WILL MMA EVER FORCE BOXING TO TAP OUT? BY HOWARD T. BRODY
In late 1993, with Mike Tyson serving time behind bars for the convicted rape of an 18-year-old Miss Black Rhode Island contestant in an Indianapolis hotel room, professional boxing was dominated by such fighters as Riddick Bowe, Julio César Chávez, Evander Holyfield, Roy Jones Jr., Lennox Lewis, and Pernell Whitaker.
Meanwhile, as these pugilists from various weight divisions within “the sweet science” were fighting for newspaper headlines, a new phrase in combat sports had made its way into print as Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg coined it. In a November 15th review of the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship card – which took place three days earlier at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado – the term Mixed Martial Arts appeared for the first time anywhere.
Although the various disciplines that comprised MMA all had their own tournaments and championships at the time, they didn’t quite receive the global attention or notoriety until they were all put in one pot and stirred together. Spectators were curious to see who was better: wrestlers, grapplers, jiu-jitsu combatants, karate experts, kung-fu masters, kickboxers, etc. The fans of each discipline rooted for their sport to prevail but started to appreciate the other forms of combat.
It’s no secret that a large part of the appeal for that first UFC card was not only in the fact that these contests would be bare-knuckled, but that the event itself was promoted with the tagline “There are no rules.”
While UFC 1 did not have the strict guidelines the organization follows today, it operated with limited rules. For instance, while it banned eye-gouging, groin strikes and biting, it did allow some techniques you would probably see in a bar fight as opposed to an organized competition. Head-butting, hair pulling and fish-hooking were all allowed. There were other guidelines that pretty much enabled anyone who wanted to compete to step onto the canvas. No substance screening, no judge scorecards, no time limits to the fights, and matches could only be stopped by knockout, tapout, or corner stoppage (indicated by a towel being thrown in). Even the referee couldn’t stop a match – he could only do so if a fighter’s corner instructed him to.
On top of all that, there was the allure of something called the Octagon, an eight-sided cage with a chain-link fence instead of a traditional four-sided ring with ropes. The Octagon was the brainchild of Hollywood veteran John Milius who was perhaps best known for directing “Conan the Barbarian,” a Brazilian jiu-jitsu student of Rorion Gracie.
While boxing promoters universally abhorred and criticized the event, calling it savagely cruel, exceedingly brutal, primitive and unsophisticated – one step above the local amateur tough man contests that were common in those days – the 90,000 pay-per-view (PPV) buys and promise of a videotape aftermarket at such outlets as Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and West Coast Video, guaranteed that Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG), the owners of UFC, would present future events.
As time marched on, and despite the undercurrent of change underway thanks to the rise of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, karate and judo studios appearing because of the increased popularity of MMA, pro boxing continued to dominate the combat sport landscape because of its solid global infrastructure of local gyms, amateur clubs, YMCA tie-ins, and Olympic-inspired organizations, all of which trained these athletes and put them on a path to earn money in the pro ranks after their amateur boxing days were done.
While many boxers transitioned from amateur to pro, the vast majority did not, and that started contributing to the decline. However, some industry insiders believed the decline in popularity took place nearly ten years earlier when on November 18, 1982, at the age of 27, South Korean boxer Kim Duk-koo died after fighting in a world championship boxing match against Ray Mancini in Las Vegas. Heightened by the bout being televised live in the U.S. on CBS-TV and compounded by the fact that a week after the fight Sports Illustrated published a photo of the battle on its cover under the heading “Tragedy in the Ring,” his death sparked reforms aimed at better protecting the health of fighters, including pre-fight checkups, such as electrocardiograms, brain tests, and lung tests as opposed to just blood pressure and heartbeat checks, and reducing the number of rounds in championship bouts from 15 to 12.
According to a December 12, 1982 article in the New York Times by writer Michael Katz titled “Referee Defends His Decision,” retrieved November 5, 2020, the Nevada State Athletic Commission proposed a series of rule changes as a result of Duk-koo’s death, announcing it before a December 10 match between Michael Dokes and Mike Weaver that would in itself be disputed because of what officials were informed before the fight. The break between rounds was initially proposed to go from 60 to 90 seconds (but it was later rescinded). The standing eight count – which allows a knockdown to be called even if the boxer is not down but on the verge of being knocked down – was imposed, and new rules regarding the suspension of a boxer’s license was put into effect (45 days after a knockout loss).
