaiian art of bone breaking. Nothing was broken here, however, other than Matua’s spirit.

The 280-pound Tank steamrolled Matua with hell-bent punches and sent all 400 pounds of his opponent into the canvas in about twenty seconds after catching him with a legal headbutt. Matua was never able to recover and was put to sleep with a huge right hand. His body went rigid and his legs began to twitch, not an uncommon reaction when somebody gets his lights turned off.

Abbott mocked Matua’s trembling with his own gyration, then nonchalantly walked to his corner and gave his guy a high five as if he’d just landed a three-pointer. The fans ate it up.

Abbott continued his spree by tapping out Paul Varelans in the semifinals with strikes, but he was tamed by a returning Oleg Taktarov with a rear-naked choke in a final match that went nearly eighteen minutes.

It didn’t matter that Abbott had lost, though. The fans were captivated by him. The UFC had found its next star to hang its future on, but something about the sixth event concerned me.

During the semifinal match between Oleg Taktarov and Anthony Macias, I believe I saw my first fixed fight in the UFC. Both fighters had the same manager, Buddy Albin, so I think it was decided backstage that Macias would throw the match so Oleg could advance to the finals and face Tank as fresh as possible. The fight went a little too smoothly for my tastes when Macias shot in and nearly fell into the guillotine choke, which he tapped out to in twelve seconds.

The night’s superfight, a rematch between Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn, was memorable to me, not because Shamrock wore purple Speedos, which he’d shown me during the backstage equipment checks. I’d thought,
You’re shitting me.
No, this fight was unforgettable for its finish. After a minute and a half of clinching, Shamrock caught Severn in a guillotine choke, and I watched Severn make one last big push to escape by punching Shamrock in his groin. It backfired, though, because Shamrock was wearing a steel muay Thai cup and all Severn did was hurt his hand in the process. Severn fell to his backside and tapped out to the choke.

The promotion had also continued its great referee experiment at UFC 6. Ron Van Clief, the fifty-one-year-old competitor from UFC 4, had found his way back into the UFC as its first and only commissioner, and he’d brought with him Taimak, of
The Last Dragon
fame, to referee. The twentysomething Taimak was nice enough, but he didn’t really have the constitution for this job. Taimak officiated the preliminary bouts for UFC 6 and 7, and by the latter I think he’d seen enough when alternate Joel Sutton reached into a half-inch cut on opponent Geza Kalman’s forehead and ripped it open another good three inches. That was Taimak’s last trip to the Octagon.