News

Keith Jardine errs in his judgment, and it's obvious to everyone looking on. That's the beauty of the elemental sports, the contests without a cult of technology attached, without elaborate equipment, without designed-to-baffle terminologies and strategies. On some level, anyone can get them, can understand instantly what's going on without enduring a short course on the fine points of the game.

Mr. Jardine has the look, certainly, demanded in the Ultimate Fighting Championships, the leading purveyor of a sport known generically as Mixed Martial Arts — a shaved head that was covered in a black tuque as he made his walk to the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena; a nasty little goatee; an expression of extreme grumpiness; and a magnificent nom de guerre — The Dean of Mean.

Forget for the moment that Mr. Jardine holds a degree in human performance and sport from New Mexico Highlands University (you can look it up), that he is a former football player and rugby player, and more gym rat than street thug. In appearance, he is all cartoon menace, as is his opponent, Houston Alexander — African-American, same shaved head, same intimidating countenance, equally ominous nickname (The Assassin) but minus the college degree.

Mr. Jardine is a rising star, Mr. Alexander a near unknown, and so the outcome seems inevitable: When Mr. Jardine lands his first punch, Mr. Alexander wobbles and Mr. Jardine moves in for the kill.

Trouble is, Mr. Alexander was only a little off balance, and trouble is, Mr. Alexander is one skilled and savage guy. He starts punching in return and rocks Mr. Jardine's head backward with an uppercut to the jaw. Eventually, Mr. Jardine falls to the canvas, but in this sport, there's no eight count, no retreating to a neutral corner, and the referee doesn't intervene immediately.

Mr. Alexander keeps pounding away at Mr. Jardine's head until he is on his knees and finally unconscious. His mouthpiece drops to the canvas just before his face hits, hard and flush and uncomprehending. There's a bit of blood dripping from between his slack, gaping lips. Only then is Mr. Alexander pulled off.

The 14,000 fans in attendance, including a sprinkling of minor Hollywood celebrities, love every minute of it. A continent-wide audience is tuning in, in record numbers, through pay-per-view. This night is the coming-out party for the UFC, its first real crack at the mainstream, and as always it delivers bang, and blood, for the buck. Though it still isn't even legal everywhere, there is a growing sense that the product packaged and sold by the UFC has the chance to largely supplant boxing and cross over to mass acceptance.

It's certainly not to everyone's taste. The short bout, over in 48 seconds, seems everything that those who see the UFC as the featured event in a Wide World of Dystopian Sports imagine it is: two men, locked in an octagonal cage, stripped to the waist, barefoot, wearing minimal padding across their knuckles, assaulting each other by just about any method they choose until one or the other quits, is knocked or choked unconscious, submits in the face of unendurable pain or, occasionally, is judged the (invariably bloodied) winner or loser once a bout reaches its time limit.

Ah, the triumph of the baser instincts, the descent of the human species, the coarsening of modern culture, the handiwork of porn and video games and ultraviolent films and equal doses of ecstasy and Red Bull. "I was going to rip his fucking arm off and take it home with me" one of the fighters shouts after winning a submission victory. Weep for a world that could produce this, and remember what happened to Rome.

But really it's more straightforward and ancient, though perhaps no more benign. The origins of this spectacle predate even the big Cain vs. Abel bout. It goes all the way back to the snake in the tree, to the essential capitalist equation. Give the people what they want, even if some of them won't acknowledge those desires, and then make them pay for it.

The human-nature argument: Men will always fight and others will always watch them (women, too, on both counts), the crowd of the curious as predictable as the one that gathers in any school yard at the first hint of a brawl. The origins of what we consider sport would have involved some form of wrestling or fist fighting, long before anyone thought to kick or throw — or create — a ball.

And beyond that, war games, mano à mano duels, often with grave consequences for the loser, were the National Football League of their time. For the spectator, combat sports deliver at the gut level, they provide a primal, anti-intellectual, amoral adrenaline rush as seductive to Joyce Carol Oates as it is to knuckle-draggers. That is us, that has always been us, though through the centuries, through the millennia, right-thinking people have tried their best to stamp the instinct out.

