A Brutal Sport Fights for Its Life

Tank is big. Tank goes 270, easy, his belly bulging out, huge as a camel hump, and strong, my lord, he can bench-press 600 pounds. He is bad in a way you can see from the 49th row, the shaved head and heavy dark goatee and eyes that seem to glare from under the heavy line of his brow like a machine-gunner’s under a helmet.

Tank is a street fighter with a bazooka right hand, and he is stalking Cal Worsham, a 230-pound U.S. Marine who is no slouch either, a master of taekwondo. They are going at it in a chain-link pit known as the Octagon, in Birmingham, Ala., in an arena roiling with noise and roving spotlights and stage smoke and placards hoisted by long-legged women.

Closing fast, Tank grabs hold of Worsham’s thighs and lifts him right off the mat, so high Worsham is suddenly teetering atop Tank’s shoulders, raining down punches. “Look out!” a television announcer yells as the Marine reaches the top rail of the chain-link, about ready to go over. Only then does Tank turn and slam him to the canvas and bring the fight to an end.

At a long table adjoining the Octagon sits a young executive, David Isaacs, who looks like anything but a fighter--or even a fight fan. Wavy-haired, trim, he is all Madison Avenue, even in jeans and tennis shoes. With a pair of Harvard degrees--in economics and law--Isaacs is, at 31, one of the two men directly responsible for the Ultimate Fighting Championships. He handles daily operating matters and the planning for future bouts--where, when, who takes part.

His boss, Robert Meyrowitz, out in the TV production truck, is the avuncular owner and CEO of Semaphore Entertainment Group, a New York firm specializing in pay-per-view television events. Meyrowitz, 55, graduated from Syracuse with a bachelor’s degree in history and a passion for the Rolling Stones. He is the money man--a riverboat gambler who sinks formidable sums into promoting concerts and other entertainment programming.

Together, these two entrepreneurs took a flier on a bold concept--live, real fights with almost no rules--and turned it into a spectacle worthy of ancient Rome or American television. For a while, it took off. There were heady times, beginning in 1994, when Ultimate Fighting brought in a flow of cash like a Texas gusher. Telecasts from small-town arenas went out through satellite uplinks and cable networks and exploded into homes. Men sat transfixed, contorting with body English.

This was action, oh man, it hammered you right in the gut--like a violent playground brawl--and it was yours to watch for $19.95. It was primitive, more elemental than any other sport in how it measured a man. Boxing comes close, but boxing is not real fighting. Look at Mike Tyson, constrained by three-minute rounds, padded gloves and a whole framework of artificial rules. Real fighting is not like that, Isaacs will tell you. Real fighting is what you see when two men tangle in an alley--or in the Octagon.

“At one point, people generally thought Mike Tyson was the toughest guy on the planet,” Isaacs says. “But I think anybody who’s seen Ultimate Fighting believes that our heavyweight champion . . . will take Mike Tyson and twist him into a pretzel.”

By 1996, the choke-outs and bloody eyes and head-butts shone in more than a quarter-million living rooms. Isaacs and Meyrowitz had found a winner, or so it seemed. But society beats down extremism, even in sports, and during the last year Ultimate Fighting has taken a drubbing.

Politicians, clergymen and newspaper columnists denounced it as brutal and abhorrent: no more than human cockfighting. The backlash echoed from Congress to the legislative halls of Oregon, Hawaii, New York and Montreal; dozens of states and major cities have either banned the tournaments or imposed restrictions that prevent them from being held. Cable companies stopped selling air time. Viewership plummeted to half what it used to be.

The rise and fall of Ultimate Fighting is a madcap tale with a pointed lesson: It is difficult to turn a profit in the world of extreme sports. Mainstream audiences want thrills and danger, but not if they’re too raw or too ugly. ESPN’s X Games tapped the reckless abandon of youths on bikes and skateboards and became a marketing triumph. Ultimate Fighting reached further, putting muscular behemoths in brutal contests, and fizzled.

The venture is not yet dead, but Isaacs and Meyrowitz are scrambling. They are holding to their ambitious schedule--still running five tournaments a year, mostly in small towns in the South--but they realize the sport may never play big in Peoria; it is illegal there, too.

All they can do at the moment is hang on and tinker with the rules. Try to appease the most vocal detractors without destroying the character of the sport. Try to promulgate their view that this jarring ultraviolence contains something beautiful and pure--”the essence of competition,” as Isaacs likes to say. “Two men walk in there . . . who walks out the champion? Who walks out defeated?”

