Bloody sport of mixed martial arts grows in popularity
By Eric Adler / McClatchy Newspapers
GRAIN VALLEY, Mo. - Mike Parker does not hate the man whose face he is now beating.
"Yeaaah! Pound him! Finish him!" men scream all around them. Fifteen hundred people pack this bar, Whiskey Tango, on a Thursday night in this Kansas City suburb. It’s the amateur "Free-for-All Brawl," 10 mixed martial arts fights held in a chain-link cage. Beers jostle and slosh to the floor. Cigarette smoke clouds the air.
Nine-year-old kids watch with their parents as blood spurts from the opponent’s nose and mouth.
A few seconds ago, Parker had lifted his opponent high off the floor - and with a bone-rattling blow, slammed his back to the mat.
Now, with 2:10 to go in the first of three rounds, Parker is in "full mount." He sits on this man’s chest like a bully. His fists thunder - left, right, left, right - 15, 18, 20 times into the man’s nose, ears, mouth and fluttering hands.
No, Parker doesn’t hate this 27-year-old trucker from Independence, Mo.
But his opponent has no idea. With every punch, every knee to the ribs, every air-robbing choke he exacts, Parker drives away at the taunting voice of his own dead Mississippi father.
"A partying, womanizing drunk," Parker had called him.
From the day Parker was born, the man branded his son with the notion that he was nothing, a nobody who would never amount to a hill of beans.
"I heard it," Parker said, "every day of my life."
But not here. Not in this place.
On this night, 30-year-old Mike Parker, a self-described country boy, a divorced dad with lean-but-not-large muscles, is fighting against failure - and fighting so that one day his own son would be proud.
"It’s like I can hear my dad in the back of my head," Parker had said. " ‘Told you so. Told you so. Loser.’ "
In the early 1990s, Sen. John McCain called these matches "human cockfighting ... a brutal and repugnant blood sport."
When McCain said that, it was true. Ultimate fighting, better known today as mixed martial arts or MMA, had emerged from a Brazilian fighting style called vale tudo, which in Portuguese translates to "anything goes."
The name was apt. Then as now, combatants used a mixture of judo, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, jiu-jitsu, karate and the techniques of hand-to-hand combat to win. But winning also meant that fighters, often mismatched in height, weight and skill, could break each other’s limbs or maim one another into submission
Bruce Spizler, chairman of the Maryland State Athletic Commission and director of the Association of Boxing Commissions legal committee, can remember watching tapes of those bouts.
"One participant had his foot on the throat of another," Spizler said. "With his other foot, he was pounding, stomping on his face, which was a bloody pulp."
But that was before MMA "evolved," Spizler said.
That was primarily before 2001, when a pair of Las Vegas casino owners, brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, paid $2 million for a struggling organization called Ultimate Fighting Championship and turned it into a global, billion-dollar business.
What the NFL is to football, the UFC is to mixed martial arts: the dominant league whose pay-per-view fights and cable television shows, "The Ultimate Fighter" and "UFC Fight Night, " have turned fighters like five-time UFC champion Randy Couture or Matt Hughes into muscled multimillionaires.
"They had the remarkable idea to legitimize the sport," Spizler said of the Fertittas, "to allow it to have more rules and be regulated."
To be sure, some current rules speak to how violent ultimate fighting used to be:
No biting. No eye-gouging. No fishhooking, which means yanking an opponent from inside the mouth, ears or anus. No picking up an opponent and spiking him or her directly on the head.
Moments before the first fight of this night at Whiskey Tango, Parker gathered with the other combatants as a referee went over it all.
Three rounds: four minutes each.
"Throat: Make sure you’re not striking or grabbing or poking at the throat," he said. "You can pull your arm across it as a choke, but not a strangulation. ... Guys, you can kick, you can knee, you can strike when they’re standing ... when they become a grounded fighter, head and neck are not a kick target."
Then the referee asked the 20 fighters to pray.
"Lord, help them to focus and stay protected all the time they are in the cage."
In 2006, the American Medical Association renewed its decade-old call to ban ultimate fighting as too violent and injurious. But proponents of the sport claim that its wrestling aspects and regulations make the sport safer than boxing. There are 5-ounce gloves, referees, short three-round-fights and the ability of a fighter to voluntarily quit or "tap out" if the bout becomes too much.
"It’s nowhere near as awful as boxing," said Susan Connors, president of the Brain Injury Association of America.
The association has no official position on mixed martial arts. Though Connors is "leery" of any sport that can inflict potential serious injury, she acknowledged the sport’s relative safety.
They’re not just trying to knock each other out," she said, "but to take each other down as in wrestling. It seems less dangerous because of the submissions. You get to tap out. You get to cry uncle before you get knocked out. And not all the moves are directed at the head, and there are a lot more strategic take-downs. They tend to call the fights earlier.
"All those things in combination ... make it far better."
Regulators apparently are satisfied, because today MMA is everywhere: apparel, Web sites, sponsors, myriad classes and amateur and pro fights sanctioned or regulated in at least 32 states, including Missouri, which legalized the sport in September.
Kansas did so in 2004, while Spizler’s Maryland legalized it in late May.
"For every boxing event we hold, we have four MMA events, amateur and pro," said Kansas’ boxing commissioner, Aaron Davis.
Even the U.S. military has embraced mixed martial arts, conducting matches among soldiers.
Last week, CBS Sports began broadcasting its own bouts called EliteXC, the first live broadcast of the sport on prime-time network television. The debut show set a record for MMA viewers, CBS said.
In 2007, given its new regulations and rules, John McCain acknowledged, "the sport has grown up."
Time ticks away.
With less than two minutes left in Round 1, Jared Corn lifts his hips, trying to buck Mike Parker off his torso. It’s not working, but against Corn, who’s tough, neither are Parker’s blows.
Change in strategy.
Parker goes for the arm bar, a wrestling submission move, a match-ender.
All night long, not one of the earlier nine matches went past this first round.
Guys entered the six-sided ring. The bell rang. Fighters hit the mat like dropped meat, punched into technical knockouts or so wrapped up, choked off for air or blood to their brains, they "tapped out" - ending the match - before passing out.
One fighter, a young wrestler in his amateur debut, barely heard the bell stop ringing before, wham, he dropped to the mat.
Two punches. KO. Knockout. He walked from the cage after 12 seconds, cupping his hand over a bloody face, his eye socket bulging and turning black
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