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For the first ten minutes, Randleman really poured it on and dumped Rutten to the mat every time he tried to kick him. However, as the wrestler’s conditioning started to peter out on him, Rutten slowly began to fight back. It went into the two overtime periods, and Rutten began to score from standing and from his back. By the end, Rutten had made a strong comeback against an exhausted Randleman.

After the twenty-one-minute fight, two of the three judges awarded the bout to Rutten.

The audience went wild when the highly controversial decision was announced. It seemed the judges had forgotten Randleman had handily dominated the first part of the bout. Perhaps watching the Dutch fighter come back and take control in the latter periods had swayed two of the three judges to award him the fight.

Mark Coleman, who’d attended Ohio State University with Randleman and was in his corner, stood on the cage’s lip and nearly shook the Octagon wall from its posts as the crowd egged him on.

I had no official stance on the decision, but I knew that six minutes were not fifteen minutes. In this case, the judging system wasn’t working fairly for the fighters.

Afterward, I told Meyrowitz and SEG they were asking too much of the judges to remember twenty-plus minutes of moves. If the fight were broken into five-minute rounds, the judges could weigh each one separately, write their scores during the one-minute rest periods, and hand them in for tallying at the end, just as it was done in boxing. It was agreed that three five-minute rounds would become the norm from here on out, while championship fights would be allotted five five-minute rounds.

Following the Rutten-Randleman decision, UFC commentator Jeff Blatnick and I were asked to assess what a judge should be looking for in a fight. Being an Olympic wrestler himself, Blatnick argued that Randleman had scored multiple takedowns and hadn’t been credited for them.

I could see his point, though I knew we’d have to create some kind of sliding scale based on where the effective action was happening in the fight. If it stayed on its feet, the judges should be looking at striking first. If it went to the ground, they should be primarily crediting techniques there. If it was a mix of both, wherever the majority of the active bout happened should be judged first.

We also came up with four terms judges would use to score the bouts: “effective striking,” “effective grappling,” “aggressiveness,” and “Octagon control.” I wanted to add “damage” to the list of criteria, but Meyrowitz thought that sounded too harsh. However, the main problem people had with the Rutten-Randleman decision was that Rutten’s face was a mess, while Randleman, other than a few small cuts on his head from Rutten’s elbows, barely had a mark. Who was really the winner there?

When people ask me who won that fight, I say, “Both men did their best, and I understand the decision.” I think history speaks for itself. That fight was a game changer, and it doesn’t matter who I think won it.

I’ll be honest, though. What I remember most about the fight was that Rutten was talking to Randleman the whole time, asking if he wanted to stand the fight up after a while because he thought it was getting too boring on the mat for the crowd. “You’re on top of me, but you can’t hurt me,” Rutten informed Randleman almost playfully.

Randleman didn’t answer him once.

The first preliminary bout of the night between Ron Waterman and Chris Condo also spoke for the times. Waterman was a competent, fit wrestler, but Condo was out of shape and far from ready to enter the Octagon. SEG was afraid Condo would get hurt, so they asked me to referee the fight, though I wasn’t scheduled to.

I thought it was ridiculous. If SEG was putting me in the Octagon to save this guy’s life, then he had no reason being in there in the first place.

But money was running short, which meant decent talent would start to run thin and the matchmaking would suffer.

Condo’s first and last career fight lasted twenty-eight seconds