Also, according to a November 13, 2007 article on espn.com by writer Ron Borges titled “Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a memory,” retrieved November 5, 2020, while the WBC wasn’t the fight’s sanctioning organization, they were the first to act to protect boxers. During their 1983 annual convention, they announced that rules concerning a boxer’s pre-fight medical care needed to be changed, and they also reduced the number of rounds for title fights from 15 to 12. Four years later, the WBA and IBF would follow suit, and by the time the WBO was formed in 1988, 12 rounds were the norm.
But perhaps the most significant blow to professional boxing came just thirteen days after the match that took Duk-koo’s life eight days earlier when one of the sports’ most prominent advocates, Howard Cosell of ABC Sports – having just witnessed a horrible mismatch between then world heavyweight champion Larry Holmes and Randall “Tex” Cobb – turned on the professional boxing establishment and called for an end to the sport.
Here was a guy who was a broadcasting icon due to his gig on Monday Night Football and who was considered at the time to be one of the world’s top boxing journalists thanks to his longtime association and friendship with Muhammad Ali, delivering one of the most public criticisms the business has ever known. But it wasn’t Cosell’s first call for action.
Ten years earlier, Cosell testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that boxing should be placed under Federal control because the organizations that regulated boxing were too lax in their oversight and easily manipulated by outside sources including the promoters of the day, most notably Don King and Bob Arum. With nothing being done in the ten years between the testimony and the Holmes-Cobb fight, Cosell grew bitter and thought it a bad joke when critics would contend that boxing could be made better from within.
Dave Kindred, a columnist for The Washington Post at the time, quoted Cosell after the Holmes-Cobb fight as saying in a telephone interview he was “deeply troubled by boxing” and that he was walking away from the sport.
“Nothing ever changes,” Cosell told Kindred. “I’ve done all I can. We’ve seen the thumbless glove, we’ve seen Earnie Shavers and Ray Leonard hurt their eyes, I’ve seen Benny Paret and Willie Classen and Cleveland Denny and Duk Koo Kim (sic) die.”
Paret passed away on March 24, 1962, ten days after his welterweight title defense against Emile Griffith from injuries sustained in the bout. Classen succumbed on November 28, 1979, five days after absorbing several brutal shots at the hands of Wilford Scypion. Denny died on July 7, 1980, 17 days after his Canadian heavyweight title loss to Gaetan Hart, where he took multiple blows to the head.
“Yet we still have laissez-faire,” Cosell said. “You’ve got two championships. The networks must take some responsibility for that. You’ve got sleazy promoters. You’ve got reporters who are afraid to look at boxing. I’ve had it. No more.”
Reflecting on his 1972 Senate subcommittee testimony, Cosell told Kindred, “I could see where Don King and Bob Arum were recreating the control that the courts had ruled illegal years before. But I stayed with boxing because I loved the boxers.”
As things often were with Cosell at the time, his “decision” to quit boxing was complicated. Despite the bad taste in his mouth, he did announce the sport during the 1984 Olympics, not only admitting he was a loyal, company man to ABC but because Olympic boxing had a mandatory 8-count and the boxers wore headgear.
Still, the sting from Cosell’s attempted knockout lasted and by the time the 1990s rolled around boxing was pretty much off network television and relegated to cable, particularly HBO and Showtime.
While Cosell passed away in 1995, perhaps no other sight illustrated his concerns for pro boxers more than that of a shaking Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Twelve years earlier, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, resulting from head trauma from violent physical activities such as boxing. Many attributed Ali’s condition to his time as an active fighter.
While both HBO and Showtime delivered quality contests, without Mike Tyson, “Sugar Ray” Leonard, Roberto Duran and many of the other fighters who made the 1980s in many ways one of the most competitive decades for boxing, except for Hector “Macho” Camacho, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Manny Pacquiao, there seemed to be severe a lack of charismatic competitors. As such, there was no media darling for the press to latch onto and give exposure. That especially held true for the heavyweight division, which from 1996 to the mid-2010s was dominated by Ukrainian brothers Wladimir and Vitaly Klitschko.
