Successful card helps put UFC ‘on the map’

Monday, Nov. 25, 2002 | 10:02 a.m.

Tattooed hulks with shaved heads, goatees and ponytails turned into Wally and The Beaver at the MGM Grand Garden Arena Friday when they asked their idols for either an autograph or a photograph.

Tank, got a second?

Ultimate Fighting Championship veterans Oleg Taktarov, Wallid Ismail and Brian Johnston, mere spectators Friday, basked in their increasing celebrity.

Taktarov has appeared in a few movies. Ismail, who once slipped Royce Gracie into choke-hold unconsciousness, has been brawling on the Japanese circuit. Johnston, wearing a red PAIN sweatshirt, has made great strides in his recovery from a stroke.

A fan looked on endearingly as Gan McGee signed a program.

"It's got the potential to blow up," light heavyweight Chuck Liddell said of the UFC. "I hope it keeps getting bigger and bigger."

In The Octagon, the eight-walled arena bordered by a six-foot tall chain-link fence where mixed martial artists punish each other in a variety of ways, Liddell, Matt Hughes, Carlos Newton, Robbie Lawler and Andrei Arlovski dispatched their foes.

Tito Ortiz (11-2) emerged from what was billed as the crown jewel of the "Vendetta" card, the defense of his light heavyweight title against legend Ken Shamrock, with his championship belt and nary a nick on his mug.

Shamrock's face looked like lumpy mashed potatoes, but he got a clean bill of health after a quick check at a nearby hospital. The "legend" looked helpless from the start and threw in the towel after the third five-minute round.

"If it wasn't for my (training) team," Ortiz said, "I'd probably be in the hospital, like him."

What was once an underground-like "Fight Club" has refined itself and matured from cult status into the mainstream, as a Garden Arena sellout crowd of 13,770 provided gate receipts of about $1.5 million, both UFC records.

Las Vegas Sports Consultants, Inc., the premier oddsmaking company in the country, laid odds on a UFC event for the first time, and an LVSC official estimated that approximately $500,000 had been wagered on the three featured bouts.

Marc Ratner, executive director of a Nevada State Athletic Commission that has sanctioned the last few UFC events, confirmed that Friday was a watershed evening for the UFC.

"On behalf of the athletic commission, we were absolutely tickled with the show," Ratner said. "This pretty much put mixed martial arts on the map forever."

From its barbaric beginning nine years ago, which got it booted off cable television, the UFC has gained respect in the public arena by eliminating eye gouging, head butting, groin kicks, biting and its past fight-to-the-death billing.

None of the eight fights went their prescribed distances, and most of the combat took place horizontal to the canvas.

Still, anyone unaccustomed to watching one man level a power-packed right punch to the left eye socket of another man on his back might shy away from UFC events.

But thousands thirst for such action, which was evident Friday.

"I'm here to see some blood, guts and full contact. Basically, I'm here to see guys kick the (expletive) out of each other," said Vick Suarez, a 29-year-old truck driver from Northern California.

"The testosterone is just spewing through that atmosphere," said San Diego resident Steve Sobel, 46. "The fighters are great athletes. They really want to kill each other. And the fans are from all strata of life, from all over the world. This is a big deal."

In the opening middleweight match, Phillip Miller twice tried lifting Mark Weir, with his back on the canvas and his legs wrapped around Miller's' torso, to slam him back down. Both times, Weir battered Miller's face with punches before being banged back to the floor.

Weir later caught Miller leaning forward with a kick to his face. Briefly dazed, Miller (15-0) recovered to force Weir to tap out with a rear choke hold that left him gasping for air for a few minutes when it was over.

Arlovski (6-3) ended his bout against Ian Freeman with a powerful right uppercut, Lawler (7-0) hit Tiki's left eye socket with that devastating downward right after flooring Tiki and Newton (12-6) immobilized Pete Spratt's left arm with an inverted Kimura lock.

"We have a mutual goal," Newton said. "We want to be great, and we want to live life to the fullest, just for 15 minutes. If I don't take him out, he'll take me out. In the dressing room today, I was, like, scared. But I love it. It's like being in love. I'm scared, but I need it."

Before the Ortiz-Shamrock duel that didn't exactly match its hype -- or did anyone miss those billboards on The Strip? -- Liddell followed a right punch at "Babalu" Sobral with a left kick, landing the top part of his ankle on the bridge of Sobral's nose as Sobral lost a simple rule of physics.

Liddell (11-1) has few answers for what inspires him to take part in such brutality.

"I've always been this way," he said. "It's me. That's a competition out there, and part of it is hurting the other guy. Getting hurt has never bothered me. I've been striking since I was 12, and full-contact sparring with men since I was 14. It just comes naturally, I guess.

"I train so hard, and this is my reward. The biggest reward is actually getting out there and trying to take someone's head off."

Then there's Tank, a k a heavyweight David Abbott, who fought in his ninth and final UFC event in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Oct. 16, 1998. Pay-per-view host Joe Logan, an accomplished martial artist of "Fear Factor" television fame, announced Abbott's imminent return to the action.

Boos rained down on Tank.

Picture a bald, graying-goateed capo of the Hell's Angels, wearing a black leather Harley Davidson jacket and sipping champagne from a flute glass, and that was Tank at the post-event press conferences.

"You just got to have it in your heart and in your soul, like a warrior from way back," he said. 'The bottom line is, this is what I was put on this earth to do, to hurt another human being or be hurt."

Like a gladiator in the Colosseum in Rome a few thousand years ago?

"That was their day and time," Tank said. "This is our day and time. Same thing, different date."

Beware to anyone who enters.

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