Conor McGregor, bloodied and beaten, his seemingly bottomless well of trash-talk abruptly run dry. Ronda Rousey’s improbable loss, brought about by a surgical kick to the head, and her vanquisher – Holly Holm – put to sleep by a choke at the hands of Miesha Tate just months later. MMA has finally found its place in the mainstream consciousness, all thanks to the efforts of the sport’s flagship promotion, the UFC, and the captivating violence put forth by its star athletes.
However, fights garnering millions of pay-per-view buys and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue pale in comparison to the one just won. For 19 years ago, New York banned MMA competitions from occurring within its borders, and today the state’s legislature voted to lift that ban. Now, there’s nowhere in North America where cagefighting is illegal. Perhaps more importantly, there is no more doubting of MMA’s legitimacy, nor any lasting, glaring evidence of the sport’s brutal, barbaric origins.
This is the story of the fierce, eight-year legal and political battle to get MMA legalized in New York, and get cagefighting beyond the last lingering vestiges of its sordid past.
* * * *
It’s 2008, and there’s a map of the U.S. that lists everywhere MMA is legal. For the first time ever, the shades of green have finally surpassed the reds, and it doesn’t take a soothsayer to recognize that it’s a sign of the changing times. Cagefighting – once hailed as a blight on the moral compass of society, a cancerous tumor on combat sports and something akin to “human cockfighting” – has become somewhat accepted.
Sure, Pennsylvania is still red, as is Connecticut and Vermont, but the war waged in state legislatures is constant, interminable, with battles fought and won without fanfare by lobbyists and true believers in places like New Jersey, California and Nevada. Soon there will be no jurisdiction in all of North America the UFC can’t go.
Except for New York, that is. It’s June, and the legislative session is in its waning days. Quietly, with no ceremony, a bill meant to rewrite the 1997 statute that made MMA bouts in the Empire State illegal is introduced to the Assembly’s Committee on Tourism, Parks, Arts and Sports Development. A 69-year-old Assemblyman named Bob Reilly objects.
“We ban cockfighting and dogfighting,” he says. “Should we allow humans to enter a cage to knee, kick and punch each other?”
Those words are enough to turn the tide of this particular battle. The words are a sign this particular fight won’t be like the others. This one will be hard.
The text message comes with a place and time, and suddenly you’re in a David Fincher flick starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, taking the subway to an innocuous martial arts school in Queens or a dingy gym in Brooklyn, scurrying past burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots to watch some underground fights.
It’s a Petri dish of unsanctioned MMA, and in 2010, this scene is seven years old. And no matter how many of these gatherings you go to, still you wonder if the cops will burst in and lock everyone up, or what you’re in for and what you’ll see, the kind of competitors who will dare to get into the ring.
At one event it’s an assistant wrestling coach from Rutgers University named Frankie Edgar. At another, it’s an unhinged kid who later guzzles a bottle of Nyquil and tries to murder an MTA worker with a power saw, resulting in a citywide manhunt and an 18-year prison sentence. Usually, though, it’s bouncers and kung fu instructors and regular Joes, and when you watch them warm up, you wonder if this will be it, the time someone finally dies. In a boxing club tucked away in a basement off the 6 train, there’s a broken leg, the femur snapped clean in half off a fluke misstep. Many times there are jagged cuts along eyebrows. A handful of hyperextended elbows. More concussions than you can count.
They are all here to test their limits, to win for themselves a fleeting moment of glory or maybe just do the one thing they’re good at. They’re here because they want to be, fighting because MMA has become a popular sport everywhere, even though here it is illegal. It’s October, and the UFC is staging mega-events in Las Vegas and Columbus, Ohio, and even in nearby New Jersey, at Newark’s Prudential Center. But this is New York, and that means the only game in town. It’s a scene that’s been holding steady in the shadows, a world without the essentials, like doctors, state-mandated guidelines, rules or regulations. “Vale tudo” is what they’d call it in Brazil, Portuguese for “anything goes,” and it’s a world away from anything considered safe.
The text message comes, and tonight it’s the Bronx, to a mosque with a foam mat spread out on the concrete floor. One of the combatants is Jerome Mickle, who maybe likes the violence or maybe he doesn’t. Either way, he’s really good at it.
