Toronto's Mark Bocek (bottom) in his debut UFC appearance against Frank Edgar (2007)
Mark Bocek
Mark Bocek
A beginner MMA class at RevolutionWhy We Fight
by Barrett Hooper
Toronto Life - 04/09
The fastest-growing sport in the city isn’t soccer or basketball—it’s ultimate fighting. And it’s no longer just hormonal boys itching to prove themselves in the infamous octagon. It’s ad execs, nurses, lawyers— anyone looking for an outlet for that increasingly suppressed primal urge to give (and take) a beating
MMA, or mixed martial arts, is exactly what it sounds like: a Molotov cocktail of fighting skills combining the strikes of traditional boxing and muay Thai kick-boxing with the grappling of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrestling (Olympic-style, not the off-the-top-rope, gold spandex–wearing kind). A well-rounded MMA fighter can attack you standing up, with feet, fists, knees, elbows, shins and shoulders. He can force you to the ground and tie up your arms and legs with painful joint locks that threaten to pull meat from the bone like a chicken wing until you tap out—the MMA equivalent of crying uncle. Or he can wrap his arms around your neck and choke you unconscious by cutting off the blood supply to your brain.
When MMA fights were first staged in North America 16 years ago, the then-senator John McCain likened them to human cockfights and tried to have them banned. Now MMA is the fastest-growing sport on the planet, rivalling soccer, NASCAR and NFL football for our Jumbotron-loving, slo-mo-replay-addicted, foam finger–waving attention. Even Hollywood has taken notice: George Clooney, Keanu Reeves and Mandy Moore are fans; and last year David Mamet released a movie called Redbelt, which was set in the world of MMA. The billion-dollar Ultimate Fighting Championship, the NHL of MMA, has, for better or worse, made the sport what it is today: a cultural juggernaut. And nowhere in North America is MMA more popular than in Toronto.
On nights when the UFC is on pay-per-view (about once a month), Toronto sports bars are packed with patrons wearing UFC or Affliction (a smaller competitor) or Tapout (an MMA clothing line) T-shirts. The Fight Network, a Toronto-based digital channel that was created to give fans a round-the-clock UFC fix, has more than five million subscribers across Canada. The annual Mixed Martial Arts Expo attracts thousands to the International Centre to meet such UFC stars as Matt Serra, Dan Henderson and Carlos Newton, the first Canadian to win a UFC championship. And the UFC’s Web site gets more visits from Toronto per capita than from any other city in the world.
And this despite the fact that MMA fighting is illegal in Ontario. Critics often decry the sport as a prime example of the coarsening of society, but it has tapped into our fighting spirit in a way not seen since George Chuvalo went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1966. MMA is the last arena where might makes right, and many of us are drawn to its lack of ambiguity. The urge to fight is a survival mechanism hard-wired to our DNA since caveman days yet out of place in modern society. Fighting, we’re taught, is bad. Disputes are not to be settled with fists and knees and elbows, but with lawyers and arbitrators and negotiators. Nobody tells their son to fight like a man anymore; even hockey fights are under threat of extinction. Yet, like it or not, when faced with conflict, our first impulse is still to fight. To deny it is simply unnatural.
Mixed martial arts has been around in some form since the ancient Olympic Games, where the most popular sport was pankration, a savage, anything-goes style of wrestling in which some competitors chose death over surrender. In the 19th century, bare-knuckle boxing was the most popular combat sport. In the late ’60s, Bruce Lee became the first modern mixed martial artist when he combined traditional kung fu with elements of boxing, French savate (kick-boxing), judo and tae kwon do to create his “style of no style.”
The sport we now call MMA was ushered in by Royce Gracie, a gracious and diminutive Brazilian who took on all comers—kick-boxing champions, karate experts, kung fu masters. He used a synthesis of Japanese jiu-jitsu and judo (a style now known as Brazilian, or Gracie, jiu-jitsu) to control and smother his larger, stronger opponents, forcing them to submit via joint locks and choke holds while he hardly broke a sweat. He won three of the first four UFC events, although his relatively bloodless encounters were an anomaly in a sport billed as no-holds-barred. (There were only two rules: no eye gouging and no biting.) The early UFC fights promised victory by “knockout, surrender, doctor’s intervention or death.” In fact, there has only ever been one death resulting from a sanctioned MMA event, two in non-sanctioned events in Europe, though UFC fights rarely ended without the canvas looking like a Jackson Pollock painting. The violence led to the sport being banned in 36 states by the mid-’90s, and pay-per-view distributors stopped carrying events, putting the UFC on life-support.
