A Fistful of Dollars

Kevin is out of breath, panting, on his hands and knees. Blood pours from a gash above his eye. He’s had enough. The referee agrees, and Kevin’s opponent—a Hispanic kid nicknamed Hybrid—jumps to his feet and roars. For two-and-a-half rounds, Hybrid was the recipient of a beating, but he persevered, flipping Kevin off him to deliver a series of punches to the head. Now, with Hybrid holding his arms aloft and Kevin’s blood pooling on the canvas, the audience cheers.

It’s a Sunday afternoon at a boxing gym in the heart of Brooklyn, and fighters and fans alike are gathered for the latest installment of the Underground Combat League, the City’s longest-running and often sole purveyor of unsanctioned fighting. Battles rage here and involve everything from boxing to karate, wrestling to jiujitsu, all for the sake of mixed martial arts, a sport some now prefer to call “Ultimate Fighting” but has also been labeled “human cockfighting”—or the end of civilization as we know it.

Sanctioned mixed martial arts was banned in New York State back in 1997, so it went underground. But with a bill legalizing it enmeshed in Governor David Paterson’s 2010-2011 budget proposal, and concurrent bills simmering within the cauldron of the State Assembly and Senate, the days of illicit bouts in martial arts schools and boxing gyms throughout the five boroughs are numbered. Attempting to answer the simple question of “When exactly is New York legalizing it?” hasn’t been so easy.

Currently, over 40 states allow mixed martial arts competitions, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Nevada and California. The Empire State is one of the last of the holdouts. And money talks.

The fact that mixed martial arts competitions are a taxable stimulant for local economy (according to a study conducted by HR&A Advisors) has not been lost on those in Albany. In 2008, New York State Athletic Commission bigwig Ron Scott Stevens was replaced by Melvina Lathan, a commissioner far more amenable to mixed martial arts, and a bill to repeal the ban began wending its way through the Assembly, stopping only when spirited debate on the subject broke out within the Committee on Tourism, Arts and Sports Development. That debate began anew last year, and after a 14-to-6 vote in favor of legalization in the Committee, the

State came close to turning that piece of legislation into law—until the unforeseen 2009 Senatorial coup derailed everything.

Dollar signs continue to dance elusively within the ring (or cage, as the case may be), so on Jan. 19 of this year, when Gov. Paterson unveiled his budget proposal, nestled within it was a provision to empower the Athletic Commission to allow, regulate and tax the very thing New York banished 13 years ago. As per the proposal, there’s $1.37 million in net revenue there just ripe for the picking, revenue that would at least provide a sip of water and an encouraging word to a state strapped for cash and on the wrong end of a five-round fiscal donnybrook. But Governor Paterson’s own political battles have roughed things up a bit. That April 1 deadline for legislative approval of the budget? It’s sitting on a wooden stool in the corner holding an ice pack to its head, not quite KO’d like the Governor’s re-election bid, but in desperate need of medical attention. No one’s sure if it will last into the later rounds.

Kevin is slow to rise. A military veteran and personal trainer at the David Barton Gym in Chelsea, he’s built like a tank. But he’s also feeling his 48 years as he tries to stand. Eventually he does, and after a squeeze from Hybrid, he passes through the ropes and steps down into the care of a ringside physician. Soon the defeated fighter is in a metal folding chair. The physician wears blue latex gloves and wields a needle and thread. He sews shut the torn flap of skin on Kevin’s brow, for a total of 13 stitches. To anyone who stops and gawks, Kevin gives a thumbs-up and a smile.

There were few rules when the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (aka the UFC) aired on pay-per-view in 1993. It was a sure-fire formula for excitement and unbridled carnage but also a recipe for doom: a decade later the sport’s flagship organization was struggling to survive, a victim of its own image. The misconception was that there were no rules, that two men engaged in unarmed combat, employing whatever martial disciplines they knew, was the lowest common denominator of entertainment. Things turned around with the success of the SpikeTV reality show The Ultimate Fighter, and presently, in addition to the UFC’s monthly pay-per-view offerings, there are grand fistic affairs broadcast live on CBS and Showtime. There are also dozens of smaller, non-televised fight cards in casino ballrooms, recreation centers and arenas across the country nearly every weekend. New York’s Underground Combat League is unique.

