Let’s Get It On! (50 page)

I’m glad I got to officiate the bout. Today it’s considered one of the sport’s greatest. Many in the industry were concerned for Couture’s well-being heading in. Aging fighters usually don’t fare well, and this one had taken a year off from a constantly evolving sport full of young guns.

We would all come to understand that Couture was the exception to the rule. The forty-three-year-old dropped the six-feet-eight Sylvia out of the gate with an overhand right.

After the punch, Sylvia spent the next twenty-five minutes either fending Couture off his back or chasing him around the cage trying to land a punch. As Couture bobbed and weaved out of the way to win each round, the crowd’s enthusiasm crescendoed. It was as if everyone held their breath until the entire crowd counted down the last ten seconds. When the bell finally sounded, everyone let it out all at once. The cheers for Couture, the symbol of underdog perseverance, were deafening.

The event broke a North American attendance record for an MMA event with 19,079 spectators, and it was one of the most electrifying nights I’ve ever refereed.

Zuffa followed up with its next pay-per-view event a month later. UFC 69 “Shootout” was held on April 7, 2007, at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas, in the UFC’s first visit to the Lone Star State.

For days before the event, the Texas fans clogged the fighters’ hotel lobby with their Sharpies, posters, and cameras. And it wasn’t just the fighters they were interested in.

The day of the show while I was eating with Elaine in the hotel’s restaurant, fans were gathering three deep at the entrance. I had to go back to my room, pack my gear, and get to the arena, but with so many fans around I knew it would take too long to get across the hotel to the elevators—and you know I hate being late for anything.

I asked the restaurant manager if there was any other way to get upstairs, and he ushered us through the kitchen to the service elevators.

The door opened, and Dana White popped out. We flashed each other knowing smiles.

The UFC was taking off in a big way. Two years after the debut of
The Ultimate Fighter
on Spike TV, Zuffa had nearly doubled its number of events per year, going from ten to nineteen. Zuffa had also purchased the World Extreme Cagefighting promotion in December of 2006 and made a deal to air events on the sportscentric Versus channel, so we were assigned to those events as well. In another coup that shook the sport’s very foundation, Zuffa also bought Pride Fighting Championships, the UFC’s longtime superior competitor for a rumored $65 million dollars. With Pride, Zuffa acquired practically all of the world’s greatest fighters other than the ones they already employed.

There was now a major UFC pay-per-view event every month with a few
UFC Fight Nights
and
Ultimate Fighter
finales sprinkled in on free TV. Celebrities like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Kevin James, and Shaquille O’Neal showed up Octagon-side in droves. It always surprised me when a celebrity approached. One of my favorites to meet was Michael Clarke Duncan of
The Green Mile
fame. Like me, he’d studied jiu-jitsu at the Gracies’ Torrance academy. He ended up holding Elaine’s mini terrier, Yoda, whom she’d snuck into the arena in her bag. That night Duncan left the show with his girlfriend chewing on his ear about getting a dog just like Yoda. All I can say is sorry, Michael.

The United States market seemed well on its way, so Zuffa turned its attention to the virtually untapped United Kingdom, which had shown an appetite for the sport with regional promotions like Cage Rage and Cage Warriors Fighting Championship in the years before. Though Zuffa said it wouldn’t go where the sport wasn’t regulated by an independent government-recognized agency, they made an exception for the United Kingdom. Zuffa had opened an office in London about six months before, and I think they realized if they waited for an existing agency to regulate it, they’d be waiting awhile.

UFC 70 “Nations Collide” was to be the promotion’s first event in the United Kingdom as well as its first event outside the United States since UFC 38 in London in 2002. With no regulatory agency to oversee it, the UFC would be hiring referees, judges, and other officials on its own. The flight was ten hours from Los Angeles, so I asked if Zuffa could fly me business-class. This is when the wheels began to fall off the wagon.

Under my contract with SEG, it had actually been agreed that I’d be flown first-class to all the international UFC events, but I’d always told SEG that it could purchase two coach seats together for me because that was cheaper. After Elaine had stopped working for the UFC, we’d paid for her seat ourselves. I didn’t think asking for a single business-class seat in place of the two economy seats was outrageous, and I wasn’t by any means making this an ultimatum.

My request wasn’t so much a question of privilege; it was more about functionality. I know most people say travel is exciting, but I hate stuffing my six-feet-four, 275-pound self into a seat and pouring out onto the person next to me for ten awkward hours. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say people recognized me and wanted to strike up a conversation when all I wanted to do was get some sleep.

The UFC employee I spoke to about it promised to take my request to Dana White and get back to me.

A week later, I got a call. It was Mark Ratner, the former head of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, who was now working for Zuffa as its vice president of regulatory affairs and would be assigning the officials for the show. “John, what’s this about you asking for a first-class ticket to Manchester?”

“I didn’t ask for a first-class ticket. I asked for a business-class seat. It’s a long freaking way. I’m not expecting it, but if you can do it, I’d really appreciate it.”

“Maybe I heard it wrong. Let me talk to everyone, and I’ll get back to you.”

I didn’t hear from Zuffa until I got a text from Dana White a few days after that: “What the fuck is up with you?”

We were on the phone a few minutes later, with White asking who the fuck I thought I was asking for a first-class ticket.

I understood his anger over what he’d been told, but the information had been incorrect. As I’d explained to Ratner, I told Dana I’d never demanded a first-class ticket. “Look, Joe Rogan and Bruce Buffer told me you fly them first-class, and I wasn’t even asking for that. I just asked if it was possible to get a business-class seat so I could stretch out on a ten-hour flight.”

