Hand-to-hand combat gets a grip on fans

Friday, Feb. 4, 2005 | 9:59 a.m.

SOURCE: Ultimate Fighting Championship

Dana White has a warning for any boxing fans who might want to expand their horizons and give the Ultimate Fighting Championship a shot.

"We're going to ruin you," said White, the president of UFC for the past four years.

As White tells it, the latest prominent figure to fall under the spell of UFC was Hollywood director John Herzfeld ("15 Minutes," "2 Days in the Valley"), who got to know UFC while working on a film project about the organization.

Though he had always enjoyed boxing, Herzfeld walked out early on a recent high-profile title bout, disheartened that the excitement level failed to measure up to the UFC's, White said.

"He called me up and said, 'Thanks a lot for ruining my life,' " White said this week, laughing.

This is a big weekend for Herzfeld and other fans of unarmed, mano a mano combat who have found that the UFC has grabbed them with the unrelenting force of a neck crank (that's a type of choke hold that impairs the flow of oxygen to the brain, for the uninitiated).

The latest UFC fight card, "UFC 51: Super Saturday" rumbles into the Mandalay Bay Events Center on Saturday night, with a light heavyweight clash between Tito Ortiz, known as "The Huntington Beach Bad Boy," and Brazilian star Vitor Belfort in the main event.

The arena is virtually sold out -- which is common for UFC events in Las Vegas, White said -- at ticket prices ranging from $35 to $350.

The show is also available on pay per view at a suggested retail price of $29.95. Recent UFC cards have generated 50,000 to 100,000 pay-per-view "buys" -- enough to make UFC the second-biggest honcho in the pay-per-view game, behind only WWE pro wrestling, White said.

"We've been very pleased with the growth of our live gates, and now our real focus is on building the pay-per-view base," said White, who speaks not in the frenzied tone of a pitchman but with the steady confidence of a gambler holding an unbeatable hand.

"If you're just getting into UFC, you couldn't pick a better card than this weekend. ... We have the most exciting sport in the world."

The Ultimate Fighting Championship, based in Las Vegas and owned by Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta of Station Casinos since 2001, is the leading sports association devoted to "mixed martial arts" -- fighting that integrates jiu-jitsu, judo, karate, boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and other disciplines.

Supporters of UFC point out that its athletes are among the most highly trained and conditioned in the world, and the variety of ways a match can end -- by knockout, by submission, with both fighters standing, with both men on the mat -- adds an extra element of intrigue.

"It's very raw, real fighting -- true fighting," said UFC star Tim Sylvia, who faces Andrei Arlovski for the organization's interim heavyweight championship Saturday. "It's not all standing up and punching. We can also get down on the mat; there's crawling, you can use your elbows, knees, feet ...

"In boxing, one guy might be the better boxer but the other guy's the better street fighter. Well, who's better overall? In our sport, you can actually determine who the better all-around fighter is."

Sylvia (19-1 in mixed martial arts), a former UFC heavyweight champ who lives and trains in Iowa, lost his title in UFC 48 when Frank Mir applied an "arm bar" move that snapped two bones in Sylvia's right forearm. ("It wasn't painful at the time," Sylvia said.) A victory against Arlovski (8-3), of Minsk, Belarus, would put Sylvia in line for a rematch against Mir, currently out of action after breaking his leg in a motorcycle crash last September.

Ortiz (12-4), one of the UFC's most recognizable personalities, said he has been training eight hours a day, six days a week for the past three months in Huntington Beach and Big Bear, Calif., to prepare for Belfort (12-4).

The high level of conditioning the fighters exhibit is a big draw for UFC followers, Ortiz said.

"It's not fake, like (pro) wrestling," Ortiz said. "A lot of the appeal is almost automatic -- just seeing how the different martial arts are integrated in the fights. And the fighters are very serious about what they do -- many of them have college degrees, and they spend a lot of time working on their sport."

An Ortiz-Belfort match was originally set to take place more than three years ago at Mandalay Bay, but it was called off when Belfort sustained an injury in training. The winner could face UFC light heavyweight standout Randy Couture.

In a third featured bout Saturday, David Terrell (10-1) and Evan Tanner (32-4) square off for the UFC middleweight title.

"There are really three main events, all of them awesome fights," White said.

While the UFC retains some characteristics of a cult phenomenon, White, a Las Vegas native and Bishop Gorman grad, has helped usher the sport into -- or at least close to -- the mainstream since the current regime took over in 2001.

The UFC first surfaced in 1993, but quickly developed a reputation as a barbaric blood sport and had difficulty gaining widespread sanctioning.

That changed when the Fertittas bought the organization, instituted a strict set of rules and got it sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, perhaps the most respected body of its kind in the world.

"When the company was purchased four years ago, the sport was practically dead in the U.S.," White said. "But we had a five-year plan: We wanted sanctioning in Nevada, New Jersey, at the Mohegan Sun (in Connecticut), all the major places we wanted to have fight cards. We wanted to get back our pay-per-view audience, we wanted mainstream coverage in the media and we wanted a TV show.

"Four years later, we have already achieved all of those goals."

The TV show is a reality-style program called "The Ultimate Fighter" that portrays a group of athletes vying to earn a spot on a UFC fight card. It airs at 11 p.m. each Monday on Spike (Cox cable channel 29).

Marc Ratner, the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, said the commission has maintained an excellent relationship with the UFC. He thinks the sport is here to stay.

"We had to learn about it ourselves at first, and we're continually tweaking it to try to make it even better, but we are very much in favor of it," Ratner said. "Now they are selling out their events ... and the reality show has generated a lot of interest in the UFC.

"We're delighted we were instrumental in making it a regulated sport."

UFC also boasts an unofficial seal of approval from another state institution: Nevada's legal sports books. Betting lines on UFC fights are routinely posted in the sports books of major Strip properties, an imprimatur that would have been impossible to come by in the UFC's early, murkier years.

White said his next goal is to develop a regular cable TV series for the UFC modeled on the old "Tuesday Night Fights" boxing show in an effort to further build the brand.

"The only way to do that is through exposure," White said. "Exposure on the major networks, in all of the media. When there's a big boxing match coming up, the TV, radio, papers -- they're all about the fight, the fight, the fight in the days leading up to it.

"We don't have that kind of coverage of the UFC -- yet."