• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It didn’t take long for certain scenarios to repeat themselves, especially if they were effective. At UFC 11, Jerry Bohlander bent the fence in his bare hands as he held on to avoid being swept by Fabio Gurgel. Then at UFC 13, Wallid Ismail took Kazuo Takahashi airborne, and Takahashi grabbed the fence the entire time so he wouldn’t get dumped on the mat.

UFC 14

“Showdown”

July 27, 1997

Boutwell Auditorium

Birmingham, Alabama

Bouts I Reffed:

Joe Moreira vs. Yuri Vaulin

Kevin Jackson vs. Todd Butler

Mark Kerr vs. Moti Horenstein

Dan Bobish vs. Brian Johnston

Kevin Jackson vs. Tony Fryklund

Mark Kerr vs. Dan Bobish

Maurice Smith vs. Mark Coleman

I jumped into the cage during an alternate match between Tony Fryklund and Donnie Chappell that I hadn’t been reffing when Fryklund stepped on Chappell after he’d tapped out. I told Fryklund, “If you want to be a champion, you need to start acting like one.”

Later, Jackson submitted Fryklund in forty-four seconds, and Fryklund pushed me away in frustration when I was helping him to his feet. In anger, I grabbed Fryklund under his arms and picked him up. I didn’t think anyone had noticed until Joel Gold, the owner of the publication Full Contact Fighter, published a picture of Fryklund in my arms with his feet about a foot off the ground. It was not a proud moment for me. I’d lost my cool.

Once Meyrowitz saw this, he finally agreed to add the rule.

At Ultimate Ultimate 96, Tank Abbott scooped up Cal Worsham and tried to throw him over the top lip of the cage. That was cause for an obvious rule addition.

Some changes were much subtler. I was in the cage with the fighters up close and personal, so I was seeing details others didn’t have a vantage point to notice. Once I’d get a new regulation approved by Meyrowitz, I’d pass it on to the fighters at the rule meetings, but I’d never been asked to write them all down.

Losing its pay-per-view platform had been a slow process for the UFC. Since around UFC 10, Meyrowitz had told me there was a chance of it happening and I’d wondered if that was the beginning of the end.

Just before UFC 14, Meyrowitz called. “We’ve got to come up with rules, John. We have to have rules. It’s the only way they’re going to put us back on cable. Come up with rules that look like something on paper but don’t change the sport in your mind that much.”

With the rules we’d already instituted, I rounded out a list of seventeen dos and don’ts for the UFC.

I didn’t mind adding “no groin attacks,” a tactic that didn’t look good for the sport anyway. I didn’t mind “no hair pulling,” either, because the practice didn’t derive from any legitimate combat sport.

I thought about headbutts and knew getting rid of them would be a game changer for a few of the fighters, like Mark Coleman, who dominated his fights due in no small part to his headbutts. Nixing headbutts was going to change the sport a little, but how in the world could we get away with saying they were legal when boxing had already established them as a major foul?

I added “no small joint manipulations” to the list. It wasn’t a highly practiced technique, but it became a rule nonetheless.

I also added “no pressure point attacks.” To me, that was a bullshit fluff rule, but it made it sound like the UFC was contemplating even the most intricate of techniques.

With the completed list, I flew with Meyrowitz to Denver to meet with Leo Hindery, the president of Time Warner Cable.

Hindery, who’d probably never seen an MMA fight in his life, was a tough customer from the start. “There’s no sport you can show me where you can hit somebody in the balls,” he said.

Meyrowitz and I nodded and pointed to where we’d banned groin strikes.

We could counter all of Hindery’s objections but one. Hindery’s real problem was one man punching another man on the ground. In boxing, you’d never hit a man while he was down. There would always be a ten count