Evening prayers are a baritone-echo over the loudspeaker, verses of the Quran scrawled on cheap printer paper hanging from the walls. There have been underground shows in neighborhoods all across the city – really, anywhere promoter Peter Storm has been able to plant his flag and set up shop – but here we’ve gathered, just six fighters and their coaches, a couple girlfriends, a photographer named Anil and myself. Beyond the locked front door, the elevated train rumbles. Within, there are the fights.
Jerome steps onto the mat, dark skinned, shirtless, carved out of marble. He’s 22 and coiled like a spring, and his opponent is Rashad, a kid from Brooklyn with similar traits and features. They clash, and it’s a blur of knuckles and wrestling and chokes. The tiny crowd yells encouragement. The prayers. Outside a car horn honks. The squeals of the subway train. Whenever the duo gets too close to the edge of the mat, those standing nearby push them back to the center, because a fall on the bare concrete would mean a cab ride to the hospital. At the end of each round, Storm – acting as the referee – tells them to break it up as if he were working the door at a nightclub and a scuffle broke out.
After two rounds Rashad quits, panting, exhausted.
“It is officially time to get drunk,” Jerome says.
Clandestine gatherings, in the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, on Long Island and in Upstate New York, meetings so secretive the collaborators in the French Resistance could’ve learned a thing or two, so many of them it’s as if New York has been bottling it all up inside for too long, look out it’s going to blow. On television, you can watch a reality show about fighters locked away in a house in Las Vegas, watch UFC events on pay-per-view, or travel to different cities just about every weekend and see one in person, but New York gets none of that love. So the battles fought are in decrepit gyms and shuttered martial arts academies, fought with fists and shins and chokes, fought in secret.
It’s November 2011, and for the last few years the owners of the UFC, Zuffa LLC, have been struggling to get the legislature to change the law. It’s a tussle of words and influence, undertaken by lobbyists, by men who bill by the hour and wield Rolodexes thick with connections and insight, their deals made in offices and hallways and over steak dinners. It’s gotten nowhere. Now what?
A lawsuit is the answer, a sexy one encompassing “Freedom of Speech” and “Due Process” and “vagueness” claims, because if the boys in Albany can’t get it done via the carrot of backroom discussions and expensed meals, the Constitution of the United States of America will be the stick that strikes down the law instead. Force the change. Screw this waiting business.
Enter Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University’s law school and a constitutional law rockstar. While working out of midtown Manhattan law firm Morrison & Foerster, Friedman is the architect of the UFC lawsuit against New York. When it’s filed, it’s as if some grand, spectral referee wearing a blindfold and holding scales has shouted, “Go!” The defendant – the state attorney general (SAG), who is responsible for enforcing the state’s laws – fires back, motions for dismissal and summary judgment taking the place of kicks and punches. It doesn’t take long for presiding Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York to whittle away most of the arguments in the suit, but there’s something to the idea that the SAG’s office has never been able to stick to a single interpretation of the law.
Friedman runs with it. Strategy and motions and replies are plotted from his house in the Hamptons, claims fleshed out with quotes gathered from a discovery phase that brings together promoters and state officials alike to testify. Even Hugo Spindola, the former counsel for the state’s athletic commission, gets the call, making the pilgrimage to downstate to walk a tightrope of ambiguous recollections and contradictions. There’s testimony about the MMA bouts that appeared on kickboxing cards in the late ’90s and early ’00s, how members of the athletic commission sat ringside and never said a word. There are statements made under oath about one athletic commissioner saying amateur MMA bouts are OK and Spindola saying they’re not. In the courtroom, the attorney for the state attorney general suggests that it would be legal for the UFC to hold a pro MMA event sanctioned by one of the dozen martial-arts organizations listed in the statute, and when Friedman wants that it in writing, the SAG attorney flip-flops. Under the Constitution, laws cannot be vague in how they’re applied, and from what’s transpired in her very courtroom, it’s clear to Judge Wood that “vagueness” is the magic word when it comes to the state interpreting the law pertaining to MMA.
The slow tick-tock of the legal system, sudden flurries of activity and urgency and then waiting. Friedman’s in it for the long haul, but no one has a crystal ball to foresee that a resolution is years away. Still, thanks to the lawsuit, one thing has changed dramatically in New York.
