Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [87]
Still, it’s always the greatest compliment to feel wanted and a part of something you truly love. SEG was the first company to validate what I did in the sport. After making $750 for my first event, I got a raise around UFC 7 to $1,250 for each event. Remember, at this time, athletic commissions and other regulatory bodies wouldn’t give MMA a second glance, so I was hired and paid directly by the promotion.
When my role expanded to court and media appearances defending the UFC and the sport, I missed more time at the police academy. Around UFC 12, I went to Meyrowitz and told him I couldn’t take any more unpaid time off. To Meyrowitz’s credit, he researched what boxing referees were making for the big championship fights and offered me a $50,000 annual contract. This allowed me to continue working the events to supplement some of the income I was losing from the academy. I was also expected to review and help develop the rules and to generally speak on the sport’s behalf when it was needed.
No other referee got the vote of confidence I did. My good friend Joe Hamilton refereed from the first Ultimate Ultimate event to UFC 16 before he approached Meyrowitz for a raise because he, too, was losing money taking off from the department to work the events for $500 a show. SEG told Joe they couldn’t do it with him, and Joe had no choice but to leave the UFC.
Meyrowitz put a lot of trust in me to always conduct myself in ways that would help the sport. I think he knew I would take a bullet for the sport if I had to. People like that were undoubtedly needed around the promotion after Senator John McCain and Time Warner CEO Leo Hindery effectively pulled the plug on the UFC’s major pay-per-view platforms.
We all marched into UFC 15 “Collision Course,” on October 17, 1997, at Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with the feeling that the UFC’s days were numbered. We needed only to look around to confirm our suspicions. The event was held in a tent in the casino’s parking lot because there was no facility in the hotel to host it. It was a severe downgrade. Still, about 2,500 hard-core fans showed up to witness another historic night for the sport.
We had the list of rules I had drafted—the ones Hindery had rejected—and we all knew we were on the right track with them. SEG decided to try them out at UFC 15. But why stop there? The perception of bare-knuckled fighting had always plagued the UFC, so SEG also decided to try out specially designed finger-free gloves that would allow fighters to strike and grapple.
The first fighter who’d worn MMA-style gloves was Melton Bowen when he’d fought Steve Jennum in a quarterfinal bout at UFC 4. Dan Severn had experimented with an early prototype in his fight against Ken Shamrock at UFC 9, as had a few other fighters after him. However, it was definitely Tank Abbott who popularized wearing gloves inside of the Octagon. The gloves were much thinner than those used for boxing, had a small gel-like padding in the knuckle area, and left the fingers free for grabbing and completing holds and chokes. They resembled weightlifting or even cycling gloves more than anything else. They weren’t necessarily designed to protect the opponent’s face but to protect the fighter’s knuckles and allow him to strike more.
Gloves would become an important safety addition. After the fighters tried them out at UFC 15, SEG would make them mandatory for every event, and I became heavily involved in their ongoing development.
With a set of rules and mandatory glove use now in place, this was one of the pivotal moments for the UFC. Revisionist history might try to convince you that changes like this didn’t happen for another few years, but I can tell you this is when the UFC truly started feeling a sense of accountability and ran toward regulation. Many people involved with the UFC spent a lot of time and effort beginning to educate the commissions about