Serra, UFC in a New York groove
Less than three weeks ago, Matt Serra was in the highest profile fight of his career and one of the most successful events in Ultimate Fighting Championship history.
Serra is already back in the ring, and in a fight. But this time it's the political ring.
And when it comes to long-term historical impact, he hopes this battle will make his April 19 loss to Georges St. Pierre pale in comparison.
Fighters Serra and Matt Hamill, along with UFC vice-president of regulatory affairs Marc Ratner and others associated with the promotion, spent several days earlier this week in Albany, N.Y., working on gathering political support to legalize mixed martial arts in New York State and put it under the regulatory authority of the state athletic commission.
"We met with about 20 legislators Monday and Tuesday," said Ratner, the longtime executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission who was brought on board by UFC to get MMA cleared nationwide.
"We had no measurable opposition," he said. "So far it's gone very good. I'm very bullish on it."
Bills still need to go through the state house and Senate and to get signed by Governor David Patterson. Ratner hopes, if everything runs smoothly, to be able to have a UFC event in Madison Square Garden by the end of this year or early 2009. He also noted there are plenty of cities in upstate New York that would be under consideration for a show.
One of those cities in Utica, where Hamill currently lives. Over the years at various civic events, Hamill has come in contact with State Senator Joseph Griffo (R-Utica), who has become a proponent of the Senate bill, citing both the popularity of the sport and the success it has had in border states like Ohio and New Jersey.
Ratner noted how important it was this past week for the legislators and politicians like Albany mayor Gerald Jennings to meet with the fighters, to dispel any image they may have of them being uneducated thugs.
Serra owns two jiu-jitsu academies on Long Island. Hamill didn’t let being deaf stop him from winning two Division III national wrestling championships and graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in engineering. As a fighter, he was originally stereotyped as "the deaf wrestler" on the Ultimate Fighter reality show in 2006. But he's progressed to the point he's rarely thought of as a fighter who overcame a handicap, but simply a regular on the roster, whose popularity skyrocketed after a controversial decision loss to Michael Bisping in London on September 8.
Serra came out of the meetings with a positive vibe, noting that a lot of the older senators talked with him about how their kids are really into it.
"If they weren't fans of it, their kids were," he said. "They were mainly concerned about safety."
Serra noted he's been fighting since 2001 and his worst injuries in matches themselves have been a few black eyes, and even though he's coming off a one-sided loss to St. Pierre, a few weeks later, he feels fine.
"I've gotten hurt worse training than fighting," Serra said.
Griffo's bill is currently in the Tourism, Sports and Recreation committee and if passed, will move to the Senate floor, with the hope of passing by the end of the current session on June 23. An identical bill is in the state House of Representatives.
"When you have New Jersey and Ohio successfully running events, we are passing up major revenue and tourism," said Griffo, "you start to ask questions."
The big question is how things got to where they are in the first place.
When UFC was in its original form and at a popularity peak in 1995, it ran an event in Buffalo, N.Y., which nearly sold out the old Memorial Auditorium and drew a then-company record $300,000 gate.
But the sport started riding a wave of controversy after Arizona Sen. John McCain dubbed the nascent sport "human cockfighting" and attempted to get it banned nationally and taken off pay per view. It was an effort that quickly crippled the sport and came close to killing the entire industry within a few years.
Shortly after McCain became his political opponent, then-UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz was able to get a bill introduced to legalize UFC in New York and get it regulated by the state athletic commission. The legalization law was actually added onto a different bill, which passed both houses easily and became law.
Meyrowitz scheduled an event in early 1997 in Niagara Falls. His strategy was to run a few shows upstate and then, with a successful record, move into New York City. But a rival promotion booked a show immediately in the city.
Suddenly, both shows became a lightning rod for controversy, with the local media asking the question as to how such the legislature could have allowed such an event to take place.
The athletic commission didn't have the legal power to stop the show, but did have the power to regulate it. It forced the event out by suddenly throwing a 114-page rulebook at UFC in the last days before the event, designed to run the event out of town.
The key rule was that the octagon cage had to be 40 feet in diameter, and at that late an hour, a new cage couldn't have been built for those specifications. The commission also mandated fighters wearing boxing gloves, changing the sport because of the difficulty of grappling with them, as well as mandating boxing headgear to be used in the fights.
The night before the Niagara Falls show, after losing a lawsuit to get the new rules overturned, UFC had to charter a flight taking 200 people to Dothan, Ala., a backup site. The fighters and officials arrived at their new hotels at 5 A.M. the day of the show after flying all night. They barely got the arena ready and octagon itself set up in time for the show to go on the air as scheduled.
Between the cost of moving the show, having to give tickets away to get a crowd because of no promotion for the event in Dothan, and losing the live gate, it was estimated the move cost the promotion $700,000.
The same politicians who voted overwhelmingly to have mixed martial arts legalized and regulated a few months earlier did an about-face under intense media pressure. They rushed into passing a bill through the House and Senate, where it passed with almost no opposition, and signed by then-Governor George Pataki, to ban the sport who called the sport "barbaric," a tag used in negative MMA media stories even to this day.
Ratner noted UFC is currently involved with pushing legislation to get MMA regulated by athletic commissions in Tennessee, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Rhode Island to add to the 32 state commissions (and the District of Columbia) currently regulating the events.
Serra himself was involved with a mass e-mail campaign to gyms and area fans.
"After fighting with 20,000 people (in Montreal on April 19) booing you, it made me really want to fight in my home state."