It comes in an almost offhanded remark by the SAG’s office in one of the exchanges of briefs, a sort of, “Hey, guess what? The law bans professional MMA, but amateur MMA events are just fine and dandy.” It’s 2013 now, and the floodgates are cast open. In an instant, the underground scene is gone, replaced by something far more dangerous and unsafe.
“This is the first MMA show in New York,” a promoter says. “This is the first sanctioned MMA show in New York,” says another. “No, we’re the first,” and so it goes, a contest of distinctions and semantics that ultimately never really matters. What does matter is that cages are being set up nearly every weekend, promoters poking their heads out from warrens like once-hunted rabbits, struck by the realization that they no longer need to be afraid. So the fights go down in a hotel ballroom in Albany. They go down in a roller rink outside of Buffalo. They’re in rec centers near Syracuse and Ithaca. They’re everywhere, all of it driven by the economics of not having to pay fighters or fees to an athletic commission, ravenous consumers desperate for live fights, and the ridiculous profit margin therein. Five hundred spectators fill a high school gymnasium in the Bronx, crowding around the cage erected on the floor and packing into the bleachers. When an organization from Florida swoops in to put on a show at Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan, they have no problem cramming 1,500 fans into the venue to see out-of-town fighters no one knows. It’s the California Gold Rush of 1848, only with four-ounce gloves and chainlink fences and jiu-jitsu.
And there’s Jerome, in a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, wading through a sea of more than 2,000 people, the main event and star attraction of an amateur MMA show called the New York Fight Exchange. Gone are the text messages, sketchy venues and no-frills combat. This show has event posters and flyers and its very own Facebook page, and when Jerome pauses before the cage, a spotlight shining down upon the warrior on the verge of battle, an inspector checks him for the required mouthpiece and cup before letting him pass. Gone are all the things that made Storm’s events every bit the Fight Club of your imagination, and with it has gone that nagging worry that this could be the time that someone is killed or maimed, a grim statistical inevitability in a sport where inherent risks absolutely must be mitigated.
Jerome bounds into the cage and takes his place in his corner, opposite his opponent, Aaron. To the crowd’s glee, the knockout comes minutes later, and there’s Jerome, sitting atop the cage, flexing and celebrating like a conquering hero awash in glory.
When Jerome first fought at Peter’s underground show, there were a grand total of seven MMA events held throughout the state that year; 2013 ends with 47 in the books, and each week there are more and more, putting 2014 on track to beat last year’s record.
That’s great if you’re a fighter looking for an opportunity, or a fan hungry for some local violence, but those numbers are bad when it comes to the statistics of injury. Because while fights by their very nature are dangerous, fights that are unregulated and untouchable by the state (thanks to the 1997 statute that says the athletic commission can’t sanction them) are even more so. Sure, that event at Hammerstein Ballroom has a doctor present (albeit one who’s never even seen an MMA bout before), but what of that show at the old airfield in Brooklyn or the one at Whitehall Athletic Center? Go to sanctioned events in Massachusetts and Texas and South Carolina, and there are safeguards in place to mitigate risk, things like the presence of trained medical personnel and waiting ambulances. No such requirements exist in New York, though.
In New York, it’s the Wild West, a combative sports free-for-all. It’s how MMA was back in the mid-1990s, when it was more spectacle than anything else. When it was on the verge of getting banned everywhere.
At a show called Kaged Kombat in Saratoga, a fighter breaks his hand knocking out his opponent. When he asks the promoter about insurance coverage for the subsequent surgery, he’s laughed at – why would the promoter have insurance? That costs money, and besides, there’s no law saying the promoter must have it.
The hits just keep on coming. At an event in Schenectady, the fighters smoke cigarettes in the cage after their bouts. In the Bronx, a referee lets a fighter eat 27 unanswered blows to the head before intervening. In New Jersey, Nick Lembo, chief counsel of the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, laments that because so few promoters in New York are screening for pre-fight medical conditions, fighters are competing there who are banned from competition in the Garden State because they have HIV and hepatitis.
In an arena in Massena, a fighter is knocked out cold and stops breathing, and a doctor, EMT and paramedic are there to revive him. But if the promoter had decided to cut that particular corner and they hadn’t been there, what then? There have been four deaths in unregulated MMA bouts worldwide, with one occurring in Michigan and one in South Dakota. Private, third-party sanctioning bodies like the World Kickboxing Assocation, the International Sport Karate Association and the United State Muay Thai Association do their best to minimize the peril, emulating what a state athletic commission would do to serve and protect. But the odds of tragedy striking in New York increases with each passing day, each unregulated bout.