*

Playboy magazine identified its own choice for the world’s toughest man--or at least “the toughest man in the United States”--in 1989. He was a bronze, 37-year-old Brazilian living in, of all places, Torrance. Rorion Gracie had claimed this title with the brash offer to fight anyone in America, winner take all, for $100,000--a challenge no man ever accepted.

Rorion was destined to become the father of Ultimate Fighting. He was suave, engaging, someone who moved comfortably through the mirrored halls of business. He valued the rich traditions of the martial arts; the attitudes and techniques had been passed down to him from infancy; they ran through his family like veins of gold through a mother lode.

No one knows the origins of hand-to-hand combat. Surely it dates to the Stone Age; there are references in the writings of Homer, in hieroglyphics etched on tombs in the Nile Valley. In Asia, systemized combat is traced to the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, a founder of Zen, who shortly after AD 500 taught self-defense to embattled monks at the Shaolin Temple in China.

Those teachings later spread and evolved into disciplines devoted to striking (karate and kung fu), throwing (judo and aikido) and both striking and grappling (jujitsu). Early this century, a Japanese master who resettled in Brazil taught jujitsu to a teenager named Carlos Gracie. Carlos taught his brother Helio, later Rorion’s father and Brazil’s first great sports hero.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the 5-foot-8, 140-pound Helio produced headlines in O Globo, Brazil’s biggest newspaper, by taking on all comers in sensational, no-holds-barred arena fights. Some lasted more than an hour. He beat opponents who outweighed him by 70 or 80 pounds. He broke one fighter’s ribs. He filled 80,000 seats in a soccer stadium. He founded a dynasty, passing on his skills to his own nine children, brother Carlos’ 21 and others who followed.

“There were 90 grandchildren and 68 great-grandchildren,” Rorion says, “all of them involved in jujitsu.”

The Gracies became perhaps the most remarkable family in the history of sports. Jujitsu was their showcase, and they refined it to emphasize grappling holds and joint manipulations. Their approach--known as Brazilian, or Gracie, jujitsu--was a formidable weapon in no-holds-barred tournaments that spread both in Brazil and in Japan, under the names vale tudo (“anything goes”) and pancration (“game of all powers”).

Vale tudo was virtually unknown in the United States when Rorion moved to Los Angeles in 1978. Shaking off the weight of his family’s fame in Brazil, he set out to build his own small empire. He cleaned houses, hustled for bit parts in movies and taught martial arts in a garage. Before long he developed a client list of actors--he coached Mel Gibson for the original “Lethal Weapon”--and eventually, in Torrance, opened the Gracie Jujitsu Academy.

In 1993, Rorion decided to stage a big-money tournament of the type popular back home. He raised $135,000 from his students, signed up fighters and rented an arena in Denver, where bare-knuckle bouts were legal. To market the event for television, he sent out a videotape to Semaphore Entertainment; it featured Rorion’s younger brother Royce, who was just entering his prime as an undefeated Brazilian champion. In his homeland he was known as “the Python.”

*

Meyrowitz, who had created and syndicated radio’s well-known “King Biscuit Flower Hour,” started his company in 1988 to develop pay-per-view programming. Television was changing. Cable was expanding. The pay-per-view market allowed promoters to couple a live event--say, a Billy Joel concert--with nationwide TV sales that might total 50,000 or 100,000 households. Semaphore’s entire project list in 1993 consisted of musical and entertainment events.

Sports programs were expanding, too. As a metaphor for an active, beer-drinking, top-down, go-for-it lifestyle, no advertising vehicle was better, and the rights fees spiraled accordingly. NBC was about to complete a deal that would cost it $456 million to telecast the Summer Olympics. Fox was negotiating a $1.6-billion, four-year contract to televise pro football.

Smaller networks and independents were shut out unless they were willing to specialize in ice skating or track and field, or come up with an entirely new product, an event that a network could own and develop without paying huge sums for rights.

ESPN was taking that tack. The all-sports network--owned by ABC, a loser in the Olympic bidding wars--was launching its second network, ESPN2. Programming Director Ron Semiao cast about for ideas by browsing through specialty magazines devoted to skating, rock climbing and bicycling. In 1994 his brainstorm, the Extreme Games, would begin a run of extraordinary success; the games would grow into a $15-million-a-year extravaganza with competitions in street luge, ice climbing and other hip high-risk sports.

