Guilty of Hypocrisy
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The ongoing overzealous push by local, state and federal authorities to ban NHB events is akin to the 1980's crusade against child molestation which led to 200 convictions, 140 of which have been overturned since. In Canada, Reality Fighting shows cannot take place even on Sovereign Indian reservations. On April 26, 1996, eight fighters, a referee, promoter and ring announcer were arrested for participating in Extreme Fighting 2 in the Mohawk Nation community of Kahnawake. The event was sanctioned by the Mohawk Athletic Commission, yet the Quebec authorities arrested and jailed everyone who stayed overnight in Canada following the day of the event. The fiasco continued in the US when TCI and Time Warner announced they would ban NHB ppvs from their programming.
There are restrictions placed on monopolies by the federal government for a purpose. Unilateral price increases are the primary concern, nevertheless, it is unethical of cable companies to impose their moral and religious judgments on their helpless customers. Whether TCI & Time Warner are bending over for the politicians, or there is a genuine effort to adhere to their twisted values to ban NHB is irrelevant. The fact is, with the exception of Satellite TV, they rule the airwaves in the communities they operate in. If NHB ppvs were profitless products, TCI and Time Warner would be perfectly justified to can the shows from their programming. By banning Reality Fighting events, they are in their own words "taking a financial bath." TCI, with over 14 million subscribers, has axed a substantial source of revenue for SEG, the promoter of UFCs.
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The cable companies and politicians view NHB events as barbaric and morally reprehensible. Yet boxing, a blood sport much more dangerous than Ultimate Fighting with over 500 deaths since 1884, is considered socially acceptable. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a crusader against Ultimate Fighting since its 1993 inception, was at ringside during the Garcia/Ruelas fight in Las Vegas. Jimmy Garcia later died despite the best of medical foresight, including a ringside neurosurgeon who had him in the operating room within 35 minutes of his collapse in the ring (AP, 1995).
Since boxing is the closest sport to Reality Fighting, a direct comparison easily yields a compelling case that the former is inherently more dangerous and should be banned before any action is secured against the latter. After all, the ultimate goal of boxing is to reduce the opponent to a state of total and complete helplessness (AMA). Let us take a closer look at the real dangers boxing poses:
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According to the American Medical Association Council on Medical Affairs, boxing deaths occur at the rate of 0.13 per 1,000 participants a year, not out of line with other high-risk sports such as motorcycle racing, parachuting or hang gliding. In two editorials published in the January 14, 1983, edition of the "Journal of the American Medical Association," the AMA says about three of every four boxers who have had more than 20 professional bouts show some brain deterioration. "It's not just the deaths but the chronic brain damage that is so frequent," said Dr. George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "The main point is that blows to the head damage the brain." Surprisingly, there are few serious head injuries among heavyweights, even though they hit the hardest of all the other weight classes. The last heavyweight to die in the ring was Ernie Schaaf in 1933, after being stopped in the 13th round of a fight with Primo Carnera in New York City. During that same period, several hundred lighter fighters lost their lives. "The question is why heavyweights hit like hell and they don't have this cerebral bleeding," Capanna said. "I can't remember a single heavyweight with a blood clot." Capanna and other ringside physicians at odds with the AMA over the issue of boxing don't deny that it can be a dangerous sport. But they argue that banning boxing would force it underground, where there would be no doctors standing by or ambulances outside. "I don't think you can outlaw sports," Capanna voiced. "If you outlaw boxing, they'll still do it, either in some other country, in offshore barges, or, at worst, underground. They'll have no prefight physicals, no medical help. It will be much worse for the fighters themselves."
