The MMA Oldtimer: How newsman turned MMA promoter/agent Monte Cox built an empire
One of the most notable and influential careers in mixed-martial-arts can be traced to a piece of paper that slid across a desk at the Quad City Times newspaper in 1995.
It was the desk of Monte Cox, an editor at the paper who had been in journalism for 16 years but also had a background in and love for boxing.
"It said there was a local guy doing an ultimate fighting event in Chicago," Cox told MMAjunkie.com (
www.mmajunkie.com) this week while breaking from a family vacation. "The guy was a local tough guy everybody knew. He had beaten up everybody in the bars and in school.
"It turned out to be Pat Miletich."
Starting with that interest in the local tough guy-turned-MMA fighter, Cox began a career promoting events (while making Iowa one of the cradles of the sport in the United States) and managing notable fighters that has grown as the sport has grown. To this day, Cox is often mentioned as one of the people who helped MMA take off in this country, as he spread an early interest in Iowa elsewhere in the country.
Now, at 49, Cox is still going strong. His company, Ultimate Productions, has broken off into arms that put on shows (Extreme Challenge), manage fighters (Extreme Challenge Management) and get them endorsements (Extreme Challenge Endorsements).
In managing, with his 70 or so clients, Cox said he tries to take a personal approach that has often been missing in the sport. He's guiding those fighters into an unknown future for the sport that has grown so quickly that it's difficult to gauge exactly where it's going.
Cox has credited the sanctioning bodies with cleaning up the sport and making it more credible. But, he would like to see changes in officiating, making it more stable, and longer fights at the championship level.
"I never cease to be amazed at how things turn in the sport," Cox said. "You think of the days when the jiu-jitsu guys won everything, then the Maurice Smiths and those guys came in as the powerful wrestlers, then the guys who avoided takedowns and knocked people out. Now you have to be able to do everything.
"Five years from now, it's almost scary to think about how good the guys will be."
A note on a desk
By the time Cox saw the note about Miletich cross his desk, he was already part of a successful career. After growing up in small-town Indiana playing football and basketball and boxing, Cox got a journalism education at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., and began his newspaper career that made him a sports editor and, then, a news editor in Davenport, Iowa.
When he heard about the Miletich fight in Chicago, he thought he would go to the gym and check out what this fighting was about. He had promoted some boxing events, so he was comfortable in gyms.
But this was new.
"I had seen wrestling, I had seen boxing, but this jiu jitsu was like magic or something," Cox said. "It was almost bizarre. They would put me in arm bars and chokes. I'm thinking, 'I've never heard of anything like this.' I was addicted."
Cox traveled with Miletich to the Chicago event, an eight-man tournament called Battle of the Masters.
"There were no weight classes," Cox said. "All the fights were the same night. There was a guy with a big ring in his nose and a ponytail, a Japanese guy, a huge heavyweight.
"Pat went through them like butter, and he won the whole thing. We get back to the Quad Cities, and he says, 'You have to do a show here.' I said, 'No, I know boxers. I'm comfortable with them, but I wouldn't know the first thing about this new stuff.'"
But Miletich continued to ask, and Cox agreed. He booked the biggest arena in town he could find, which accommodated about 10,000 people, and made professional-looking posters. It was called Quad City Ultimate.
There were 8,000 people at the event. Three months later, they did another show, and 6,000 people were there. Cox formed Ultimate Productions and Extreme Challenge, quit his newspaper job and started plowing through the Midwest.
"I had a fever for the thing," he said. "I was doing a show a month, and we wanted big crowds. If we went to Des Moines and got 3,500 people, we weren't going back. I wanted 8,000 people. I wanted it all. I wrote the law for Iowa, got it approved. I was the first one to do Wisconsin, one of the first in Illinois, Michigan, Utah. At the time, I couldn't do anything wrong. People wanted it so much.
"The UFC was off hiding from the sanctioning bodies, and I was out going places, getting ticketed. Everyone was treating me like I was a carnie, but people loved the rawness of it. They couldn't help but watch."
Moving MMA forward
As the shows moved forward at a pace of about one per month, Cox lamented the lack of fighter management. He didn't have a background in it, but he took on some fighters, including Miletich.
As his companies have grown, he has put on more shows and has taken on more fighters. Cox, like many around the country, has watched the sport take off.
"This could've ended at any time if there had been some untimely accidents," Cox said. "It could've just been a fad if there had been some accidents or deaths. That's a positive."
Still, there are some things that could use some adjusting, Cox said.
"We're so, so, far behind on the officiating and judging," he said. "Boxing has its own weed-'em-out method. I used to judge, and we would get graded. You had to keep at 70 percent, or you would go back and take seminars.
"Here, we have the same five referees doing all the big fights. We just have to develop more guys."
Cox also thinks there should be changes to time limits, at least in the bigger fights. Why not, he said, give people more of the title bouts and ensure they're not decided by split decisions. The veteran pros, he said, are fighting the same length as beginners. This is another place where he points to boxing as possibly doing it right, increasing the length of the fights as the level progresses.
In looking at the future, though, Cox wonders how great the athletes will become. The sport is still young enough that the best athletes have often grown up choosing other sports, such as basketball or football.
Now, the very good athletes will be able to choose MMA earlier, making for a better crop of fighters.
Those fighters will enter a sport that has seen almost unbelievable growth, in part because of Cox and his early interest and advancement into new areas.
"There are young kids out there who are into wrestling and jiu jitsu," Cox said. "They're starting earlier, and they're getting better. Who knows what can happen?"