The red-light district

Two forms of fighting sports survived into the 20th century — boxing, which was first codified a couple of hundred years earlier, but which didn't achieve full legitimacy until the adoption of the Marquess of Queensberry rules in the mid-1800s, providing an illusory framework of reason and order around the violence; and wrestling, which evolved into pure pantomime once a couple of commercial principles were fully understood, i.e., that it was a ticket-selling bonus if you could guarantee dramatic momentum and a slam-bang finish, and that audiences were quite willing to suspend disbelief in order to get it.

During its modern history, boxing has often been made illegal in one jurisdiction or another. It has been cast as the "red-light district of sports," not just because of the lurking danger (ring deaths, though very rare, will always happen), but because as a largely unregulated bastion of the free market, it was a forum for the ruthless exploitation of its poor, desperate combatants.

But even as tastes changed, even as other sports passed it in importance — soccer, baseball, football, hockey, basketball, auto racing — boxing survived and occasionally thrived. The biggest one-off sporting events of all time, measured in dollars, have always been fights.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were attempts to grab parts of the boxing and wrestling audience by aiming farther down-market, by staging "tough man" contests where most of the niceties of rules and regulations were eliminated. The problem was the sheer scuzziness of it all, plus the fact that most of those no-holds-barred fighters were technically inept and tended to collapse in exhaustion.

The original Ultimate Fighting Championship, a promotional company that began operation in 1993, provided a slightly more sophisticated take: Eliminate all rules but three (no biting, no eye gouging and no "fish hooking" — inserting fingers into the nose or mouth); don't bother with weight classes; and then see what might happen if you put a bar bouncer in with a sumo wrestler, or a jujitsu expert with a boxer. And put it not in a ring, but in a cage: Two men enter, only one leaves standing.

When I attended one of those early shows in Buffalo, the fights seemed remarkably crude and pointless, and the audience seemed drawn from a demographic that would have found pro wrestling as challenging as Shakespeare. It's what Senator John McCain, a devoted boxing fan (he once sat ringside at a fight in Phoenix happily wedged between Don King and Mike Tyson), famously labelled "human cockfighting," calling for it to be banned.

By 2001, even pay-per-view providers, who will show just about anything for money, were getting queasy, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship seemed on the fast road to extinction.

The whole shebang was purchased for the relative pittance of $2-million (U.S.) by Las Vegas-based brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, who had made a considerable fortune running the suburban casino business that their father had started and by investing in Las Vegas real estate. (Lorenzo Fertitta had also served on the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which regulates boxing in the state.)

Their partner was a guy they had met in the gym, a small-time boxing trainer and manager with no formal business background, someone who shared their new-found passion for jujitsu-style fighting: Dana White.

Mr. White was sitting in the stands before the biggest night of his professional life, and his voice was worn down to nearly nothing. He does all of the talking for the sport. (Though Lorenzo Fertitta sits a few rows away, he and his brother remain steadfastly in the background.)

Mr. White seems born to the role of front man: He is a charming, charismatic figure, and of course he has the UFC look — jeans, shaved head, a tight shirt to show off the gym work — along with his ready smile.

In the single corporate entity that effectively controls the entire sport (especially since buying out its only significant competitor, the Japan-based Pride Fighting), Mr. White is much more than just the face of Mixed Martial Arts. He is the president, the matchmaker, the paymaster, the de facto commissioner, the negotiator, the disciplinarian, the uber-boss.

Boxing, the one true free-market bastion in professional sport, has long been dominated by promoters working only in the interest of their own enrichment and willing to cut each other's throats to get there. Here, it's a de facto monopoly, a one-man, one-company show.

"The guys who have run boxing for the last 40 years have destroyed it," Mr. White says. "Boxing became all about money, all about greed. They've done nothing to secure the future of their sport. Nothing. It's been all about how much money I can put in my pocket now."

