Hella Nation - Evan Wright [91]
TOUGH GUY
Tito Ortiz shadowboxes in his dressing room at the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Arena while a capacity crowd of more than nine thousand fans chants his name, making it feel as though the massive concrete walls in the backstage area are vibrating with their enthusiasm. They have come to see a type of fighting that until recently was against the law in most parts of America. Tonight, Tito Ortiz will defend his light heavyweight title in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the anything-goes, no-holds-barred league in which combatants fight using any means possible—punching, kicking, grappling—until one surrenders or is knocked out.
Back in the mid-1990s, Senator John McCain deemed this style of combat “human cockfighting.” Cable TV operators refused to carry the fights. The taboo contests went underground. The sport was barely kept alive by a loyal cadre of fans and amateur fighters who gathered for events held in backwater arenas in the Deep South, at Indian reservations and at obscure storefront fighting schools in Southern California.
But now with its first-ever Las Vegas fight, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is staging a comeback. New owners are betting that revamped safety rules and a star fighter, Tito Ortiz, billed as the “most charismatic man in Ultimate Fighting,” will make the UFC as acceptable to ordinary Americans as apple pie, the WWF and the use of cluster bombs by our military. Tonight’s fight is called “UFC 33: Victory in Vegas.”
Turnout for the event is astonishing. Las Vegas has been a ghost town in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Yesterday at Mandalay Bay several hundred bikini-clad hopefuls in the Hawaiian Tropics beauty contest had lined up in a cold, nearly empty auditorium with only their goose bumps for company. But now, less than twenty-four hours later, the Mandalay Arena is mobbed with screaming fans. Arena cameras pick out celebrities in the crowd and splash their faces across jumbo video screens. Chuck Norris is in the house. No surprise there. So are a handful of barely recognizable subcelebrities like Robin Leach. But then video monitors fill with the authentic, full-fledged A-list crowd—Nicolas Cage, Justin Timberlake, Mike Tyson. People swivel their heads, trying to spot where the heavy hitters are sitting, as if their flesh-and-blood presence somehow sanctifies the event.
“It’s about time America wakes up and recognizes the one true fighting sport,” says a tall, taut-jawed fan in his late twenties who looks like a drill instructor and wears a T-shirt bearing the legend “Marine Corps Underwater Combat School.” He punches the shoulder of a buddy seated nearby and says, “The UFC has landed in Las Vegas, the fighting capital of the world.”
WHEN THE UFC WAS STARTED IN 1993, the idea was for two guys to meet in an octagon-shaped ring surrounded by a chain-link fence and beat the crap out of each other until only one was left standing. There weren’t many rules back then, except fighters weren’t supposed to bite or poke anyone’s eyes out. They were sort of allowed to kick each other in the balls, though this was frowned upon. Choking was definitely okay. So was stomping a guy in the head when he was down. It looked like pro wrestling, only the blood and the occasional broken bones were real.
Americans loved it, at least a certain group of people did—one that George Will called the “basest element of society” in a column railing against the UFC that he wrote in 1997. At this time during the UFC’s initial burst of popularity, nearly three hundred thousand of the basest element were tuning in to each fight on pay-per-view television. Public outcry against the UFC, led by George Will and Senator McCain, resulted in its banishment from cable TV, the main source of its revenues, and by the year 2000 the UFC was nearly out of business.
Today’s rebirth of the UFC has been brought about by two wealthy brothers, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta. They are Las Vegas insiders who run a publicly