It’s a story so old it’s become legend, the stuff of campfire tales: The Fertittas, who own the UFC, also own Station Casinos in Nevada, and because those casinos are non-union, Culinary Union Local 226 has been the driving force in stymieing the lobbying efforts here. It rings true the trail of influence, tracing along lines that connect groups like Unite Here and the National Organization for Women to assorted anti-UFC press releases and websites, to a hired political gun named Neal Kwatra making promises and threats.
On the other side are David Weinraub and Steve Greenberg, the UFC’s lobbyists, fighting a long, hard military campaign against forces dug in deeper than Russians at the Battle of Stalingrad. Each year progress is made, albeit in inches, and there are miles to go. By 2015, the Senate has voted to lift the ban a number of times, and the governor has alluded to supporting the sport. But the Assembly is the last necessary component of the trifecta, and getting it to budge remains the impossible task. For directing the flow of legislative traffic is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and the corruption that permeates his decades-old regime means the UFC is stuck in the trenches, pinned down by raking machine gun fire from atop impenetrable walls.
“It’s all because of Culinary Union influence,” UFC Chief Operating Officer Ike Lawrence Epstein tells a Sports Management class at Columbia University. When asked why it’s so important to have New York join the rest of the continent in allowing sanctioned MMA, he talks of blue-chip sponsors hesitant to attach their name to something still illegal somewhere, describing the loss like a general citing casualty figures.
Then, in an instant, the tide of battle shifts. It’s January, the start of a new legislative session, and a federal U.S. Attorney named Preet Bharara dials in like a sniper and fires, turning an investigation of Silver’s extracurricular activities into an arrest and indictment. Silver is forced to step down, and though his successor – Assemblyman Carl Heastie – is new to the job and unwilling to throw his support behind an issue he’s previously championed, he’s at least open to allowing the bill that would lift the ban to be discussed.
The yearly pilgrimage to the state’s capitol by UFC brass has CEO Lorenzo Fertitta himself making the media rounds, and this time around, his optimism rings true. He mentions the $135 million in economic impact sanctioning the sport would create, and after Greenberg tells him that 54 dangerously unsanctioned amateur MMA events took place in New York in 2014, that becomes a talking point as well. Downstate, in Judge Wood’s courtroom in Manhattan, the UFC’s lawsuit is dismissed for lack of standing (meaning the UFC hasn’t been sufficiently injured by any vague interpretations of the law for them to bring the case to court), but things are finally looking up in the Assembly. “Cautiously optimistic” is the phrase that gets tossed about, and nothing else is more apt.
Unwavering Assembly members talk of keeping the sport out of the state, dishing out soundbites like they’re safeguarding their constituents from some intruding evil. Never mind that there are more MMA events in New York now than in any other state, all of it with zero regulation and maximum danger to those involved; misguided morals had to be upheld, a symptom of a hysterical blindness that held sway over too many.
For Weinraub, and the MMA bill’s main sponsor, Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle (one heck of a political big gun to have on the side of cagefighting), the numbers of converts in the Assembly holds steady at too few. To reach the Promised Land of a floor vote (where bipartisan support ensures passage), at least 76 members of the Democratic conference have to be on board; no iteration of the MMA bill has ever gotten out of the 60s, and this one is barely cracking 70. It’s June, and with the 2015 legislative session in its waning days, Morelle rewrites the MMA bill to address the concerns of his colleagues on the fence. For those concerned about the flood of unregulated amateur MMA events, there is athletic commission oversight. For those who pause at the thought of combatants suffering brain injuries, there are mandatory brain scans and provisions for a long-term medical study. There’s accident insurance, there’s taxes imposed on promoters, there’s regulation of gyms – Morelle has done his homework and hit all the bases.
The number of Democratic Assembly members in support grows to 78. The MMA bill is finally there.
Meanwhile, Kwatra attempts to spin, decrying it all as a losing effort. When a group of rabbis pens a letter claiming the UFC to be anti-Semitic, his fingerprints are all over it. “This desperate, misinformed, last-minute attack borders on racial and ethnic stereotypes that have no place in public discourse,” Greenberg replies to the “New York Daily News.”
