STEP INTO THE OCTAGON
With UFC Fight Night about to take place in Ottawa, the Citizen’s Darren Brown brings readers an up-close look at the sacrifices required to pursue a career as a mixed martial arts fighter by telling the story of Ottawa’s own Fred Stonehouse.
What will future archeologists conclude when they uncover The Octagon, the 30-foot-wide, eightsided caged enclosure that mixed martial artists call home? It resembles little else — the offspring of a marriage between a boxing ring and cattle bullpen, perhaps, its less-than-clear provenance dating back at least to the first Ultimate Fighting Championship night — UFC 1 — in Denver in November 1993.
A handful of organizers of that inaugural event have claimed authorship of the ring’s trademarked design, one of them even crediting the terrible 1980 Chuck Norris martial arts/ninja film, The Octagon, for its inspiration. Nine months before UFC 1, though, martial artist and promoter Greg Patschull used a strikingly similar stage for his Cage of Rage event at University of California, Irvine. So who knows? Perhaps, not dissimilar to numerous inventors coming up with the telephone at about the same time, the birth of The Octagon was simply due.
In the course of their research, forensic historians will sift through layer upon layer of dried human blood and sweat — though likely few tears, there being no crying in mixed martial arts — in search of clues.
There’s no telling what they may find, depending on how deep into the strata they choose to dig, for underneath The Octagon lie the likes of boxing champ Muhammad Ali, actor and kung fu expert Bruce Lee, a U.S. presidential hopeful, a large and combative Brazilian family, ancient Greeks and at least one fencer.
With that in mind, we offer this primer for the uninitiated, as we head into the Throwdown in O-Town.
Q What is MMA?
AMixed martial arts is a combat sport that combines elements of numerous styles of fighting, such as muay thai, kick-boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, boxing, judo, taekwondo and karate.
It combines the striking skills typically associated with, say, boxing or kickboxing, and the grappling ones found in wrestlingstyle sports. In the distant past, fights typically featured athletes from one discipline fighting practitioners from another — a boxer against a judoka, for example.
Since the formation of the UFC in 1993 and its growth into the sport’s most influential organization, however, MMA fighters have become more homogeneous, with each trained in multiple disciplines.
Matches usually consist of three five-minute rounds, with championship fights, as well as non-title UFC main bouts, scheduled for five rounds.
Q Rules? What rules?
ATo the casual observer, MMA appears to have few, if any, rules and, indeed, early iterations included No Holds Barred events, where pretty much anything short of brass knuckles was allowed.
Today, conduct in the sport is governed by the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, a Douglas Adams-sounding title over which specifications for weight divisions, hand-wrapping, ring dimensions, protective equipment (mouthguards for all; cups for male fighters only; chest protection for women) and the like are spelled out. “Each unarmed combatant,” the rules state in a boy-scouty way that belies the sport’s image, “must be clean and present a tidy appearance.”
The unified rules list 31 infractions that can result in penalties or disqualification at the discretion of the referee. These include head-butting, eye-gouging, biting, spitting, hair-pulling, groin attacks, putting a finger into any of your opponent’s orifices, striking the back of the head or spine, kidney kicks with your heel (although using your elbow is fine), throat strikes of any kind (including “grabbing the trachea”), clawing, pinching, kicking or kneeing the head of a “grounded” opponent, stomping a grounded opponent, using abusive language and, most detrimental perhaps to the sport’s popularity, timidity. In short, it’s almost identical to the rules governing most family reunions, with additional penalties for pinching, swearing and even the friendliest of cuffs to the back of your nephew’s head (and, until his recent incarceration, Uncle Matt’s annual Christmas Eve magic show that included making silver dollars appear from one orifice or another).
Q How do I know when it’s over?
AAmbulance sirens are one cue, but there are other possible outcomes. Most dramatic, of course, is the knockout (KO), where an opponent is rendered unconscious. A technical knockout, or TKO, occurs when the referee stops the fight or when an injury is severe enough to end it. A fighter can also win by submission — if his opponent physically or verbally surrenders by “tapping out” — or if a combatant is disqualified or, by his absence, forfeits. If the allotted match time has elapsed and both fighters are still standing, a decision will be determined by the scorecards of three presiding judges. Draws and No Decisions, the battle equivalent of kissing your sister, are also possible.
Q What are the common moves?
AThe names of some you’ll know or can intuit if you’ve ever seen a boxing film: the uppercut, jab, hook and clinch. Others include the choke, guillotine, hammerfist spinning back-kick, Superman punch, rear naked choke, axe kick, and the ground-and-pound, the latter of which might more accurately be called “opening a can of whoop-ass.”
Q It often looks like head trauma served on an octagonal platter. Is the sport really that dangerous?
AThat depends on whom you ask. Defenders of the sport note that the incidence of concussion has dropped considerably since the unified rules were developed in 2000 and that fighters are less inclined to suffer concussions as they are trained to take hits, whereas hockey and football players aren’t. Still, a knee to the temple is likely to cause far more serious injury than anything experienced by, say, an Ultimate Frisbee player. In 1997, Arizona senator John McCain compared MMA to “human cockfighting,” and led a campaign to convince states to ban it.