When a programming director walked into Semaphore’s Manhattan office clutching Rorion’s videotape, Isaacs and Meyrowitz thought they had found their own breakthrough product. Isaacs had never heard of the Gracies--”To us they were nobodies”--but he watched the poorly shot images dance across the screen. “It was just so compelling. You were just drawn to it. The office filled up with people, saying, ‘What is this?’ It was amazing.”

Semaphore and Rorion agreed to become partners. They would build the venture from scratch as a TV event, control the rights and divide the revenues, with Semaphore buying air time for the tournament in Denver. “From a business standpoint,” Isaacs says, “this was wide-open.”

The name, Ultimate Fighting, was chosen despite Isaacs’ concern that it sounded too much like Ultimate Frisbee. Film director John Milius (“Conan the Barbarian”) devised the Octagon. The slogan, “There are no rules!” was part of a marketing scheme that exploited the savagery with a brazenness that Meyrowitz would later rue as “an early, bad mistake.”

From the start, crowds were unruly. Fights broke out in the grandstands. But the show itself was often stunning, especially when Royce Gracie entered the Octagon. The 6-foot-1, 178-pound fighter dominated three straight matches. His defeat of a fighter who outweighed him by 40 pounds was galvanizing--not only for the crowd on hand, but for a pay-per-view audience of 80,000 households, double what Isaacs had expected. At $14.95 a pop, the income stream was substantial.

“It wasn’t like we made hundreds of millions of dollars,” Isaacs says, “but we thought, ‘Maybe we’ve got something here.’ ” Certainly enough to proceed with the next event, boost the promotional budget, reach a rental-video deal with a company that would splash this descriptive across the video jacket: “The bloodiest, most barbaric show in history. . . .”

Five events a year became an optimum pace. Royce Gracie became the giant-slaying superstar. Pay-per-view sales kept climbing. All over the country there were people like Robby Russ, a bar waiter from Atlanta who happened to catch a promo one night and became a zealot; he now records every bout and travels hundreds of miles to see fights. Or Bob Voss, a pizzeria owner in Tulsa, Okla.; he rented a tape on a whim at Blockbuster and “was hooked.”

Early bouts had no judges, no scoring system, no time limits. A fight could end three ways: by knockout, surrender or by intervention of the referee. You weren’t allowed to gouge eyes or “fishhook”--snag an opponent’s mouth with a crooked finger--but you could choke, pull hair, kick the guy in the face.

Issacs and Meyrowitz were hearing some flak about the untrammeled violence, but their primary problem was how to format their event for television. Disaster struck in late 1994, in Tulsa, during the night’s climactic battle between Royce Gracie and a difficult opponent.

“The fight lasted 16 minutes,” Rorion recalls. “But at 14 minutes . . . nationwide, all the television sets went blank.” The air time had expired. Out in the electronic universe, in about 240,000 homes, friends were eating pizzas, drinking beer, watching the action. Then, blammo. Nothing. “The biggest mishap in pay-per-view history.”

For Isaacs and Meyrowitz, it was a catastrophe. Complaints poured in like windblown hail. Hours were spent on phone calls, meetings. This can never happen again, they decided. Never. The solution was galling to the purists: time limits. Twelve minutes and a fight was over. Rorion was outraged; time limits changed the psychology of the contest. Royce, who liked to “cook” his opponents, letting them exhaust themselves in vain attacks, lost his edge when a larger man could fall on him and do nothing and let the clock run out.

“I told Meyrowitz, ‘If you instill time limits you’re going to kill the show,’ ” he says. Meyrowitz stood firm. Next came kiss-your-sister draws, and then, to settle those, thumb-twiddling judges. The frustrated Gracies sold out.

Rorion, who still runs his two-story academy in Torrance, laments what might have been. “I always felt I had everything to blow boxing off the map,” he says. “That if I can do the thing the way I want, nobody’s going to watch boxing any more.”

*

While Rorion was getting out, another promoter was jumping in, creating a rival enterprise that would cause no end of difficulty for Isaacs and Meyrowitz. Donald Zuckerman, a onetime lawyer and former owner of the Ritz nightclub in Manhattan, had wangled financial support from Penthouse baron Bob Guccione and founded a pay-per-view venture he called Extreme Fighting.