MMA, meanwhile, and specifically UFC, started dominating combat sports PPV buys. Instead of the pro boxers getting the attention, the media began focusing on these modern-day gladiators who entered an 8-sided cage. Although it was much more violent and brutal than boxing was, the spectacle drew attention, and so the combatants started to become well known. UFC showcased a multitude of combat styles and fighters, including Tank Abbott, Don Frye, Gary Goodridge, Gerard Gordeau, Royce Gracie, Marco Ruas, Dan “The Beast” Severn, Ken Shamrock, Patrick Smith, and Oleg Taktarov.
The only problem for UFC was, the more popular it became with the fans, the more of an outcry there was from politicians to ban it. After seeing a videotape of one of the first UFC events, Republican Senator John McCain from Arizona called for the immediate banning of MMA, referring to it as “human cockfight” and subsequently sending letters to the governors of all 50 states. One-by-one states began declining UFC’s request for sanctioning – thirty-six states in all passed laws banning “no-holds-barred” fighting, including New York, which enacted the ban on the eve of UFC 12, forcing an overnight relocation of the event to Dothan, Alabama. By 1997 the group was forced “underground” as they held events in small markets.
In response to the harsh criticism, UFC began cooperating with state athletic commissions and rewrote their rules to remove elements of fights considered barbaric while keeping the core elements of striking and grappling. UFC 12 saw the introduction of weight classes and the banning of fish-hooking. For UFC 14, gloves became mandatory, while kicks to the head of a downed opponent were banned. UFC 15 saw limitations on hair pulling and the banning of strikes to the back of the neck and head, headbutting, small-joint manipulations, and groin strikes. With five-minute rounds introduced at UFC 21, the company gradually re-branded as a more palatable form of combat sports, positioning itself as a sport rather than a spectacle.
After a long and arduous fight to receive sanctioning, SEG was nearly bankrupt and was unable to produce PPV events. That’s when brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, two Station Casinos executives, along with business partner Dana White, entered the picture. In December 2000, they tendered an offer to buy UFC, and a month later, the Fertittas owned the brand, having paid $2 million. Zuffa, LLC was created as the parent company that would control UFC.
Having ties with the Nevada State Athletic Commission (Lorenzo was a former NSAC member), Zuffa was able to get UFC sanctioned in Nevada. Shortly after that, they returned to PPV. Under Zuffa’s ownership and White’s guidance, UFC slowly rose in mainstream popularity due to more exposure through better advertising, corporate sponsorships, returning to PPV, and distributing home video and DVD releases.
By 2006, UFC dominated pro boxing in the Las Vegas publicity department and looked at the WBA, WBC, WBO and IBF in its rearview mirror. While boxing still had a presence in Sin City, you had to look for it. That lack of exposure impacted the industry, so much so that during a 2009 interview on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, Top Rank’s Bob Arum called UFC fighters “guys rolling around like homosexuals” generalized MMA as “garbage and junk.” Arum also found fit to knock UFC’s fan base.
“For me, I look at the UFC audience and the boxing audience as being two different audiences entirely,” he said. “UFC (fans) are a bunch of skinhead white guys watching people in the ring who are also looking like skinhead white guys. For me, and people like me, (MMA) is not something that they ever care to see. They watched it. It’s horrible.”
Arum continued by saying MMA was not a sport that showed great talent. He said, “Guys who throw punches can’t throw a punch to save their ass. When the punches land, the guys have no chance. These are not like boxers. They are not trained like boxers.”
Two years later, Arum was on the attack again. In 2011 Arum shrugged off/joked his way through comments about the UFC’s then upcoming debut on Fox, where they’d go head-to-head against the first hour of a Top Rank PPV card headlined by Manny Pacquiao. When they talked about the different business models, about the way the two sports are promoted, and about their crossover – or lack thereof – and how that impacts the two sports, Arum said he didn’t care about UFC and wasn’t worried about them.
