Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [108]
However, not all of Zuffa’s initial changes were successful. For instance, Zuffa dropped considerable dough for a seven-figure advertising campaign featuring fighters like Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Pedro Rizzo, Carlos Newton, and Jens Pulver paired with models in a handful of prominent men’s magazines, including Maxim and FHM. Carmen Electra, who also starred in the ad campaign, was hired as the spokeswoman for the UFC. At a New York City press conference, when asked about her MMA experience, Electra told reporters she’d done Tae Bo. She seemed like a waste of money to me, but I thought maybe Fertitta had more experience in this than I did.
The campaign didn’t even make a dent in boosting public awareness of the UFC or the sport. That was clear from the turnout at the next event.
UFC 32 “Showdown in the Meadowlands,” held at the Continental Airlines Arena, now the IZOD Center, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was underwhelming for a number of reasons. While the event marked the UFC’s return from parking lot tents and run-down community halls to a state-of-the-art venue, Zuffa shot too high, and it was virtually impossible to fill the 20,000-seat arena.
Bernie Dillon, the original chief operating officer for Zuffa, handled the arena layout and priced the tickets, which ran from $25 for the nosebleeds to $300 for cageside seats. It didn’t seem super expensive, but the event sold only a few thousand tickets. Ticket pricing became an immediate issue between Dana White and Dillon, who left Zuffa after a few shows.
The real issue, in my opinion, was the weak main event, which paired Tito Ortiz against Australian grappler Elvis Sinosic. At UFC 30, Sinosic had pulled off a major upset in submitting Jeremy Horn, but he had little fighting experience in the United States and certainly wasn’t ready for headlining status.
The much larger and stronger Ortiz took Sinosic down and hammered him with fists and elbows. Sinosic’s forehead split open almost instantaneously, and the flaps of skin hung from his face. I try to let championship bouts play out as long as possible because there’s so much at stake, but Ortiz destroyed Sinosic to the point that I had to jump in three and a half minutes into the first round.
As Zuffa tried to find its promotional legs, progress was being made in Nevada. From his time as a commissioner, Fertitta had relationships with all of the NSAC’s players, and mixed martial arts was rescheduled to go to the commission for a vote.
I was flown to Reno to see Glenn Carano, the former football player who’d thought MMA was too violent for his tastes. I met him at the casino he owned there and wasn’t shocked to learn he still wasn’t thrilled with the sport.
After a while, when he was fed up with talking about it, he said, “John, I’m never going to like this sport, and it’s not what I consider a good athletic event, but I am friends with Lorenzo Fertitta. He believes in it, and I will vote for it.”
On July 23, 2001, the Nevada State Athletic Commission voted unanimously to regulate mixed martial arts. They also adopted a set of rules nearly identical to the Unified Rules drafted in New Jersey a few months before.
It was obvious Fertitta had a lot of pull in town. Zuffa immediately secured a September 28 date for UFC 33 at the 12,000-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center on the Strip. As if that weren’t enough, Zuffa also negotiated the return of the UFC’s pay-per-views to iN DEMAND and all of the other leading cable providers that had jumped ship in 1997.
In six months, Zuffa had accomplished a number of the goals SEG had been chipping away at for the last few years. Things were changing fast, and I wasn’t immune. MMA was now regulated by two key state bodies. As a referee, I would now report to the commissions, not the promotion, and the days of my officiating events from top to bottom were over.
MMA referees made anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars per event, but I’d been