Zuckerman was a raconteur, a fledgling Hollywood producer, a man hot after bicoastal opportunities with a phone pressed to his ear. With a circular fighting ring and his own cast of gladiators, Zuckerman booked an inaugural event in November 1995 at the Brooklyn Armory, a Gothic-looking, century-old warehouse large enough for 5,000 bleacher seats.

Word of a major event in New York got the media going, got the mayor’s office involved. The city blocked the use of the Armory. With all hell breaking loose, Zuckerman retreated to a film sound stage in Wilmington, N.C., where he was forced to give away tickets.

“A nightmare,” Zuckerman said.

Isaacs and Meyrowitz followed the news reports with trepidation. They had scheduled their events in mostly modest media markets--Tulsa, Charlotte, Casper, Wyo. Slip in, slip out. But Extreme Fighting streaked across the New York skyline like a noisy turbo-prop. Isaacs’ next target was Denver. The mayor, though, blocked the engagement.

Radar screens began flashing at the U.S. Capitol. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), an ex-Naval Academy pugilist and Vietnam prisoner of war, was already aware of Ultimate Fighting; someone had sent him a video. Disgusted, McCain fired up his word processor and blasted off letters to all 50 governors: “A brutal and repugnant blood sport . . . [that] should not be allowed to take place anywhere in the U.S.”

Isaacs had no idea--yet--of McCain’s involvement, but phone lines were crackling. Anywhere Semaphore tried to go, attorneys general and athletic commissioners were putting up roadblocks. Booking dates was now complicated by court hearings and lawyer consultations and long nights worrying about whether a $1-million show would even hit the air.

Critics fixed on the blood and the cage-like Octagon. Isaacs found himself on the defensive, pointing out time and again that there are doctors at ringside; that fighters can surrender with honor; that there are pre-fight medical exams and blood tests for HIV and hepatitis. He argued that the sinister-looking chain-link is actually a safety measure, preventing fighters from tumbling into the crowd. His fighters are safer than boxers because unpadded fists get hurt before they can strike enough blows to cause brain injuries. No one has ever been seriously injured, he told detractors. It is only a matter of time, they replied.

For most of 1996, Ultimate Fighting staged its battles in the courtroom. In Rhode Island, state commissioners ruled that the bouts would have to be held in a wrestling ring. Isaacs went instead to Detroit, where a judge’s last-minute ruling allowed the event to go on provided there was no head-butting or punching with a closed hand.

“Seconds into the first bout,” the Detroit News reported, “Cal Worsham . . . drove his head into the face of Zane Frazier. . . . By the end of the night, the ring had the dark, stained look of the floor of an auto repair shop.”

Detroit did huge box office, but, damn, the picture was becoming scary. For every arena he rented, Isaacs had to line up an alternative spot. North America became a tactical board game; Canada was out of bounds. Bans were being enacted in North and South Carolina, Missouri and Oregon. Other states, including California, were making it clear that the fights were not welcome; by McCain’s tabulation, that list would grow to more than 40.

*

Drawn by purses of $50,000, fighters came from everywhere. Rorion recruited the first combatants; later, Isaacs ran ads in Black Belt, Karate International and martial-arts magazines in Japan, Brazil, Germany and Russia.

Talented boxers were difficult to get--they could profit more in the ring--but the sport attracted judo artists, kickboxers, karate masters. A number of new stars--Royce Gracie’s successors--were former collegiate and Olympic wrestlers: Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock, Mark Coleman. They trained at gyms like the Lion’s Den, the House of Pain and Hammer House.

Never mind that Ultimate Fighting was the narrowest of subcultures, visible only to a fraction of cable and satellite TV subscribers; it offered a spotlight to athletes like Coleman, a former national collegiate champion who competed for the 1992 U.S. Olympic team. The glory he never experienced as an amateur wrestler rained down on him like tinsel in the Octagon. He was besieged for autographs, pictures.

“My phone was ringing all day long,” he says. “Various people wanting to represent me . . . telling me I’m the best. It changed my life.”

Ego is why they do it, why they enter the cage, risk getting their eye sockets broken, their lips mashed to tomato pulp. Fighters hear the crowd. The noise swells up in their brains, part of the sensory cocktail of colored spotlights and faces--the fans and officials, the entourages, the trainers, the security and medical people, all eyes on them--and the tense warmups, hands hitting leather, the sweat flowing, waiting in concrete staging rooms. Take the cue and step through the curtains into the arena in a fervor, like snake-handlers, caught up in the danger and theater.