In an article published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers at Macquarie University in Australia assembled results from a half-dozen studies and found the injury incidence rate among MMA fighters to be 228.7 injuries per 1,000 exposures, an exposure being one fighter in one fight. This is within the upper range experienced by professional boxers (118 to 250 injuries per 1,000 exposures) but far higher than those found in judo (44), taekwondo (79) and amateur boxing (78).
By comparison, a sixyear University of Calgary study found the rate among NHL players to be about 15.6 injuries per 1,000 games (even factoring in each player’s actual time on the ice raises the incidence to only 49 injuries for every 1,000 hours of play.
Meanwhile, a 2014 University of Toronto study determined that MMA fighters suffered the highest incidence of concussions and other traumatic brain injuries among athletes — about 159 per 1,000 exposures. The rate for professional football players was 81, boxers 49, and NHL players 22.
In 2007, McCain conceded that MMA had made progress since he made his denigrating remark a decade earlier.
“They have cleaned up the sport to the point, at least in my view, where it is not human cockfighting anymore,” he said.
“They haven’t made me a fan, but they have made progress.”
Q Have there been any deaths?
AIn theory, MMA’s safety banner could now read “836 days since the last fatality from a sanctioned fight.” That was 29-year-old Congolese fighter Booto Guylain, who died on March 5, 2014, a week after suffering a severe head injury in a fight in Johannesburg. Guylain’s death was the fourth in sanctioned play; there have also been nine reported deaths from non-sanctioned bouts, most recently that of 28-year-old Joao Carvalho, a Portuguese fighter who died on April 11, 48 hours after a bout in Dublin.
It bears noting that UFC, the promoter of tonight’s tilts in Ottawa, has never had a fight result in a fatality.
Q Was the sport ever banned?
ALots. As a result of McCain’s efforts, 36 U.S. states banned UFC events. The organization responded by working with state athletic commissions to further define and enforce rules to make MMA safer and more palatable to the general public. Today, all 50 states allow mixed martial arts competitions. In Canada, professional MMA bouts were illegal according to Section 83(2) of the Canadian Criminal Code, which declared that only boxing matches in which fists only were used were legal. Provincial athletic commissions found a way around that prohibition by classifying mixed martial arts as “mixed boxing.” MMA was formally decriminalized in 2013, when provinces were granted the power to regulate and sanction the sport.
Q How old is MMA?
A Less than 25 years in its current incarnation. But its roots extend to ancient Greece and a sport known as pankration, which featured grappling and striking skills similar to today’s MMA. With only biting and eyegouging off-limits, the sport was introduced to the Olympic Games in 648 BC. When the modern games were revived in 1896, pankration was the only one of its original competitions left off the menu. Soon after, in 1899, Britain’s Edward William Barton-Wright founded bartitsu, the first mixed martial art to combine European and Asian fighting styles.
The 1800s and early 1900s saw much cross-discipline competition, with French kick-boxers, British bare-knucklers, wrestlers and the like challenging one another to bouts.
The 1920s, meanwhile, were seminal in the development of MMA. At the time, Brazilian circuses included popular “vale tudo” matches, incorporating numerous martial arts with very few rules (“Vale tudo” roughly translates to “anything goes”), and the Gracie family, whose numerous members were proficient in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, began holding challenge matches in gyms and garages, eventually cornering the market on vale tudo events. In 1978, Rorion Gracie moved from Rio de Janeiro to California, where he promoted jiujitsu and taught hundreds of classes a month out of his garage. He was also hired to choreograph the fight scenes in the Lethal Weapon movie. In 1993, he co-founded UFC.
Mixed martial arts were already well received in other parts of the world. In the 1950s, Wong Shun Leung’s wing chun style of kung fu saw him prevail in numerous illegal street fights, earning him the nickname Gong Sau Wong, or King of Talking Hands. In one televised fight, he defeated a champion fencer. The Hong Kong fighter also trained actor Bruce Lee, who in the 1970s helped popularize mixed martial arts in the West with his jeet kune do style of fighting, incorporating pieces from numerous genres. UFC president Dana White has referred to Lee as “the father of mixed martial arts.”
One of the most famous mixed matches occurred in 1976, when Muhammad Ali and Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki squared off at Tokyo’s sold-out 14,000-seat Nippon Budokan, with some tickets selling for as much as $3,500. The match, according to one reporter, was originally intended to be fixed, with Ali first accidentally knocking out the referee and then, bending over to show his concern for the ref, getting knocked out himself by a kick to the head from Inoki. But Ali, upon discovering the fix, refused to take part, and so the fight was on — sort of.
Neither athlete would fight the other’s style, and so the match was called a draw in the 15th round. Ali threw only six punches over the entire fight, during which fans threw trash and shouted “Money back! Money back!” Ali’s legs were badly cut during the fight, however, and he spent three days in the hospital, where he developed an infection that raised the possibility of amputation. He also suffered two blood clots in his legs that affected his mobility for the remainder of his boxing career. The fight was considered one of the most embarrassing moments of that career.
In 2001, casino moguls Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, through their Zuffa holding company (Italian for “fight”), bought UFC for $2 million, an investment that Forbes magazine suggested they’d never get back.
Q And how did that work out for them?
A Pretty well. In 2014, Forbes magazine listed UFC’s worth at about $1.65 billion, ranking it in the top 40 sports brands in the world.