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UFC 7

“The Brawl in Buffalo”

September 8, 1995

Buffalo Memorial Auditorium

Buffalo, New York

Bouts I Reffed:

Paul Varelans vs. Gerry Harris

Mark Hall vs. Harold Howard

Remco Pardoel vs. Ryan Parker

Marco Ruas vs. Larry Cureton

Paul Varelans vs. Mark Hall

Marco Ruas vs. Remco Pardoel

Ken Shamrock vs. Oleg Taktarov

Marco Ruas vs. Paul Varelans

UFC 7 was the debut party for vale tudo legend Ruas, who won the night’s tournament in impressive fashion. Known as the King of the Streets in his home country of Brazil, Ruas mixed his fighting styles between Brazilian jiu-jitsu and muay Thai. He was the first fighter to make everyone take a step back and watch what powerful leg kicks could do to an opponent.

UFC 7 sold approximately 14,000 tickets to its largest crowd to date. I looked around the packed arena and thought, Yeah, this thing’s going.

Meanwhile, the UFC reached its second birthday and decided to celebrate by bringing back the notable fighters for one gala night. Ultimate Ultimate 95 was meant to be a reunion of the best we’d seen in the Octagon thus far, and for the most part I thought it was. Veterans like Oleg Taktarov, Dan Severn, Tank Abbott, and Marco Ruas pulled out all the stops in their bouts.

The event also marked a big first for the UFC. Judges sat cageside to decide the fights’ winners. Before the event, I’d told Meyrowitz that bringing back their standouts would lead to closely contested bouts. If a fight went the distance, it would be considered a draw, but that meant neither fighter would advance in the tournament, and nobody wanted that. Meyrowitz agreed that it was time to bring in judges.

The addition went fine for the most part, except that SEG seated all of the judges at the same table on one side of the cage. In future events, they realized the value in placing each of the three judges on a different side.

SEG also quickly abandoned the practice of showing judges on camera as they each held up a card with the name of their winner on it. Can you imagine judges doing that today? With some of the questionable decisions fans haven’t agreed with, they’d probably have to run for cover after the shows.

It was a shame the UFC had brought the show back to the Mammoth Events Center. For what was supposed to be their biggest event yet, the venue was nasty. But with McCain picking up the UFC’s scent and his political army joining the hunt, shoddy venues would become the least of the UFC’s worries.

Elaine manning the phones in the boardroom at the UFC’s first Ultimate Ultimate event (December 1995)

With my best friend and fellow referee, Joe Hamilton, at his first UFC, Ultimate Ultimate 95

Having a laugh with Tank Abbott

RENEGADES

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

—George Bernard Shaw

From the beginning, I was shocked that people didn’t just flock to the UFC and the sport that would evolve out of it. I thought every guy would love it. How could he not? It’s fighting. There’s nothing more pure. People should just fall in love with this, I thought, and when they didn’t, I couldn’t understand why.

Senator John McCain remained staunchly opposed to the UFC, which he described as “human cockfighting,” and he became its most outspoken opponent. McCain had a sizable pulpit from which to spread his message, and he urged his senatorial peers to protect the people in their states from this “reprehensible” sideshow. A majority of them took him at his word, too, without investigating the UFC on their own.

McCain had an added motivation to see the UFC banished. He was not only a huge boxing fan; his wife was tied to one of the country’s largest distributors of Anheuser-Busch, producer of Budweiser beer, a major sponsor in boxing at the time.

Though he’d sat at events where boxers had taken massive punishment and later died from it and hadn’t said a word about that, McCain hit the airwaves condemning the UFC as brutal and