He, on the other hand, can take the long view — untroubled by competitors, by agents, by a union, by exorbitant athlete wages. (For absorbing those 48 seconds of face pounding, Mr. Jardine was paid just $7,000.)

When they first saw a live UFC, in Louisiana, back in what are now considered the dark ages, Mr. White and the Fertittas thought the same thing as everyone else — that it was ugly and primitive and, in that form, doomed. But they also saw something else.

"What was great about [the competitors] was their personalities," Mr. White says. "They were good people and they all have their own different stories.

"You know how [wrestling kingpin] Vince McMahon builds characters in the WWE? You've got Haystacks Calhoun — he's a big country boy? We've got Matt Hughes. He's a real country kid who really does farm. He's real. Chuck Liddell [UFC's biggest star] looks like an axe murderer. He's an accounting major from Cal Poly."

So there was part of the formula: Wrestling-style storylines, but with real, unscripted, violent, bloody action in short-attention-span bites. Athletes who didn't have the usual boxing background: African-American or Hispanic, from bad places, fighting as a means of economic survival or to stay out of jail.

UFC fighters were largely middle-class white guys — former college wrestlers and football players who took up martial arts of one sort or another initially to say in shape — so they could easily be marketed to a middle-class white audience.

Kalib Starnes, the only Canadian on the card, is fairly typical. He is 32 years old and began studying a Brazilian variant of jujitsu 12 years ago, making his leap to the UFC through the Ultimate Fighter reality series. (He winds up winning an impressive victory over another product of the show, Chris Leben.)

"I fought in the first martial arts shows in B.C.," Starnes says. "They were illegal at the time. We had police helicopters flying over the ring and the fire department coming in and trying to shut down the venues. Like it was a death match. I don't think people really understood that it was a legitimate sport. …

"The fighters enjoy danger as much as somebody who is a sky diver or a downhill skier. There are a lot of dangerous sports and lifestyles that people can take up, but that's what they're into. Sure, it's dangerous, but so is crossing the street."

Mr. White and the Fertittas also understood that in order to cross over to a mass audience, to get out of the tough-man ghetto and reach a more attractive demographic, the UFC would need to go straight — the outlaw, no-holds-barred sport needed rules and more than a whiff of legitimacy.

"You have to turn it into a real sport with real athletes," Mr. White says. "Nobody wants to see crazy, death-sport shit."

To that end, they immediately began emphasizing the skill sets and specialization of their competitors. Then they hired Marc Ratner, who for 14 years had been the director the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and one of the most respected figures in boxing.

(Back in the "human cockfighting" days, Mr. Ratner actually appeared with Senator McCain on The Larry King Show during a debate on ultimate fighting, arguing that the sport-without-rules would never be made legal in his state.)

Mr. Ratner's job was to help draft a set of statutes, and then to begin the long process of persuading various athletic commissions to sanction the UFC. Five weight classes were created, and the original three rules grew to 32 (including a prohibition against "putting a finger into any orifice or into any cut or laceration on an opponent," and also against "abusive language" and "timidity").

Mostly, Mr. Ratner had to make the case that, appearances aside, MMA was in fact safer than boxing. Having watched seven boxers die from a ringside seat, he was more than comfortable with that argument. "There are certainly cuts and contusions [in UFC]," he says. "But what I can document [is that] during my whole time as a director, we probably had 80 cards of MMA — about 700 individual bouts. There were cuts, contusions, broken toes. The most serious injury we had was a broken arm. That's it."

Boxing features longer bouts, repeated head blows (not just in competition but in training), eight counts that allow fighters to continue after they've been concussed and an ethic in which surrender is the greatest sin. (Consider how Roberto Duran never really lived down his " no mas" performance against Sugar Ray Leonard, when he simply turned his back in mid-fight and walked away.)

By contrast, MMA bouts are stopped quickly once a fighter is knocked out or choked unconscious, with no reprieve. And it's quite acceptable to quit by "tapping out."

