Let’s Get It On! (20 page)

Davie loved the idea.

UFC 2 “No Way Out” was held on March 11, 1994, at the misleadingly named Mammoth Events Center, which had been incarnated as everything from a sports venue to a textile warehouse to an open food market. Compared to the McNichols Sports Arena, the place was like someone’s armpit. It was old, outdated, and in a seedy part of town.

The arena didn’t even have dressing rooms for the fighters to wait in before their bouts, so WOW and SEG rented a few rooms next door in a broken-down hotel full of prostitutes and drug addicts. The fighters pushed the beds against the walls to make space to warm up, and as the night wore on, they were ferried back and forth through the rat-infested alleyway between the two buildings.

Royce found that being Rorion’s brother had its advantages. He was the only fighter given accommodations at the venue in an area behind some curtains.

This night there were sixteen participants and two alternates. There would be a whopping fifteen fights—nearly double the eight quick bouts that had transpired at UFC 1—and Rorion decided I would referee all of them. Only the last eight fights would be televised, and Royce’s first-round bout would kick off the pay-per-view.

I don’t know if there was a momentous realization when I first stepped into the cage, which was officially dubbed the Octagon at the beginning of the UFC 2 telecast. I wore baggy, black Otomix weightlifting pants and a UFC T-shirt with the ironic words “There are no rules” across the chest. Standing there in the cage, I was nervous, I admit. I had no idea what I was doing. I just thought,
Holy Christ, don’t let me screw this up.

The first fight matched eighteen-year-old karate expert Sean Daugherty against Scott Morris, an American ninjutsu black belt at least ten years Daugherty’s senior. Morris, a student of Robert Bussey’s Warrior International program, was escorted to the Octagon by an army of teammates in matching button-down shirts, ties, and red-and-black letterman jackets. One of these dapper guys was Matt Andersen, half brother to future fighting great Jeremy Horn. Andersen himself would fight at UFC 9.

Once the fighters and their corners had settled at opposite ends of the cage, I walked to the center and motioned to each fighter one last time to make sure they were on board. “Are you ready? Are you ready?” I pointed to each fighter. My first “Let’s get it on” was a far cry from its later glory. It was more like I was casually telling the guys I was going down to the store to pick up some milk. At least I accentuated it by raising my arm and throwing the imaginary gauntlet down in front of me.

As soon as the fighters engaged, I got out of the way fast.

Daugherty came out and threw a really fancy front hook kick, but Morris grabbed ahold of Daugherty’s neck in their clinch and flipped him over his head in a backward roll before climbing on top into mount.

That’s good,
I thought.

Morris then cranked on Daugherty’s neck, and I’m sure the karate kid had felt nothing like this in the dojos. He tapped the mat fast and hard, and I rushed in to separate them. Twenty seconds had elapsed.

That’s it?
I thought.
This is going to be easy.

Before Morris could walk away, I grabbed his arm and raised it to signal that he was the winner and would advance. The two fighters left the cage, and the next pinball was in the chute ready to be launched on the first fight’s heels.

Patrick Smith, a Sabaki Challenge champion kickboxer, was a returning fighter from UFC 1. I’d also seen his opponent, Ray Wizard, at a karate tournament in Los Angeles. Wizard was fast. I quickly realized fighter recognition would be important for me because it gave me at least a faint idea of what the dynamic of the bout might be.

I checked both fighters’ fingernails and toenails to make sure they’d been cut down and then walked to center cage and repeated the starting words.

Smith flailed his arms above his head in some mock traditional stance, but what he really wanted was to lock up with Wizard and find a quick submission. Smith had learned his lesson from UFC 1. He clinched with Wizard and pulled him in tight as the two migrated to the fence. Finding a guillotine choke around Wizard’s neck, Smith pushed his hips up to sink the choke in even deeper.

I was standing next to them. Rorion, dressed this time in a more practical tracksuit, squatted on the other side of the chain link. We both knew either the tapout or Wizard’s unconsciousness was imminent.

As soon as Wizard went limp, I stepped in and he fell back to the canvas.