Then, in 2001, casino owners Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, billionaire brothers with connections to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, bought the flailing organization for $2 million. They put Dana White, an obnoxious ex-boxercise instructor and a high school buddy, in charge, and he immediately made changes. Weight classes were imposed, along with timed rounds. More rules were added, for a total of 31, including no hair pulling, groin shots or kicking a downed opponent in the head. Fights became more competitive, more entertaining and more palatable to non-fans. States began to sanction bouts, notably Nevada and New Jersey (home to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where betting and brawling have always been popular), and pay-per-view companies scrambled back on board. “Suddenly we were being treated like superstars,” says Carlos Newton, the 32-year-old UFC veteran. “We started making money, and people recognized us on the street.”
Dramatically improving the sport’s mainstream profile was the launch of the UFC-produced Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV in 2005. The Big Brother meets Bloodsport reality series demystified MMA to outsiders and made celebrities out of its combative house guests. It was an instant smash, often beating out the NBA, NFL and major-league baseball games in the ratings. (Season nine begins this month.)
Finally, MMA was earning some respect. It’s still the bloodiest sport this side of bullfighting, but most injuries are superficial cuts to the face and head, which bleed profusely and spectacularly yet are never life-threatening. When it comes to grievous bodily harm, MMA lags far behind bull riding, surfing, skydiving, mountain climbing and whitewater rafting, and light-years behind boxing, which has had 1,029 deaths in the past 89 years. Even McCain, a boxing fan, has changed his tune. In 2007, he conceded that MMA had “grown up.”
On April 18, UFC 97 will take place at Montreal’s 20,000-seat Bell Centre. Last year, it hosted UFC 83, an event that sold out in record time, earning $5 million in ticket sales (on eBay, tickets went for 10 times their face value). The economic spinoffs for the city were estimated at upwards of $50 million, and organizers are expecting a similar return this year. Of course, either event could just as easily have been held at the Air Canada Centre. Only Ken Hayashi, Ontario’s athletic commissioner, stood in the way.
Hayashi’s job is to govern professional sports in the province. He also happens to be a karate black belt with more than 40 years of martial arts experience. Yet he won’t sanction MMA events because, in his interpretation, they would violate Section 83 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which states that all “prize fighting” is illegal, with the exception of “boxing contests.” Never mind that the law dates back to the 1890s, or that other jurisdictions have interpreted “boxing contest’’ more liberally. (In Quebec, MMA is often referred to as “mixed boxing.”) As far as Hayashi is concerned, “It’s breaking the law anywhere it’s happening.”
In order for him to change his mind about MMA, two things need to happen. First, Section 83 needs to make MMA legal in explicit terms, which requires an act of Parliament. Second, the sport must establish a strong safety record at the amateur level—a catch-22 since MMA isn’t recognized at any level in Ontario. Curiously, amateur sports fall under the jurisdiction of a different government office, the Ministry of Health Promotion, which recognizes 86 sporting organizations—including judo, karate, tae kwon do, boxing and muay Thai—but has denied mixed martial arts.
As a result, some Ontario fighters sign up for unsanctioned bouts, or “smokers,” being held in underground gyms or on native reserves. (The town of Ohsweken on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford holds occasional Rumble on the Rez fight cards inside a lacrosse arena.) Underground bouts, which aren’t subject to the same safety regulations as sanctioned events, can obviously put fighters at risk—exactly what the province says it’s trying to avoid. Still, the lack of legitimate fight venues hasn’t prevented Ontario from spawning its share of serious MMA competitors. Following in Newton’s footsteps is Toronto fighter Mark Bocek. A rising star in the UFC, the 27-year-old recently had his sixth win and will compete at UFC 97 in Montreal this month. When he’s not fine-tuning his jiu-jitsu in Brazil, or training with two-time Olympic wrestler and UFC veteran Dan Henderson in California, or working out at Florida’s American Top Team (one of the foremost MMA gyms in the world), he trains at Xtreme Couture, a 33,000-square-foot MMA wonderland that opened in Etobicoke a year ago.
