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It was the second verbal submission of the night, which reminded me that I had to listen just as much as I had to watch.

I was still thinking I was doing all right. I hadn’t prematurely stopped a fight and was doing what Rorion wanted, and that’s what I thought I’d been hired to do. The next fight would make me reevaluate my thinking.

Kickboxer Robert Lucarelli bobbed into the arena. At 245 pounds, he was bigger than opponent Orlando Weit, a slighter but well-conditioned muay Thai fighter, who bowed to each corner of the cage in the tradition of his art.

Lucarelli was soft and out of shape, so I was thinking he should go after Weit as fast as he could before he tired out. As if he were reading my thoughts, Lucarelli muscled Weit down and grabbed his neck in a basic bulldog choke within the first few seconds.

Weit was the better athlete, though. His instincts, agility, and a lot of hair pulling got him out of the hold and back on his feet in no time. When Lucarelli went to rise, Weit grabbed his head and launched a knee into his face. Lucarelli folded to the mat again, and Weit kicked his head like a soccer ball, then began to walk away.

I still couldn’t do anything because Lucarelli wasn’t tapping out, so Weit came back to finish the job. Honestly, I think Lucarelli was too dazed to signal that he was done, which left the only other option: his corner throwing in the towel.

Remember: I’d told the corners beforehand that if I pointed to them, I was signaling for them to think about throwing in the towel.

I pointed to Lucarelli’s corner, but they didn’t respond.

“Watch your fighter,” I warned, but I didn’t get a reaction. My eyes darted nervously between Lucarelli’s corner and the beat down, and I knew I had to do something. I started yelling for the cornermen to throw in the towel, but they just stared at me.

With an elbow to the back of the head, Weit smacked Lucarelli’s mouthpiece out. Lucarelli crawled away like his life depended on it—no exaggeration—and his corner finally tossed in the towel as Weit landed another devastating elbow to the back of their injured fighter’s head.

It was a scary sequence that lasted no more than ten seconds, and it ripped the bloodthirsty crowd out of the seats. They were the most uncomfortable ten seconds I’ve ever squirmed through in the Octagon.

I walked a shell-shocked Lucarelli to his corner. “How much did you have to see?” I said. “How long was I telling you to throw the towel?”

“He told us if we threw in the towel, he was going to kill us,” one of them sheepishly answered.

Holy shit, I thought, this is a problem.

I didn’t want something like this to happen again, but there was nothing I could do. The next fight was under way before I could give it a second thought.

Remco Pardoel was a Dutch grappler specializing in jiu-jitsu, so I thought he must at least have a good understanding of base and where to position his body on the mat. I didn’t know anything about Alberto Cerro Leon’s style, called pencak silat, not even how to pronounce it. It was categorized as an exotics art along with the other obscure disciplines introduced during UFC 2.

They’d said Leon had broken bones, so I thought he would either strike hard or do submissions. At least Leon, who resembled a young Steven Seagal, looked the part in his black gi with matching grave demeanor.

Whatever his style, I can’t imagine things went the way Leon had planned. After an opening exchange and a scramble to the mat, Leon found himself on his back with a rather large Dutchman pinning him down from side control.

Leon’s discipline, which I would later learn was a culmination of Indonesian striking arts, didn’t seem to cover this position in their manuals. So Leon did the only thing he could: he tried to stick his fingers in or over Pardoel’s mouth whenever he could to slow him down.

Pardoel was in complete control, though. He mounted Leon and then shifted back to side control and isolated Leon’s arm. He didn’t have a standard armlock, but