Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [1]
John McCarthy has crossed paths with many omens in his lifetime and often listened.
His first omen was his father, a tough, no-nonsense Los Angeles police officer and Medal of Valor winner credited with originating the modern-day Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) program still used to this day. Both his mom and dad loved sports, and his father once told John that if a sport had no contact, he wouldn’t consider it a sport. I love that advice.
Following in his father’s footsteps, John was always interested in learning how to keep himself and his fellow officers safe. He was ahead of his time, because when everybody still believed that stand-up fighting, like karate, tae kwon do, boxing, or Thai boxing, was the most effective type of martial art, John already knew he could take guys down and simply sit on them. Then it was pretty much over for them.
So when, after the Los Angeles Riots, the LAPD was looking for the best ways to subdue a person, they invited a plethora (I had to use this word, being “El Guapo” and all) of martial artists to the table. When John challenged some of the teachings of the other instructors in real-life police settings, he grabbed the attention of Rorion, who invited John to train at the Gracie Academy. You see? Rorion Gracie was John’s omen that day because that was the person who, a year later, started the UFC.
Rorion saw in John the qualities that we all see. John was imposing because he was big and strong but, most important, he had great insight and knowledge of skills and was a decision maker. After UFC 1, Rorion asked John if he wanted to referee at UFC 2, a show John wanted to fight in himself. Nobody knows all this stuff that happened when MMA became important, but guess who was right there from the beginning? That’s right: John!
A month and a half before the UFC held its first show on November 12, 1993, I started fighting in Japan for the organization Pancrase. What I did was called free fighting, while the UFC called its fighting No Holds Barred. We had rules and were wearing shoes plus shin protection, but it was fighting. And since I was right there when it all started, I always thought I knew a lot about what happened in MMA from its birth. After reading this book, I guess I was wrong.
For instance, I thought the phrase “intelligently defending oneself” was something made up in the last ten years with all of the newer rules. Nope. John came up with that after UFC 2, as he did many of the sport’s rules still used to this day. (Sound familiar?) There are so many more cool facts that I jotted down to share with you here, but I realized I’d ruin all of the surprises!
I also always believed I was so cool for coming up with a good way to explain to the nonbelievers that MMA is not a violent sport. I always said MMA is a combination of four Olympic sports and while Olympians train solely for one sport, a mixed martial artist has to know them all. It turns out that John was years ahead of me, telling that same story, because he’s the one who actually made it up. I probably just heard it from him and stole it.
Reading the book, I was shocked to see the similarities John and I had growing up. We were both kids who got bullied early on in life, were called “four eyes,” had asthma, and because of that were in the water a lot. We both loved sports, watched the same movie that changed our lives, like to push things to the limit, and like to make things perfect. Heck, even our daughters were born on the exact same day and year! When I read about all these similarities, I even began to wonder if I was an omen for John in writing this foreword, or is he the omen for me?
Because we have so much in common, it’s not surprising to me now that we all clicked when I met John and Elaine for the first time at UFC Japan in 1997. We’ve been friends ever since, and I’ve always had and still have, of course, great respect for John. If you need somebody