Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [145]
Just before I committed to the The Fight Network, I headed to the U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio, for UFC 77 “Hostile Territory,” to be held on October 20, 2007. While we prepared for the event, Fertitta pulled me aside and asked if I remembered the conversation we’d had six years before at UFC 30 in New Jersey about paying fighters millions of dollars. “I never realized that would be the start of all my troubles,” said Fertitta, who’d been hit with the very public resignation of disgruntled heavyweight champion Randy Couture over a contract dispute the month before. The UFC was getting popular and, in turn, the fighters were expecting a larger share in the profits.
I didn’t share with Fertitta then that this would be my last UFC pay-per-view as a referee. Only a couple friends knew of my plans, and I conducted myself as I would any other given night.
But visible to the astute eye, I took a slight pause before delivering what I thought would be my last “Let’s get it on” to start a UFC pay-per-view. I savored that moment.
After I’d left Dana White’s office a few months earlier, I’d thought about the state of officiating in the sport. Rather than continue to complain to my wife every time I saw an inexperienced referee make a bad call, I decided to do something about it. I pored over fight tapes and prepared a curriculum to begin teaching others how to properly referee mixed martial arts fights. For years, Elaine had received inquiries about a course from all over the world. I thought if anyone was going to teach it, why not me?
On December 1, 2007, I held my first COMMAND (Certification of Officials for Mixed Martial Arts National Development) course in Valencia, California. I’d feared we wouldn’t get a single person to sign up, but the first run had twenty-one attendees, some from as far away as Brazil and Australia. A few of the students had already been refereeing for years in their states; others never had. One guy said he’d sat in the front row of the first Ultimate Ultimate in 1995 in Denver, Colorado. All of them had a passion for MMA, which was obvious from their questions and willingness to be there.
My dad even made it up for the day and watched from the back of the hotel conference room as I went through my PowerPoint presentation. There was so much to get through that we went well past the allotted time, so we ordered pizza for the class and stayed until midnight. Not a single person complained.
The course lasted two days and included hands-on instruction, with my fighters demonstrating techniques in the cage at my gym, and final-day testing. Of that inaugural class of twenty-one participants, only four passed. I didn’t mind the low pass rate at all. I knew it was a difficult test. I’d made it that way to flag any weak areas because I wanted each student to leave as prepared as possible.
The regulations and rules could be learned, but what I really wanted to impart above everything else was that referees should be decisive. “When you make a decision, go with it,” I told them. “Don’t hem and haw before or after the call. It doesn’t mean in the end someone won’t say you’re wrong. If you say it’s right, it’s right at the time. If you waver, you’ll always be in a position to make more mistakes. Trust your instinct.” It was a lesson I’d learned in the cage.
I’d never had the benefit of learning MMA refereeing from anybody. Everything I’d picked up had come from seeing what had worked and what hadn’t over the last fourteen years. But if I’d had someone teach me, this was one of the more crucial lessons I would have wanted.
A week after my first COMMAND course, I refereed my last fight at The Ultimate Fighter 6 finale at the Palms Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. A friend and I had tried to calculate how many fights I’d officiated since 1994. We came up with 535 bouts, give or take