That said, everyone involved with the UFC continues to live in fear of a grave injury or death in the octagon, however improbable, knowing that, unlike boxing, the sport wouldn't have enough history to survive the political backlash.

However, Mr. White is confident enough now to sound rather flip on the whole subject of life and death: "At the end of the day, this is a combat sport. Two guys get in there and start hitting each other and anything can happen. Such is life. You'd shit if you knew how many kids die every year playing high-school football. But nobody thinks about it because it's football. You wouldn't believe how many people die playing polo every year. Dying is part of life. It happens."

The final master stroke in the relaunch of the sport was to ride the reality-show wave with The Ultimate Fighter, a program on the male-oriented Spike Network, which became a platform for building personalities who could then arrive on the big stage complete with a fully realized backstory. Stars come and go, champions eventually lose, but the TV show, in which Mr. White is prominently featured, provided the UFC with its own farm system combined with an extended infomercial.

With that structure in place, and with boxing on a path of commercial self-destruction, all that was left was letting the darker elements of human nature take their course.

A very profitable savagery

Chuck (The Iceman) Liddell, the accounting major who looks like an axe murderer, is knocked out in 113 seconds at UFC 71 by Quinton (Rampage) Jackson, surrendering the light heavyweight championship.

Unlike Mr. Jardine, Mr. Liddell at least gets well paid for his pain, cashing a cheque in the neighbourhood of a half-million dollars, plus a percentage of the pay-per-view sales that would take his purse into the seven-figure range. That's the reward for being the sport's biggest breakout personality, the magazine cover boy, the guy who made the cameo appearance on Entourage.

In boxing, the humiliating demise of such a star would be disastrous, but in the UFC fighters seem to suffer little as commodities even after they are beaten. Mr. Liddell will be recycled soon enough, Mr. Jackson is already matched with an opponent chosen by Mr. White to maximize the potential box-office appeal, and UFC 72, to be staged in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is just beyond the horizon.

The Las Vegas event has generated more than $4-million at the gate (a sold-out, beer-drinking, frat-boy kind of crowd, almost exclusively Caucasian) and more than a million pay-per-view buys.

More significantly, this week has provided vindication for all of Mr. White's dreams of reaching the mainstream. The UFC graced the covers of both Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine, the two biggest sports publications in the United States. And the ESPN all-sports network covered the fights, straight, for the first time, the same way they would have covered baseball, football or basketball.

Forget about the gates: The barbarians are in the living room.

And now, to conquer the rest of the world. The UFC is currently sanctioned in 22 U.S. jurisdictions, with Illinois, Michigan and New York soon to come on board. More events are planned for the United Kingdom, for Canada (Ontario remains a holdout), for continental Europe, for Japan. Five years from now, Mr. White envisions the first truly global pay-per-view event.

Do the math: Multiply a $50 price tag by however many millions of buy-ins you might imagine (the recent Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather Jr. boxing event drew a record 2.15 million pay-per-view subscribers in the U.S. alone), and subtract the relative pittance they're paying the fighters.

It's potentially an astounding number, all based on that original premise, on an appeal rooted somewhere deep in our DNA.

"Think about the NFL," Mr. White says. "The NFL can't get arrested in any other country. With [UFC], I don't have to explain anything. … When I take two guys fighting in the octagon, it crosses all barriers, all language barriers, all culture barriers. Everybody gets two guys fighting in the octagon, and they like it. It's something primal inside of us that we like combat sports."

And as for those who don't get it, who don't like it, who conscientiously object?

"Listen, it's not 1973," Mr. White says. "We've got 500 channels now. I don't like golf. I think golf's the stupidest game in the history of sports. That doesn't mean other people shouldn't watch it. I can change the fucking channel if I don't want to watch golf.

"So, back in the day when there were only four or five channels, I get that you had to be careful what you put on television. Now that there are so many different channels, everybody can have whatever they want."

Stephen Brunt is a sports columnist for The Globe and Mail.