“I don’t fly them first-class,” Dana said. “They upgrade themselves.”

“I’ll just take a regular ticket,” I said. I hadn’t meant for it to become such a big deal.

But to Dana, I guess it had become just that. “No, I think I’ll take Mario Yamasaki.”

The bull in me answered, “Well, take Mario then.”

It wasn’t that Dana hadn’t fulfilled my request. I would have flown whatever way they’d wanted me to. I guess it was the way it was all handled that irked me. It seemed like a big miscommunication, and it shouldn’t have turned out that way.

In fourteen years, I’d never skipped a UFC event. Even when my son Ron had graduated from high school, I’d missed his big day to fly to Connecticut for UFC 55 in 2005. I’d felt it was my responsibility to be there and I owed it to the UFC and Zuffa. Now I was going to miss UFC 70 over a lousy plane ticket.

While heavyweight Gabriel Gonzaga was shocking everyone by knocking kickboxer Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic out cold with a high kick at UFC 70 on April 21, 2007, in Manchester, England, I was with my wife at our cabin in Bear Lake, Utah, shoveling snow. The ice and snow got the worst of it.

As it turned out, the UFC wasn’t pleased either. Though UFC 70 had filled the Manchester Evening News Arena with 15,000 rabid United Kingdom fans, Zuffa had been concerned about a couple of questionable referee calls.

The next day, Dana and Ratner called to ask if I could come speak with them about what had happened. Dana offered to have me flown in, but I wasn’t anywhere near an airport that could do this, so I said I’d drive from Utah to Las Vegas. We agreed to meet Monday at 11:30 a.m., which meant I’d have to leave the cabin at 3:00 a.m. to make the eight-hour drive.

I was there on time, as I always am. I hadn’t been to the Zuffa offices in a while. A security guard was stationed outside, and I had to give him my name to check in. Things were getting very businesslike.

Dana didn’t show up for another hour, so by the time he’d ushered me into his office with Ratner, I was a little perturbed. I know Dana had just flown back from England the day before, but I’d gotten up before the crack of dawn and driven eight hours straight because he’d asked me to be there at a certain time. Again, it was a matter of respect. I respected Dana, but I was getting the feeling I was becoming more of a pain in the ass than an asset to him.

As he’s known to do, Dana got right to the point. “We can’t have this happen again. This is crazy that this kind of stuff happens.”

I think Dana was referring to both the officiating he’d seen in England and the fact that I hadn’t gone on the trip. Dana told me I was the best referee there was and I had to be at all the shows from here on out.

Ratner suggested I get involved with training other referees, and I told them that was great, but there wasn’t enough time in the day for me to do all that and still work my police academy job. If they wanted me to do some training for them, I’d have to retire from the LAPD.

However, it was agreed that it wasn’t Zuffa or any other promotion’s place to facilitate training programs for officials. It was really the responsibility of athletic commissions to make sure the people they hired were prepared.

Before I left, I brought up the issue of the plane ticket and reiterated to both of them that I’d never asked anyone for a first-class ticket.

“Well, that’s not what I was told,” Dana said.

I’m sure when I walked out, Dana and Ratner thought everything was great and back to normal, but I have to admit, at the time, it wasn’t for me.

It was completely my hang-up, but I felt like I was being kicked in the nuts by the sport, or at least by its evolution. I wanted things to be like they were in the past, but that wouldn’t happen. The referee’s role was changing, and because I’d been around the longest of all the officials, it affected me most. I’d started at a time when athletic commissions wouldn’t have given mixed martial arts a second glance. Now the commissions were controlling every aspect of regulating the shows.

For instance, I’d handled the fighters’ gloves for just about every UFC event for the last fourteen years. In my hotel room, I would gently knead each pair myself before rolling them up so they’d keep their stretch, and then I’d bring them to the weigh-ins.

Once there, I’d sit at a table backstage, and each fighter would try them on until he found the right size to mold to his hands. Then, I’d have him initial a roll sheet with his size listed next to his name so I knew which size to bring the next time he fought.

I’d repeated this ritual since UFC 15, which was when gloves had become mandatory, until one of the commissions had decided they’d handle the responsibility themselves. Shortly after that, the Nevada State Athletic Commission asked the referees and judges not to attend the weigh-ins so we wouldn’t form a biased opinion of the fighters prior to their bouts.

These had been smaller changes I’d learned to live with. But what really bothered me, which would get me into hot water later, was the trend of some commissions assigning more and more inexperienced referees and judges. Boxing officials who’d previously shunned MMA saw all the buzz surrounding it and suddenly wanted in on the party, but the majority of them couldn’t tell an armbar from a heelhook. How can you know when to restand two fighters locked on the ground or evaluate their progress when you don’t really know what you’re watching? I was seeing fighters working hard to move to dominant positions, setting up submissions, only to be stopped and stood by referees who had no idea one of the fighters could be on the verge of ending the fight.

This wasn’t a case of ego for me; I’d always known more referees would enter the sport. But if you’re a race car driver, would you rather be in the pits or on the track, especially when you can get the car around without crashing it?

Since UFC 15, I’d handed out the fighters’ gloves and kept track of their sizes.

Change is inevitable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you enjoy it, especially when you feel you’re being pushed away from what you love. The last time I’d left the Zuffa offices in Las Vegas, as I’d walked out, I’d looked around at the army of employees bustling about preparing for a handful of upcoming events, and I hadn’t recognized any of them. I think it was in that moment that I felt I wasn’t really a part of the UFC anymore.