A long, arduous fight can begin to drain away the energy, producing a fatigue that turns arms and legs into lead pipes. Now and then a puncher or kickboxer will inflict blows that land like clubs, but usually the adrenaline buffers the pain; blood flows and the fighters scarcely feel it, cheeks and ears slam into the mat but the mind is concerned with moving, seizing the advantage.

Severn, religious, married with four children, says his most difficult adjustment was not in absorbing abuse, but in meting it out: “I had to struggle more with my conscience than with my opponent. I was going against 26 years of sportsmanship.”

Sportsmanship yielded. In one fight against Tank, Severn landed 276 elbow strikes alone. He is now known as “The Beast.”

*

For Isaacs, there had to be a line of demarcation, a place where Ultimate Fighting dug in. That place was New York state--home turf, where the Legislature was considering a ban. This was Normandy and Waterloo put together. Legal expenses topped $1 million a year as Isaacs and Meyrowitz lobbied in Albany. The amazing part was that it worked. They wheedled passage of a law that allowed the sport to operate under the state Athletic Commission.

Although not exactly carte blanche, it was at least a start. Isaacs opened discussions with the commission to establish rules of combat, even while he searched for sites for a February tournament “as far as possible from [New York City], so the commission could see our first event outside the media spotlight.” The place was Niagara Falls.

One morning, shortly before the scheduled event, Meyrowitz opened the New York Times: Extreme Fighting, the paper reported, was planning bouts at an undisclosed hall in Manhattan. Meyrowitz raised up, took a breath, and got Zuckerman on the phone. “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

The media, the mayor’s office--everyone dived in again. The commission finally handed Isaacs its list of rules--a whopping 114 pages. Fighters would have to wear headgear; they couldn’t choke, couldn’t kick below the knees. The Legislature repealed its earlier bill, setting in motion the ban that would take its place. “Up until that point,” he says, “I thought we had done everything right in New York.”

The aftermath was another grand farce. A day before the event in Niagara Falls, Semaphore lost a last-ditch skirmish in court. The tournament had to be moved in 24 hours. Meyrowitz chartered a 757 and a cargo plane--”It cost me half a million in cash”--and all the TV equipment, lights, the Octagon, 150 fighters and crew took off in the middle of the night for Dothan, Ala. Fans arriving in Niagara Falls from all over the world were furious.

Tickets in Dothan were handed away. Isaacs presided over the production on half an hour of sleep, a sack of jangled nerves almost jubilant that the event was happening at all. “We were still painting the Octagon as the crowd was coming into the arena.”

*

Ultimate Fighting never recovered. The failure in New York portended even further trouble. America, a place so accustomed to violence--on TV, on the streets, in the movies--was also a place trying to address that violence, trying to clean up its streets.

The Octagon became a tiny, illuminated battleground in that struggle. Values were at stake. The political momentum shifted because there were people in New York--all over the country--who did not want their teenagers seeing that it was OK to bash in a man’s face. Some of those people, it turned out, were in the cable TV industry--like Leo Hindery Jr.

When he ran a small cable network in San Francisco, Hindery refused to carry the sport. This spring, to the consternation of Isaacs and Meyrowitz, he took over industry giant TCI, an octopus reaching 14 million viewers in 46 states. “I came here, found out where the bathrooms are, and I canceled [Ultimate Fighting],” Hindery says.

Almost immediately, Time Warner also dropped the bouts. Isaacs had once looked out at the universe of potential pay-per-view buyers and seen 36 million households. Now the number was down to 17 million.

With the TV market collapsing, Zuckerman’s Extreme Fighting folded. Isaacs and Meyrowitz entered discussions with Hindery and conceded to new rules: no hair pulling, no kicking an opponent who is down and no groin strikes. The restrictions moved the sport another step further from Rorion Gracie’s purist vision, but Meyrowitz was determined to prove wrong all those who predicted its death.

“I am totally committed to this,” he says. The new rules helped win sanctioning for the latest event, on Oct. 17 in Mississippi, but Hindery has not budged from his ban.

Isaacs, meanwhile, continues the search for places to hold his tournaments. To say he has gone to the ends of the Earth may be an exaggeration--or maybe it isn’t. He’s gone to Kazakhstan. He’s made 10 trips to Japan for a December show in Yokohama. He talks of staging bouts in Europe, Asia, of establishing a world’s championship, big, big plans--as long as the money lasts.