Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [140]
“I don’t fly them first-class,” Dana said. “They upgrade themselves.”
“I’ll just take a regular ticket,” I said. I hadn’t meant for it to become such a big deal.
But to Dana, I guess it had become just that. “No, I think I’ll take Mario Yamasaki.”
The bull in me answered, “Well, take Mario then.”
It wasn’t that Dana hadn’t fulfilled my request. I would have flown whatever way they’d wanted me to. I guess it was the way it was all handled that irked me. It seemed like a big miscommunication, and it shouldn’t have turned out that way.
In fourteen years, I’d never skipped a UFC event. Even when my son Ron had graduated from high school, I’d missed his big day to fly to Connecticut for UFC 55 in 2005. I’d felt it was my responsibility to be there and I owed it to the UFC and Zuffa. Now I was going to miss UFC 70 over a lousy plane ticket.
While heavyweight Gabriel Gonzaga was shocking everyone by knocking kickboxer Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic out cold with a high kick at UFC 70 on April 21, 2007, in Manchester, England, I was with my wife at our cabin in Bear Lake, Utah, shoveling snow. The ice and snow got the worst of it.
As it turned out, the UFC wasn’t pleased either. Though UFC 70 had filled the Manchester Evening News Arena with 15,000 rabid United Kingdom fans, Zuffa had been concerned about a couple of questionable referee calls.
The next day, Dana and Ratner called to ask if I could come speak with them about what had happened. Dana offered to have me flown in, but I wasn’t anywhere near an airport that could do this, so I said I’d drive from Utah to Las Vegas. We agreed to meet Monday at 11:30 a.m., which meant I’d have to leave the cabin at 3:00 a.m. to make the eight-hour drive.
I was there on time, as I always am. I hadn’t been to the Zuffa offices in a while. A security guard was stationed outside, and I had to give him my name to check in. Things were getting very businesslike.
Dana didn’t show up for another hour, so by the time he’d ushered me into his office with Ratner, I was a little perturbed. I know Dana had just flown back from England the day before, but I’d gotten up before the crack of dawn and driven eight hours straight because he’d asked me to be there at a certain time. Again, it was a matter of respect. I respected Dana, but I was getting the feeling I was becoming more of a pain in the ass than an asset to him.
As he’s known to do, Dana got right to the point. “We can’t have this happen again. This is crazy that this kind of stuff happens.”
I think Dana was referring to both the officiating he’d seen in England and the fact that I hadn’t gone on the trip. Dana told me I was the best referee there was and I had to be at all the shows from here on out.
Ratner suggested I get involved with training other referees, and I told them that was great, but there wasn’t enough time in the day for me to do all that and still work my police academy job. If they wanted me to do some training for them, I’d have to retire from the LAPD.
However, it was agreed that it wasn’t Zuffa or any other promotion’s place to facilitate training programs for officials. It was really the responsibility of athletic commissions to make sure the people they hired were prepared.
Before I left, I brought up the issue of the plane ticket and reiterated to both of them that I’d never asked anyone for a first-class ticket.
“Well, that’s not what I was told,” Dana said.
I’m sure when I walked out, Dana and Ratner thought everything was great and back to normal, but I have to admit, at the time, it wasn’t for me.
It was completely my hang-up, but I felt like I was being kicked in the nuts by the sport, or at least by its evolution. I wanted things to be like they were in the past,