Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [68]
On April 7, 1995, in the first preliminary bout at UFC 5, Dave Beneteau took down Asbel Cancio, mounted him, and whaled down with the wrath of a man who’d been wronged every which way to Sunday. Cancio’s face split open like a piñata, and he tapped the mat frantically, but referee Lonnie Foster was standing on the other side of them and was heinously slow to respond. Cancio must have tapped twenty times before his corner finally threw in the towel, and Foster stepped in.
Cancio flipped to his stomach, and blood just poured out of him onto the light-blue canvas.
When Foster left the cage, I said, “What happened?”
“I didn’t see the tap.”
I wasn’t anyone to give instructions on refereeing, so I bit my tongue and walked away. Foster refereed one more prelim that night and was never asked back.
Returning from UFC 4 was alternate and future standout Guy Mezger, who was paired with a young Russian sambo master named Oleg Taktarov.
At the infamous swordfish dinner with future UFC competitors Oleg Taktarov and Guy Mezger
I’d been at Davie’s office when Taktarov had come walking in, clutching a black videotape sans cover. Taktarov barely spoke a lick of English, but he had a rugged, weathered look that said he’d been around the block a time or two.
The videotape featured grainy, black-and-white footage of Taktarov performing sambo and fighting in Russia. “I want to be a movie star,” Taktarov kept repeating in broken English as we watched. I guess Taktarov figured his sambo talent and the UFC might be an avenue to get there.
He was right. Six years later, Taktarov would get his big break when director John Herzfeld, a die-hard UFC fan, would cast him in his first major film role opposite Robert De Niro in 15 Minutes.
Davie walked Taktarov across the street to Rorion’s academy to see what he could do. Pedro Sauer, the respected Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt instructor, happened to be there, so he gave Taktarov his audition on the mat.
Afterward, Rorion turned to Davie and said, “He’s no good,” and walked away.
“What do you think?” Davie asked me.
“He’s pretty damn good.”
Aside from some rough technique here and there, Taktarov was strong and had given Sauer a good match.
Rorion didn’t want to use him because Taktarov knew his way around the mat. The guy could roll, and that was that.
Taktarov didn’t make me a liar at UFC 5. He swam past Ernest Verdecia in the quarters, but the returning Severn sliced Taktarov’s forehead open with a knee in the semifinal match, and I had to stop the bout. Taktarov was what you’d call a bleeder. Some guys open up, and the blood just can’t be stopped.
Severn advanced to the finals and took out Beneteau to become the UFC 5 tournament champion, winning $60,000 in the process.
The highly anticipated superfight between Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock died on the vine. It was scheduled for thirty minutes, and boy, did they waste every single minute and then some. The fight actually went for thirty-one minutes, until Art Davie, of all people, jumped onto the apron to tell me through the fencing that it was time to stop it.
The fight was restarted for a five-minute overtime period, which saw Shamrock land the only serious blow of the night. Still, after a total of thirty-six minutes, the bout was deemed a draw.
The fight was simply coma inducing, but I was able to laugh in the middle of it all when Bob Shamrock, Ken’s feisty adoptive father, finally grew frustrated with his son’s tactics and yelled, “Well, if you’re just going to lay there with him, you might as well start kissing him.”
The always stoic Royce looked at the elder Shamrock and then at Ken and said, “Please don’t do that.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last time I’d referee Royce in the UFC, at least for a while.
The North Carolina district attorney’s earlier reaction