Among fighters with nicknames like Top Gun pilots—Iceman, Rampage, Spider, Shogun—he is simply Mark Bocek. At five-foot-eight and 155 pounds, with bright red hair, he looks a little like Casey from Mr. Dressup. Only his cauliflower ears—caused by years of punching, twisting and tearing and considered a badge of honour among fighters—betray his vocation. He’s a typical MMA athlete: an average guy with a strong work ethic and an ability to take an ungodly amount of punishment.
Like aerobics in the ’80s and Tae Bo in the ’90s, MMA has become an exercise phenomenon. There are more than a dozen clubs in the city devoted to teaching mixed martial arts, plus countless strip mall McDojos that have added some sort of MMA element (grappling, for example) to their traditional karate or kung fu curriculum. And the UFC recently announced that it will open a chain of MMA gyms in the U.S. and Canada aimed specifically at the fitness crowd.
Revolution MMA in North York is one of the fancier facilities. Open since January and built at a cost of more than half a million dollars, the 13,000-square-foot gym is all sleek surfaces and clean, masculine lines. Past the treadmills and weight machines is a large area with thick mats where a row of punching bags hangs from the ceiling. A boxing ring sits in one corner, and next to it a gleaming black cage not much bigger than a jail cell. This eight-sided arena, called, appropriately enough, the octagon, is synonymous with the sport of mixed martial arts.
Carlos Newton teaches MMA here, showing lawyers, brokers, nurses and students—even kids as young as three can take part in a munchkin MMA program—how to take their opponents to the ground and apply a submission: a shoulder lock, for example, or a choke hold. For beginners, an MMA class is like living out their own private Rocky montage: sit-ups, push-ups, skipping rope, hitting a heavy bag like it’s a side of beef, and kicking and punching drills. Once they’ve picked up enough skills, they can slap a $20 piece of moulded plastic over their $2,000 smile and climb into the cage to spar, throwing leather like a real fighter but at a much slower pace. “People who train in MMA have a Clark Kent syndrome,” says Joel Gerson, a five-time Canadian jiu-jitsu champion and Revolution’s owner. “By day they wear a suit and sit at a desk. At night, they put on their MMA gear and leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Of course, they’re not invincible, and when they make a mistake, injuries can happen.
Black eyes and bloody noses are common in MMA. So are bruises, concussions and broken bones. As Newton points out, it’s not the fighting that takes a toll on the body, it’s the training, so sticking with the program requires a bit of a sado-masochistic streak. Yet MMA requires smarts as well. For every bouncer and bounty hunter in the UFC, there’s a banker or teacher or member of Croatian parliament. “It’s a sport for the highly intelligent,” says Gerson. “You can’t just get really good at one technique and expect that to be enough. It’s not like baseball, where being able to hit a 95-mile-an-hour fastball will get you in the Blue Jays’ lineup. Like Aristotle said, the complete man should work, study and wrestle.”
For Andrea Bloch, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mom, MMA is about pushing herself both physically and mentally. “It’s about the personal challenge,” she says. “And I love the intensity of it.” (Her husband and two oldest children, ages five and nine, have also taken up the sport.) Mark Brunswick, a 39‑year-old advertising account director who trains at Revolution with his eight-year-old son, thinks MMA has an authenticity and practicality that’s missing from other training programs, like running or karate or lifting weights. “It keeps you mentally sharp and teaches life lessons that you can apply in the boardroom,” he says. “And after you’ve been kicked in the head a few times, things that used to bother you don’t faze you quite as much.”
So why do fighters fight? In her book On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates wrote that the sweet science is “a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for its being lost.” The same applies to MMA. Most fighters will tell you that you never feel more alive than when you are giving—and taking—a beating.
