Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [92]
I knew nothing about Sakuraba, but I knew Silveira was a bruiser. I protested, but Meyrowtiz and Isaacs weren’t going to budge.
The last thing I remember Meyrowitz telling me was, “As soon as he’s in trouble, just get him out of there. Don’t let him get hurt.”
That was my mentality when I walked into the fight.
In the Octagon, Silveira outweighed Sakuraba by a good forty pounds at least, but the Japanese fighter was fast and had some working knowledge of being on the ground. Silveira was out for the kill, though, and landed hard punches until he cornered Sakuraba on the fence and began to unload uppercuts and hooks. Silveira hit Sakuraba with a good right hand.
I saw the Japanese fighter fall to his knees, and thinking he’d been hurt, I jumped in to stop the fight. It was over in less than two minutes.
Sakuraba, who spoke no English, immediately protested what I’d done, as his camp gathered on the cage lip to decipher what had just happened. As I raised Silveira’s hand, Sakuraba tugged at my other arm until I told him to stop.
I left the cage and jumped down to the commentators’ table. “I need to see a replay,” I said.
Meanwhile, Sakuraba refused to leave the cage and tried to wrestle the microphone away from Bruce Buffer to address the audience, but nobody gets Buffer’s mic unless he wants them to.
In the replay, plain as day, Sakuraba took the punch and then dropped levels for a single-leg takedown. There was no debate at all. I turned to commentator Jeff Blatnick and said, “I screwed up.”
Not only had I messed up Sakuraba’s chance to advance in the tournament, but I’d given Silveira a victory he truly hadn’t earned. I felt awful about it.
But things have a way of working out. Abbott hurt his hand in his preliminary qualifier, and Telligman, who won his heavyweight alternate bout, had broken his foot in the process. Nobody was left standing to face Silveira in the tournament finals. Meyrowitz, Isaacs, and I conferred cageside and decided the fairest thing to do would be to let Sakuraba fight Silveira again.
Sakuraba and the crowd were thrilled for a second chance, though Silveira wasn’t. I think he’d gotten a good look at Sakuraba earlier and realized he was fighting a much sharper opponent than he or anyone else had anticipated. It took his head out of the game, allowing the swift Japanese pro wrestler to snag the armbar finish three minutes and forty-five seconds into their rematch.
As for the other bouts, after two overtime rounds, Randy Couture earned a hard-fought majority decision, meaning two of the judges gave him the victory and one scored it a tie, over Maurice Smith. This would be his first of many UFC heavyweight titles during his career.
In the first ever under-200-pound title bout, Frank Shamrock, the adopted younger brother of Ken Shamrock, tapped out 1992 Olympic wrestling gold medalist Kevin Jackson with an armbar in sixteen seconds. Shamrock had gotten a shot at the title out of the gate because he’d beaten Enson Inoue in a Vale Tudo Japan bout nearly three weeks prior. Shamrock had made a name for himself with almost twenty appearances in Pancrase, which had slightly different rules from the UFC’s and required knee-to-ankle shin protectors and wrestling shoes.
A story floated around that Frank, who’d recently left his brother’s famous Lion’s Den squad to form his own team called The Alliance with Maurice Smith, had somehow intercepted the UFC contract meant for teammate Jerry Bohlander to fight Jackson. I don’t know if that story holds any water, but I was there when SEG discussed the winner of Shamrock-Inoue getting the title shot, with the reasoning that