That was enough to trigger a volatile, if not hostile response from Dana White. Speaking to Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports, White went for Top Rank’s jugular: “Bob Arum is a jealous moron,” he said. “Bob Arum could do great things for the sport of boxing. I don’t know if he wasn’t smart enough to do what we did or whatever, but when we first came out with this thing, this guy laughed at us. He said how stupid the Fertittas were and that this thing was ridiculous and it would never be a sport.”
“Now, all he does is run around [expletive] and complaining about it,” White continued. “You had the ability, Bob Arum, to make boxing great. But the problem was, you were greedy. You’re a greedy pig, just like all the other guys who were involved in boxing. All you ever did was try to rip money out of it. You never invested a dime into the sport of boxing to make it great, to make it last, to create a future for boxing. He’s nothing but a greedy pig, and his jealousy shows non-stop.”
While Arum and White were busy trading barbs, even the flamboyant boxing promoter Don King recognized MMA’s success, and while he never made it official, in 2011 had contemplated getting into the MMA game himself.
“MMA is great. I love MMA,” he told Mike Berardino of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Many other guys think it’s bad, but I think it brings in people young and old.”
Although King called MMA “an outright Pier 6 brawl” and referred to it as “sophisticated barbarism,” he recognized UFC’s ability to promote.
“UFC is doing a much better job in advertising and promoting their [events] than the guys that are out here [in boxing],” King said. “The young kids want to see action, and UFC is exciting. That’s where the knockout punch comes in boxing.”
That was as far as King would compare the two sports.
“There’s no comparison,” he told Berardino. “It’s ‘in addition to.’”
Dan Lambert, who in 2001 founded American Top Team, a primary team in MMA and whose fighters have competed over the years in many major promotions including UFC, PRIDE Fighting Championships, DREAM, K-1, Strikeforce, and Bellator, has his take on why MMA has surpassed boxing in popularity.
“I think boxing has always been star-driven, whereas MMA has a built-in portion of the audience that are pure fans of the sport and will tune in regardless of the main event,” he said. “That’s why you see such a difference. If you look at the empty seats during the prelims of a boxing event compared to those in attendance early on at an MMA event, MMA has many more people in the seats. I think it just comes down to the point that MMA is more exciting than boxing. There are so many more ways to win a fight in MMA as outcomes are unpredictable.”
Unpredictable or not, UFC continued to evolve and as the rules continued to change, so did their roster of competitors. Hall of Famers Mark Coleman, Randy Couture, Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell, Pat Miletich and Tito Ortiz all emerged from this era.
Today UFC produces events worldwide that showcase twelve weight divisions (eight men’s divisions and four women’s divisions) and abides by the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts. Since its inception, UFC has held more than 500 events, and under White’s stewardship as UFC president, the brand has grown into a globally recognized multi-billion-dollar enterprise. In 2016, Zuffa was sold to a group led by William Morris Endeavor (WME–IMG), including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, MSD Capital and Silver Lake Partners for more than $4 billion. It remains the largest-ever acquisition in sports.
Over time Brock Lesnar, Conor McGregor, Rhonda Rousey, and Anderson Silva all became household names. However, many would argue that Lesnar’s fame came primarily from his time in pro wrestling with World Wrestling Entertainment.
In August 2017, pro boxing’s biggest draw at the time – the undefeated eleven-time five-division world boxing champion – Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr., went head-to-head with two-division mixed martial arts (MMA) world champion and, at the time, UFC Lightweight Champion “The Notorious” Conor McGregor, in what was billed as “The Biggest Fight in Combat Sports History.” While MMA fans called for the contest to be a boxing versus MMA bout, Mayweather’s camp would have none of that, and the parties agreed to a twelve round boxing match. Although McGregor knew he would be at a disadvantage, he also knew this fight would be his career’s biggest payoff. Pre-fight estimates put Mayweather’s purse for the fight at a guaranteed $100 million with the ability to earn upward of $280 million. In comparison, McGregor’s purse was guaranteed at $30 million with the ability to earn as much as $75 million. Although both men signed non-disclosure agreements, during a Q&A session in Glasgow, Scotland, McGregor let it slip that he had earned a total of nearly $100 million.