Two fights in under two minutes. No sweat.

The next fight paired Johnny Rhodes, another karate champion, against David Levicki, a kung fu practitioner and supposed Navy SEAL.

I took one look at all 275 pounds of Levicki and thought,
I don’t think so.
I’d met a few Navy SEALs, and there was no way a man Levicki’s size would be able to fulfill all those physical demands. Besides, the way Levicki talked about it set off my bullshit meter big-time.

Still, Levicki had Rhodes on the run right away. But when they clinched and fell to the mat, Rhodes landed inside Levicki’s guard, then quickly hopped one of his own legs over Levicki’s right leg into half guard. From there, the fighters pretty much stalemated in terms of punching, though Levicki regained his guard by pulling Rhodes’ body back between his legs. I watched Rhodes try to push his fingers into Levicki’s jugular, which was perfectly legal.

Levicki wasn’t doing much from the bottom except trying to keep Rhodes close. As he hugged him, Levicki’s legs naturally tugged at Rhodes’ gi pants until suddenly we had a full moon rising inside the Octagon.

Son of a bitch,
I thought. I didn’t know what to do at first because I wasn’t supposed to interfere with the fight. But the man’s ass was staring me in the face, so I decided to move in and pull them up. I tried to offset this by blurting out, “Get to work,” but Rhodes’ pants just kept sneaking back down his legs. I must have yanked them up at least fifteen times.

Eventually, Rhodes’ hugging, slapping, and sporadic punches opened a cut over Levicki’s eye. The blood began to flow, creating a puddle on the canvas next to him, but there wasn’t much I could do but grab those pants and try to keep UFC 2 from earning an X rating. The blood started to cloud Levicki’s vision, so I asked him if he wanted to continue. Levicki finally tapped out by telling me no, he’d had enough.

At about thirteen minutes, it was the longest UFC fight so far, and I was thinking,
Shit, here I’ve been touching a man’s ass on TV. This sucks.

Little did I know a little nudity would be the least of my worries. It was all about to go downhill.

The first round’s fourth fight matched the two greatest names I would ever hear in the UFC: Freek Hamaker and Thaddeus Luster. Hamaker was a student of Gerard Gordeau, the savate champion who’d made it to the UFC 1 finals against Royce. Gordeau had been announced as retired for this event, but I guess he wanted to keep his lineage alive by sending in one of his students.

Hamaker said his main discipline was sambo, which is Russia’s version of wrestling with some effective leg locks and submissions. Luster was introduced as a seventh degree black belt in kung fu san soo, which he calmly explained on the telecast was the most potent fighting system on the planet.

As soon as this match hit the ground, the ponytailed Hamaker moved on top of Luster to half guard. Luster soon figured out that Hamaker’s ponytail made a nice handle for keeping his opponent at an arm’s distance. Hair pulling wasn’t illegal, so I simply paced, waiting like the rest of the audience.

Hamaker kept trying to line up a shoulder lock called the keylock or Americana. I was a Brazilian jiu-jitsu blue belt under Rorion at this point, so I could follow his technique. I was tempted to tell him he was doing it wrong.

Hamaker finally freed his now unruly hair and managed to create enough distance for a few punches. Then he mounted Luster.

Smothered underneath the Dutchman, Luster called out a muffled surrender. He’d had enough, and I stepped in fast.

It was the second verbal submission of the night, which reminded me that I had to listen just as much as I had to watch.

I was still thinking I was doing all right. I hadn’t prematurely stopped a fight and was doing what Rorion wanted, and that’s what I thought I’d been hired to do. The next fight would make me reevaluate my thinking.

Kickboxer Robert Lucarelli bobbed into the arena. At 245 pounds, he was bigger than opponent Orlando Weit, a slighter but well-conditioned muay Thai fighter, who bowed to each corner of the cage in the tradition of his art.

Lucarelli was soft and out of shape, so I was thinking he should go after Weit as fast as he could before he tired out. As if he were reading my thoughts, Lucarelli muscled Weit down and grabbed his neck in a basic bulldog choke within the first few seconds.