If the purest form of sport is fighting, then the purest form of fighting is mixed martial arts. The sport strips everything down to its essence: there is no ball, no team, no end zone, no next inning, no next game. Only one bout of sheer mano-a-mano, push-yourself-to-the-limit aggression. MMA simplifies competition down to winner and loser, without rules like boxing’s standing eight-count, which waters down the intensity of the sport, extends the length of the fight and increases the chance of injury. By pitting two combatants of similar stature and skill against each other under a set of mutually agreed upon rules, one of which clearly states that either can stop the fight at any time, MMA is as fair a contest between two people as you’ll find.
The sport’s popularity stems in part from the fact that it’s universal: a knockout is a knockout in any language. But it’s also popular because, unlike boxing, with its cast of blinged-out, up-from-the-ghetto warriors—or any pro sport that features overpaid, often underperforming athletes—the heroes of MMA are relatable in an Average Joe sort of way. That, and the sport is accessible; anyone can do it. Not everyone can skate or swim or throw a curve ball, but we all instinctively know how to kick or throw a punch.
MMA is bloody, but it’s not bloodthirsty. Fans love a well-executed—and bloodless—submission as much as any knockout kick. We still have no stomach for cockfighting and dogfighting because of their cruelty; the obvious difference with MMA is that the violence is consensual. Two men enter, one man—the better man—leaves. It’s Darwinism in action.
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and the movie it inspired posited underground fist fighting (to which ultimate fighting has often been compared) as a kind of therapy for the numbing effects of consumer culture. MMA, organized, sanctioned and beamed into millions of homes and sports bars, acts as an antidote to our overly polite, overly regulated, overly protective PC culture. It lets us answer the essential question we all ask ourselves at some point: Am I a coward? Even if you enter the cage and come up short, it’s a lesson in humility without the humiliation. “It’s an incredible way to test yourself and see what you’re made of,” says Bocek.
As Oates points out, “Man’s greatest passion” is not for peace, it’s for war. And organized fighting provides a necessary outlet for these savage instincts.
UFC Planning November Show in Boston; New York and Toronto in early 2010
MONTREAL - A trio of new host cities will get Ultimate Fighting Championship events later this year or in early 2010 if Dana White gets his way.
The UFC president, apparently confident that legislation will be in place in time, has targeted Boston, New York City and Toronto for upcoming UFC shows.
White laid out the plans during today's UFC 97 pre-event press conference.
White, born and raised near Boston, has long publicly shared his interest in taking the UFC to the state, a hotbed for MMA that has hosted a past tryout for "The Ultimate Fighter." However, despite the sport's popularity in the state, and though some events are held in the state, Massachusetts does not currently regulate MMA.
UFC officials are involved in the political push, though, and regulation is considered likely very soon.
"I'm pretty confident we're going to do an event in Boston, Mass., at the Boston Garden in November," White said.
The Garden, formally known as the TD Banknorth Garden, is home to the NBA's Boston Celtics and NHL's Boston Bruins and can accommodate nearly 20,000 spectators.
Although Boston boasts a population of about 610,000 (making it the 21st largest city in the U.S.), its greater metro area includes nearly five million people, making it potentially one of the most lucrative markets available to the UFC.
However, bigger even than Boston is New York City. The UFC has been on the frontlines in the fight to get MMA sanctioned in the state of New York, though a few (but vocal) opponents have provided hurdles. Still, most are optimistic that legislation will pass and the state, the third most populous in the country (19.5 million residents), will begin MMA regulation by year's end.
White and Co. are ready to capitalize once the doors open. The same goes for Toronto, which is Canada's most populous city with 2.5 million residents (and 5.6 million in the metro area).
"The first of the year, (we want to do a show in) New York, and I'm hoping we have Toronto done before New York," White said.
White's ultimate goal is to host a NYC event at the legendary Madison Square Garden, a 20,000-seat arena in the heart of the city. However, since arriving in Canada on Wednesday, fans have been adamant that Toronto could do even better.
"The people up here tell me, 'If you go to Toronto, you could do 60,000 seats,'" White said. "People tell me crazy stuff about going to Toronto.
"As fast as we sell out here (in Montreal), maybe we could do 30,000 in Toronto."
