Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [81]
Mezger and Ortiz faced off in the finals, and Ortiz was doing quite well with his wrestling skills. He cradled Mezger on the ground and started kneeing him in the head, which opened large cuts on Mezger’s scalp. One sliced an arterial vein, which was like striking oil: blood just started pulsing out with each heartbeat.
Feeling the heat from politicians who were calling the UFC a “barbaric bloodbath,” Meyrowitz had told me before the show to scrutinize any excessive bleeding and to stop the fight if it got bad. With Mezger spouting blood like a fire hydrant, I paused the match and called in Dr. Istrico. Good old Dr. Istrico wasn’t squeamish in the least. He looked at the laceration and said the fight could continue as long as the cut didn’t get worse.
At the time, I was to always restart any fight standing no matter where it had been stopped. I did, which meant Ortiz lost his position on the ground. It was Mezger’s gain for sure. Ortiz shot in for a takedown, and Mezger locked him in a guillotine choke, then sat back and squeezed, forcing Ortiz to tap out.
I knew after the fight that Ortiz hated me because he thought I’d taken the win away from him by restanding the bout after Dr. Istrico had checked Mezger. I’d thought Dr. Istrico would stop the fight, and I hadn’t really had a choice when he’d said it could continue. For better or worse, and in this case it was definitely the latter, I had to follow the scant rules that were in place.
UFC 13 marked another turning point for the promotion, though this one would prove crippling. Senator John McCain, having been elected chairman of the Committee on Commerce, which regulated the cable industry, made sure UFC 13 was the last event to see the light of day on major cable carriers, including Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer’s Choice, and others. Overnight, the UFC’s potential viewing audience dwindled from 30 million homes to about 5 million.
Meyrowitz had never planned for this reality. Without pay-per-view buys to sustain the promotion, he turned to the live gate revenue. But Meyrowitz had never set up the UFC to be a spectator event. He didn’t give a shit about the crowd because he was a TV guy; the telecast was all that had mattered to him.
My family experienced this firsthand when my dad took my son Ron to the first Ultimate Ultimate event in December of 1995, and they sat in the front row. It’s hard enough to see into the elevated cage when the fighters hit the ground, but my dad had to contend with a cameraman’s ass blocking his view the entire time. My dad finally approached the cameraman and yanked him off the cage lip.
With budget costs cut, the live experience had only gotten worse since then.
What kept the UFC’s small, devoted following were the fighters. After watching Royce and Brazilian jiu-jitsu dominate the first few events, fans debated when the reign of wrestlers in the UFC would ever come to an end. No one had come close to beating Mark Coleman, but Maurice Smith, a world champion kickboxer, changed that at UFC 14. Smith eventually wore the weary wrestler’s legs down to unseat him with a unanimous decision nod after twenty-one minutes. It was the beginning of a wave of successful strikers to enter the UFC.
No matter what anyone tells you, the UFC was always a work in progress. There was never a time when it wasn’t evolving, including in its rules. Even from UFC 1 to 2, changes had been made. Situations would arise in the cage that would make us realize certain rules had to be implemented to preserve an even playing field. Some rules we saw right away. Others took more reflection.
At Ultimate Ultimate in 1995, I’d watched Oleg Taktarov grab the fence with one hand to pull himself up and away from Marco Ruas, who was trying to take him down. He’d used the fence to change the context of the fight and ended up winning the bout. The cage was there to keep the fighters from falling out, not to aid in leverage. I went to Meyrowitz and the rest of SEG and told them grabbing the fence shouldn’t be allowed,