When some yahoo ex-con out of Buffalo spams the Assembly with a letter saying the traditional martial-arts community deserves its own commission and doesn’t support the MMA bill, Weinraub makes sure a counter-memo is circulated to assure them that isn’t true.
The UFC’s thick, muscular tendrils of social media spread out, poking, squeezing. A call to action has hundreds upon hundreds of fans calling and emailing Speaker Heastie’s office, begging him to move forward on the legislation. In Brooklyn, an MMA apparel maker named Manny and a kickboxing referee name Joel meet with their local Assemblyman to convince him; in Albany, a martial-arts instructor named Ron roams the halls of the capitol like an amiable specter, shaking hands and voicing encouragement. The words “grassroots effort” don’t even begin to describe it.
The support is there, the votes are there – and for the first time ever, the MMA bill dies not because of Culinary Union machinations, but because there is no more time. The session is over.
Back in New York City, Jerome talks of shucking the bonds of amateur status and going pro. The prospect of being able to do so in his home state is tantalizing; like too many fighters before him, Jerome knows the fans who’ve flocked to see him in Queens would never trek down to Atlantic City, N.J., to see him compete at one of the fully sanctioned shows there. But that dream is on ice now, frozen until the thaws of the new legislative year.
It’s September, and Friedman has regrouped for another attack, this time with a fresh lawsuit as well as an appeal of the one dismissed. There can be no doubt the UFC has standing now; the UFC has officially booked Madison Square Garden for an April 2016 show.
A new legislative session begins each January, and it culminates in June. Within those months there’s a budget that must get hashed out, and negotiations between the Senate, the Assembly and the governor dominate much of March. For eight years, the UFC’s battle to get an MMA bill passed has taken place in the latter part of the session, in the time after the March 31 budget deadline.
But 2016 is different, and the first inkling of that comes in December, 2015.
It’s hard to pin down if disgraced former Speaker Silver was truly against MMA, or if he was swayed by influences monetary in nature. Yet there are those within the legislature who actually do believe the sport is bad, with Assemblywoman Margaret Markey – the chair of the Tourism, Parks, Arts and Sports Development Committee – wielding the most clout out of all of them. In the tail end of 2015, she announces a public Committee hearing to examine the injuries germane to combat sports. Weinraub puts together an array of speakers to talk positive on the issue, and it includes a female UFC fighter (a double whammy, since much of the anti-MMA rhetoric has been about the sport’s alleged negative attitudes toward women). Meanwhile, the gab around the office water cooler is that Markey can’t find anyone to champion her cause and speak out against MMA, and when Weinraub puts together a protest outside of the Assembly’s offices in Manhattan, Markey cancels the hearing at the last minute.
It’s January, and for the first time ever, Governor Andrew Cuomo commits to supporting the sport by including a measure to sanction it in his budget proposal. On Feb. 1, the Senate approves its bill to legalize it – more than a month ahead of when it usually gets done. Everything seems to be coming together, and given that the previous session ended with the issue carrying enough support, it’s no surprise. But no one wants to talk numbers and jinx it, so prudence and maybe a dash of superstition make for a quieter, more measured fight.
In Manhattan, Judge Wood once more dashes the UFC’s legal hopes against the rocks of jurisprudence, denying an injunction that would’ve allowed the April Madison Square Garden show to go on.
And then, just as suddenly as it began all those years ago when Assemblyman Reilly made his objections, it’s done, the nearly eight-year battle to get New York to legalize MMA won. It’s March, and Speaker Heastie’s communication director announces that the issue will be taken up and voted on. Days later the MMA bill passes in landslide.
“Bankroll,” says Jerome, who has one last amateur fight slated for an upcoming New York Fight Exchange show, and an open slot waiting for him on a pro card in New Jersey. “I don’t gotta stay doin’ what I do, but do what I want.”
The days of Jerome having to fight in unsanctioned events have come to an end. So, too, have ended the days of MMA fights being lawless, unnecessarily brutal. So, too, closes the last portal to the sport’s bloody early history.
“This is what I was waiting for,” he says. It’s what everyone has waited for.
After eight years of scrapping, the Great Empire State Fistfight is finally over.
Jim Genia is a New York City-based MMA journalist, author and CagedInsider.com managing editor who’s extensively covered MMA in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @jim_genia.