Weit was the better athlete, though. His instincts, agility, and a lot of hair pulling got him out of the hold and back on his feet in no time. When Lucarelli went to rise, Weit grabbed his head and launched a knee into his face. Lucarelli folded to the mat again, and Weit kicked his head like a soccer ball, then began to walk away.

I still couldn’t do anything because Lucarelli wasn’t tapping out, so Weit came back to finish the job. Honestly, I think Lucarelli was too dazed to signal that he was done, which left the only other option: his corner throwing in the towel.

Remember: I’d told the corners beforehand that if I pointed to them, I was signaling for them to think about throwing in the towel.

I pointed to Lucarelli’s corner, but they didn’t respond.

“Watch your fighter,” I warned, but I didn’t get a reaction. My eyes darted nervously between Lucarelli’s corner and the beat down, and I knew I had to do something. I started yelling for the cornermen to throw in the towel, but they just stared at me.

With an elbow to the back of the head, Weit smacked Lucarelli’s mouthpiece out. Lucarelli crawled away like his life depended on it—no exaggeration—and his corner finally tossed in the towel as Weit landed another devastating elbow to the back of their injured fighter’s head.

It was a scary sequence that lasted no more than ten seconds, and it ripped the bloodthirsty crowd out of the seats. They were the most uncomfortable ten seconds I’ve ever squirmed through in the Octagon.

I walked a shell-shocked Lucarelli to his corner. “How much did you have to see?” I said. “How long was I telling you to throw the towel?”

“He told us if we threw in the towel, he was going to kill us,” one of them sheepishly answered.

Holy shit,
I thought,
this is a problem.

I didn’t want something like this to happen again, but there was nothing I could do. The next fight was under way before I could give it a second thought.

Remco Pardoel was a Dutch grappler specializing in jiu-jitsu, so I thought he must at least have a good understanding of base and where to position his body on the mat. I didn’t know anything about Alberto Cerro Leon’s style, called pencak silat, not even how to pronounce it. It was categorized as an exotics art along with the other obscure disciplines introduced during UFC 2.

They’d said Leon had broken bones, so I thought he would either strike hard or do submissions. At least Leon, who resembled a young Steven Seagal, looked the part in his black gi with matching grave demeanor.

Whatever his style, I can’t imagine things went the way Leon had planned. After an opening exchange and a scramble to the mat, Leon found himself on his back with a rather large Dutchman pinning him down from side control.

Leon’s discipline, which I would later learn was a culmination of Indonesian striking arts, didn’t seem to cover this position in their manuals. So Leon did the only thing he could: he tried to stick his fingers in or over Pardoel’s mouth whenever he could to slow him down.

Pardoel was in complete control, though. He mounted Leon and then shifted back to side control and isolated Leon’s arm. He didn’t have a standard armlock, but from his judo side control, Pardoel managed to get that arm into a straight lock, bending it backward between his legs at an uncomfortable-looking angle. After about ten minutes of getting smothered by Pardoel from multiple angles, Leon and his art of pencak silat tapped out.

Of the eight opening-round bouts, the seventh was a pretty good fight, mostly because both men had a little knowledge of jiu-jitsu. Jason DeLucia, the determined, athletic youngster who’d submitted Trent Jenkins during the UFC 1 alternates match, returned to face Scott Baker, a Wing Chun master who’d been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with black belt Pedro Sauer in Salt Lake City, Utah. DeLucia had been choked out by Royce at UFC 1, and I knew he’d sought out some jiu-jitsu instruction afterward, so I was a lot more familiar with his capabilities.

DeLucia sprang out of the gate and landed a traditional sidekick to Baker’s body before he clinched with him. Though DeLucia was trying to initiate the takedown, he didn’t resist Baker’s instinct to push him to the ground. DeLucia now had guard from his back, but Baker was able to pass and get to full mount, where he was basically sitting on DeLucia’s chest. DeLucia did a good job of using his hips to buck Baker off balance and take top position. It was solid Jiu-Jitsu 101 technique.