Danger exists in all sports, particularly football where players are coached to hit opponents as hard as they can. However, medical evidence suggests a far higher incidence of serious injury in boxing than in any other athletics. While there are fewer fatalities than in horseracing, motorcycle racing or scuba diving, it is only in boxing in which there is a high incidence of chronic rather than acute serious injury. Chronic brain damage is not, as might be thought, caused by a knockout or a heavy punch, but the effect of numerous individual blows each producing minimal or unobservable effects which mount up to produce chronic brain damage. It is a likely consequence which has long been recognized. The term "punch drunk" was used by Martland to describe a person displaying the symptoms as far back as 1928. Millspaugh coined the phrase "pugilistica dementia" in 1937 to describe the same thing. George Foreman, a former heavyweight champion, has called for the use of headgear by professional boxers, but there has been little support for it. "We might as well ban boxing if that is the case," former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson said about the idea. "It's a fighter's sport. This is a hurt business. In this business, things happen." Indeed, headgear has not prevented several amateur boxers from suffering blood clot injuries in the brain in recent years. But a study of amateur boxers by Johns Hopkins University shows that it might be proving effective against the punch drunk syndrome.
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High incidence of chronic brain damage in the non-heavyweight categories, all because of repeated blows, often over 12 rounds of 3 minutes each! UFC events have none of these characteristics. In Ultimate Fighting there are no rounds, therefore, combatants cannot take a breather every 3 minutes to come out fresh and swinging repeatedly. This single factor is enough to reduce the risk of serious injury by a wide margin. In most cases, even the fittest athletes cannot muster up enough strength to be a serious threat after a few minutes of continuous action. There are no gloves, so a fighter's hands are not protected from delivering 500 punches per fight. Moreover, a hard punch landed by a bare knuckle can easily open up a cut sufficient to terminate the fight (Contrary to popular opinion, boxing would be a much safer sport in terms of chronic brain damage if no gloves were worn). There are no lower weight categories: The lightest weight class typically consists of participants who are at or near the 200 lb. limit.
Why, then, would all of these uninformed politicians and media executives have an adverse view of Reality Fighting despite not a single case of a chronic injury or death for over 70 years? Reality Fighting events have been taking place in Brazil as far back as the Great Depression, sometimes in the most unforgiving conditions with fights lasting as long as 4 hours! The answer to this can be traced back to the early days of Ultimate Fighting. No one denies some of the fights in the first two UFCs were appalling. Tuli's tooth flying out of the Octagon, or Pat Smith elbowing Scott Baker half a dozen times did a disservice to the sport of No Rules in its infancy. These and other early fights opened a lot of eyes and ears. In UFC II, referee John McCarthy was specifically instructed by Rorion Gracie not to stop the action unless one of the cornermen threw in the towel or one of the participants tapped the canvas. While the gore was great for PPV ratings, it became a potent weapon in the hands of the opportunists, the all mighty politicians. But as the promoters began cleaning up their acts with doctors at ringside, ambulances on standby, and a referee who was stopping fights early, the media and politicians had a handful to portray the sport as the most brutal thing since the days of the Roman empire when prisoners were fed to the lions in front of a cheering crowd of spectators. In New York, SEG hired one of the most powerful and influential lobbyists, Jim Featherstonehaugh, and managed to legalize the UFCs in the media capital of the world for a short time. Before they put on a single show, the media went on a rampage and broke the lobbyist story. An embarrassed Governor Pataki was forced to do a complete about face and consequently, the New York athletic commission's ludicrous 114 page rule book chased SEG out of New York and the TCI/Time Warner ban soon followed.
Throughout NHB's brief history in the US, SEG has been a pivotal player both in and out of court. Their efforts should be praised, but they have shot themselves in the foot at times. SEG was late to recruit world class wrestlers which lends immense credibility to the quality of competition and dispels misconceptions that UFC participants are a bunch of mindless brawlers. The sport of Reality Fighting is still in its infancy and facing the same opposition boxing encountered during the late part of the 19th century. Art Davie, the UFC commissioner put it best when he said during an interview, "...what happened after a period of time was that the people who opposed boxing became more sophisticated in their tastes, and the young people who appreciated these types of sporting events eventually were in positions of power themselves and could affect the voting process." These are critical times for Ultimate Fighting and let us hope an accidental death does not hamper the evolutionary process of this raw sport until it is more established and accepted.
All photos and captions by Scott Henry.
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Webmaster Last updated 02/06/99 |