Let’s Get It On! (32 page)

On the second night, SEG’s foreign business partners wanted to take us out on the town and spared no expense. With a restaurant on the top floor of a high-rise practically all to ourselves, we sat around a large grill while the chef cooked teppanyaki-style. The Kobe beef melted in my mouth. When asked if we wanted more, we all said yes without hesitation.

Afterward, we learned that Belfort’s second helping cost about $1,500, while Abbott and I had ordered smaller servings for the reasonable price of $750 each. Abbott also liked eating the fat, which was cut up and grilled until it was crisp, not exactly the fuel for a top-caliber athlete. I watched him scarf it down and thought,
Aw, dude, that’s nasty.

After dinner, Belfort excused himself because he had a massage scheduled, but the rest of us went to a lounge. It was a strange setup. Professionally dressed women waited on us, then sat next to us to have conversations. They weren’t prostitutes, and nothing physical was going on. This was just the way the culture worked. I later got a peek at the bill, which Meyrowitz paid—$8,000 for a bunch of drinks.

The night wasn’t over, though. Around 1:30 a.m., we went to a karaoke bar. Since karaoke was obviously important to our new friends, Meyrowitz asked me and Abbott if we’d get up and sing as a sign of goodwill.

Abbott, who was pretty liquored up by then, picked some freaking metalhead song and started banging around the room screaming and going nuts. He got a lot of laughs.

I sang a song by The Rolling Stones. Mick himself would have fucking cringed.

The next morning, we told Belfort over breakfast what had happened, and he was kicking himself. He thought for sure he’d missed out on something with the businesswomen at the lounge and couldn’t quite grasp that it wasn’t like that at all.

During the entire trip, Belfort kept trying to convince Meyrowtiz to let him, instead of Randy Couture, fight Maurice Smith for the title next. Meyrowitz wouldn’t have any of it. It was quite funny to watch.

When we left Japan three days later, Abbott dumped out of his suitcase all the new “Tank” shirts he’d brought to give away and replaced them with towels and robes from the hotel. “Did you feel these things, John?” he said. “They’re the softest damn things I’ve ever felt.”

The first and last time I ever karaoked in my life: on a press tour with SEG Vice President David Isaacs and Tank Abbott in Japan

We all later returned to Yokohama, Japan, and began the week-long ritual leading up to the event. At the press conference, SEG asked me to sit at the dais in the middle between the fighters, which was something I normally wouldn’t do and made me feel stupid as hell. Compared to the press reaction in the United States, the UFC seemed to be a bit of a bigger deal here in Japan. Maurice Smith and Frank Shamrock, both with a wealth of experience fighting in Japan, knew what the crowd wanted, so they played up the charisma and trash-talking for the cameras and did a good job with it.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing in the Land of the Rising Sun, though. At about 2:30 a.m. on the day of the show, I got a call in my hotel room from Meyrowitz, who was downstairs in the lobby. “John, I need you. Come down to the lobby quick.”

Being a heavy sleeper, I said, “Okay,” hung up, thought I must be dreaming, rolled over, and fell asleep.

Five minutes later, the phone rang again.

“Where the hell are you?” Meyrowitz asked, with a little more desperation in his voice.

I hadn’t dreamt it after all.

In the lobby, Meyrowitz was standing with four Japanese men, three in suits and another in a sweat suit. I recognized the beefiest gentleman as Kazuo Takahashi, who’d fought at UFC 12 and regularly competed for the Pancrase organization. One of the other men was Mr. Ozaki, an organizer for Pancrase. When I walked up behind him, Takahashi was startled by my presence. He moved away like I was ugly, which I am, so he had every right to. But when he recognized me, he shook my hand.

At first, I had no idea what was going on, but Meyrowitz was trying to subtly get me up to speed during the conversation. I was able to piece together that Mr. Ozaki wanted Meyrowitz to sign some kind of agreement to copromote the UFC in Japan from there on out. Mr. Ozaki didn’t look like he was going to take no for an answer, and it was obvious Takahashi had been brought along to “encourage” a smooth process.

SEG asked me to sit at the dais between main event fighters Randy Couture and Maurice Smith at UFC “Ultimate Japan.” I felt like an idiot. (December 1997)

“This is not the way we do business,” Meyrowitz said cordially and then suggested that Ozaki’s lawyer draft and send a proposal to SEG for a future show.