Mayweather defeated McGregor via technical knockout in the 10th round. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that if the fight would’ve been a mixed rules or straight MMA rules match, it would’ve been McGregor getting his hand raised in victory. Either way, the fight recorded the second highest pay-per-view buy rate in history.
For the most part, the boxing versus MMA debate has been put to bed, with MMA getting the clear-cut victory when it comes to popularity. Perhaps no event could highlight that more than that of the Mike Tyson versus Roy Jones Jr. fight that took place this past November. When the most talked about or anticipated boxing event in years is between a 54-year-old and a 51-year-old, there is something wrong with that picture. While the 8-round bout between the two former champions might have ended in a draw, the real winners were the promoters as all the event did for boxing was show how much the sport falls short when it comes to the current crop of fighters.
Still, some people don’t know when to throw in the towel despite the war being over. Things began heating up once again between the two combat sports last spring just as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to spread. In May 2020, Top Rank’s Bob Arum and UFC’s Dana White once again exchanged barbs, and as we go to press, their blood feud continues.
When UFC announced they would begin holding events again, Arum publicly criticized UFC’s urgency for returning to holding events amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Top Rank did not have any events scheduled, while the UFC had announced plans to run UFC 249 on May 9, followed by four other UFC events between May 13 and June 6.
“Good luck to them,” Arum told Boxingscene.com. “I just hope that they’re not endangering the safety of anyone. But this kind of cowboy behavior doesn’t do anybody any good. We’re looking now with Nevada, which we’ll do in a sensible way, or California. We’re working with [Nevada Athletic Commission executive director] Bob Bennett and [California State Athletic Commission executive officer] Andy Foster, and we’re talking to the Texas commission. We’re only [going to] do this if it’s safe for the fighters and everyone involved, and if it’s approved by the medical authorities. We’re not [going to] be cowboys, like Dana White. I don’t want to get politics involved, but I have really very little respect for Dana and what he’s doing.”
White struck back hard against Arum when on an episode of the podcast “UFC Unfiltered” he said: “Listen, I think by now everybody realizes that Bob Arum is a dickhead. This guy has been talking shit about the UFC and me for 20 years. He’s fucking bankrupt, this guy. He’s bankrupt. Of course, you don’t want to put fights on. You can’t afford to put fights on you fucking jackoff. You’ve been in this thing your whole life and have completely destroyed the business and the sport. Congratulations, Bob Arum. You’re brilliant.”
While the UFC was the first North American sport to return to action with UFC 249, Top Rank was quick to jump back on board with live events and returned to ESPN days before the UFC’s June 6 event, drawing 370,000 viewers on June 2 and 311,000 on June 4, according to Boxingscene.com, making Arum look like a major hypocrite. White took notice.
According to a June 15 story on foxnews.com written by Ryan Gaydos, White said, “So many people are watching, this is everybody’s time to shine. The sport is at a whole other level right now. You know what I mean? When we first started on ESPN, if you look at the ESPN totem pole, you had NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, these guys, right? And we were down like; we were one notch above Cornhole. OK? Now we sit in a much better place on the ESPN totem pole than we did when we signed this deal a year and a half ago. By the way, Cornhole almost out-rated Top Rank the other night for their fights. So congratulations to Top Rank. Bob Arum, give him a shout out. Good job, Bob. You’re fucking brilliant. You dickhead.”
You’d figure that’d be the end of it, but no. In November 2020, the two were at it again. Arum, who has a long-standing history of knocking UFC for drastically underpaying their fighters because he claims they are a monopoly, told The Athletic he could “build a house in Beverly Hills” on the money he lost on fighter Terence Crawford over his last three fights.
When White caught wind of Arum’s comments, he pulled no punches and immediately went into attack mode, calling Arum a “fucking scumbag” among other color expletives.
“Can you imagine if I said that,” he asked reporters during a press conference for his Contender Series. “Are you fucking kidding me? You guys would murder me if I said that – I’d never hear the end of that.”
Nor are we likely to hear the end of the battle between the 89-year-old Arum and the 51-year-old White until one of these two men have passed on, despite the fact that the final bell has rung on the fight between MMA and Boxing. Perhaps the two could settle the score at the next WrestleMania? But that’s another discussion for another time. For now, ring the bell!