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Bob Meyrowitz knew he had to turn things around or the UFC and the sport would likely die in the United States. The UFC’s only sustaining revenue was its pay-per-views. Meyrowitz went back to Leo Hindery, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, and showed him the progress the UFC had made with instituting rules. Hindery told Meyrowitz that if the UFC could get the sport regulated by a major state athletic commission, he’d put it back on the larger cable platforms. What Hindery meant was that the UFC had to get sanctioned in Nevada, the one state he considered major because of Las Vegas.

This was a tall order. Marc Ratner, the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s executive director, had gone on CNN’s Larry King Live a couple years earlier and said he felt MMA wasn’t a consideration for regulation in the state. Still, Meyrowitz had to make it happen somehow.

Two NSAC commissioners, Lorenzo Fertitta and Glenn Carano, as well as the commission’s chief medical advisor, Flip Homansky, were invited to the next UFC in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. UFC 21 “Return of the Champions” was held on July 16, 1999, in the 8,000-seat Five Seasons Events Center. The trio sat cageside, taking in their first live MMA event. It couldn’t have played out worse if Senator John McCain had planned it all himself.

In one of the middleweight bouts, Jeremy Horn weighed in right at the 200-pound limit, but his Japanese opponent Daiju Takase showed up to weigh-ins at only 169 pounds. Apparently something had been lost in translation, but both fighters agreed to continue with the bout anyway. Fighters rarely turn down bouts because of weight issues; they always want to fight because they want to get paid.

With the weight advantage, Horn took Takase down and manhandled him with elbows that opened the Japanese fighter’s face. Referee Mario Yamasaki was in a no-win situation. If he stopped the fight early because Horn was mauling Takase, people would complain. But if he let it go too long, he stood the chance of upsetting the Nevada commissioners, which meant another step backward for the UFC and the sport.

He let it go till Takase was drenched in blood. It got ugly, and you could tell by their faces that Carano and Fertitta weren’t happy with what they saw.

Afterward, Meyrowitz asked me and Jeff Blatnick to join him for dinner with our Nevada guests. Surprisingly, Dr. Homansky wasn’t that averse to what he’d seen, but the Takase massacre was all Fertitta and Carano could talk about.

Fertitta, whose family owned a handful of Las Vegas casinos that catered to the local clientele, said he had a problem with the fighters hitting each other on the ground. He was a pure boxing proponent, so he wasn’t used to the image.

I said, “You’re always going to have a problem with it until you understand what you’re watching on the ground.” Society had trained us to believe it wasn’t natural or fair to fight that way, that it was dirty fighting. In the movies, John Wayne would land a punch, but then he’d pick the guy up before knocking him down again.

“Fighting on the ground is like a chess game,” I said. “It’s a systematic way of moving to either defend yourself or counter your opponent’s last move. The difference is that your pieces are your arms, legs, and torso positioned in various ways around your opponent’s body to secure chokes and holds to get the checkmate in the end.”

Fertitta wouldn’t understand that until he experienced it himself. He was poised and smart and admitted he didn’t understand MMA at all but that he’d like to look into the sport further.

Carano, who’d been a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, didn’t want to hear any of it. “Those guys were trying to hurt one another,” he said, which was pretty closed-minded considering his background.

I said, “If you drop back for a pass, isn’t linebacker Lawrence Taylor out to bury you?”

“That’s different,” Carano said.

Whether he wanted to admit it or not, though, football had a combative edge. I also pointed out that a majority of our fighters shook hands, hugged, and congratulated each other after