I’d never seen anything like this, but I would come to learn that these types of strong-arm negotiations were common on the Japanese MMA scene.

Finally, Meyrowitz scribbled down something general about being willing to do business with the organization in the future and signed it.

Mr. Ozaki talked for a couple more minutes and finally left with his crew.

Meyrowitz looked at me, relieved that I’d come to his rescue.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I told him I was calling our lawyer when I was really calling you. I didn’t need legal advice. I needed protection!”

I was a multipurpose employee. I’m just lucky I wasn’t asked to wax the floors at the SEG office, because I probably would’ve done that too.

The Yokohama Arena filled to capacity that night with 17,000 spectators, which was one of the promotion’s better-attended efforts since UFC 7 in Buffalo. I wouldn’t say the production was bigger or bolder in any way. There were a lot of Japanese employees running around busy as ants, but things weren’t getting done any differently. One change that did take shape was an elevated and larger ramp for the fighters’ entrances.

What was noticeably distinctive was the audience’s behavior. Japanese crowds were unlike their United States counterparts. They were so into the matches but were as quiet as church mice. It was weird because I could hear the corners instructing their fighters, and they could hear whatever I said. I remember Mr. Koji getting upset because Joe Hamilton, the other referee, started the first bout of the night with the word “Hajime,” which is the way you’d start a judo match.

“We don’t want Hajime,” Koji told me. “We want American.”

I was sent to tell Joe he had to change his starting call.

Ultimate Japan was far from my crowning achievement as a referee. It’s where I made my first major blunder as an official in the cage, something I’ve never quite gotten over because my actions affected the immediate futures of two fighters.

It all started a week before the show when dynamic collegiate wrestler Mark Kerr was scratched from the four-man heavyweight tournament. Tra Telligman was tapped to take his place against Marcus “Conan” Silveira, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and pretty aggressive striker. But two days before the show, Meyrowitz and David Isaacs approached me with yet another roster change. The Japanese promoters working with SEG had requested that a Japanese fighter named Kazushi Sakuraba be included in the heavyweight tournament. He was actually a pro wrestler who’d been in only one MMA fight—a worked match he’d lost to Kimo Leopoldo. Sakuraba wasn’t even really a heavyweight.

I knew nothing about Sakuraba, but I knew Silveira was a bruiser. I protested, but Meyrowtiz and Isaacs weren’t going to budge.

The last thing I remember Meyrowitz telling me was, “As soon as he’s in trouble, just get him out of there. Don’t let him get hurt.”

That was my mentality when I walked into the fight.

In the Octagon, Silveira outweighed Sakuraba by a good forty pounds at least, but the Japanese fighter was fast and had some working knowledge of being on the ground. Silveira was out for the kill, though, and landed hard punches until he cornered Sakuraba on the fence and began to unload uppercuts and hooks. Silveira hit Sakuraba with a good right hand.

I saw the Japanese fighter fall to his knees, and thinking he’d been hurt, I jumped in to stop the fight. It was over in less than two minutes.

Sakuraba, who spoke no English, immediately protested what I’d done, as his camp gathered on the cage lip to decipher what had just happened. As I raised Silveira’s hand, Sakuraba tugged at my other arm until I told him to stop.

I left the cage and jumped down to the commentators’ table. “I need to see a replay,” I said.

Meanwhile, Sakuraba refused to leave the cage and tried to wrestle the microphone away from Bruce Buffer to address the audience, but nobody gets Buffer’s mic unless he wants them to.

In the replay, plain as day, Sakuraba took the punch and then dropped levels for a single-leg takedown. There was no debate at all. I turned to commentator Jeff Blatnick and said, “I screwed up.”

Not only had I messed up Sakuraba’s chance to advance in the tournament, but I’d given Silveira a victory he truly hadn’t earned. I felt awful about it.

But things have a way of working out. Abbott hurt his hand in his preliminary qualifier, and Telligman, who won his heavyweight alternate bout, had broken his foot in the process. Nobody was left standing to face Silveira in the tournament finals. Meyrowitz, Isaacs, and I conferred cageside and decided the fairest thing to do would be to let Sakuraba fight Silveira again.