“We’re one of a kind,” says promoter Peter Storm of his pugilistic baby. Storm is an instructor at a martial arts school in Midtown Manhattan by day and a nightclub bouncer by night. He’s held over 20 of these events in the last seven years, years that have seen mixed martial arts explode in popularity. Now, what was once considered a gladiatorial circus act—illegal in most states—is a big bucks industry, fully accepted by athletic commissions from coast to coast. In New York, though, right at this very moment, it’s the Underground Combat League or nothing, and to the assembled crowd of about 60, that’s just fine. “It goes into that whole myth thing about underground fighting and what you see in movies,” says Storm. “In a sense, it’s life just imitating art.”

Amidst applause, wearing a blue judo uniform and a look of determination, the promoter makes his way from the locker room to the ropes, stepping through to square off against a lithe, scrappy-looking Brooklynite named Rashad. Storm’s fought in about half of his events and met with about as much success as failure, but he’s confident for this one, having dedicated a few weeks of training for what should be a spirited affair. The typical Underground Combat League competitor runs the gamut of skill and promise, a sliding scale that ranges anywhere from future stud to lunatic. In 2005, Rutgers University wrestling coach Frankie Edgar fought at a UCL installment in the Bronx, while strip club busboy Tareyton Williams fought at one in Manhattan in 2006. Edgar will be fighting for the UFC’s lightweight championship belt in Abu Dhabi this April. Williams, on the other hand, is doing 18 years upstate for assaulting a 64-year-old man with a power saw in a subway station.

Resting somewhere in the middle on that scale are Storm, a judo black belt, and Rashad, an ex-boxer. For a fast-paced round-and-a-half of technical, back-and-forth action, it shows. The end comes when Storm gets Rashad down, grabs a leg and twists. In pain, Rashad has no other recourse but to tap out. Peter Storm is victorious.

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There were 45 sanctioned mixed martial arts events in New Jersey last year, consisting of a grand total of 471 amateur and professional bouts. A sizeable portion of those bouts involved New York-based fighters, with New York-based fans making the trek to see them. That fact isn’t lost on promoter Lou Neglia.

“Why should I bring 3,000 spectators to New Jersey to a show when I could have those 3,000 here at a show in New York, spending money on cabs and feeding the local economy?” he asks. The question is a rhetorical one, meant to illustrate the frustration Neglia shares with many over New York’s lagging in regulating mixed martial arts. Since 2002, his Ring of Combat has been the region’s preeminent fight organization, a place where up-and-comers hone themselves into sharpened weapons before moving on to the “big show” (i.e., the UFC). Though a New York resident with a martial arts academy in Brooklyn, Neglia travels to New Jersey to put on his Ring of Combats, and from hosting his events a few times a year, Atlantic City’s Tropicana Casino & Resort reaps whatever benefits a few thousand fight fans—hungry and thirsty and willing to spend money—may bring.

Over 13,000 fans crammed into the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for a recent UFC, and when the UFC came to Newark two years ago, the attendance numbers topped 14,000. That’s par for the course for the promotion universally considered the “Superbowl of Mixed Martial Arts.” There are, of course, numerous other shows out there, smaller yet very capable of attracting a decent-sized crowd, and Ring of Combat is just one of several poised and ready to pounce on New York State and the Five Boroughs—and especially Madison Square Garden.

“Why should the greatest arena in the world not have the greatest sport in the world?” says Neglia, echoing the sentiments of an army of promoters eager to tap into one of the last remaining vast and untouched markets.

“I’m all the way at the grassroots level,” says Storm, when asked about the changes legalization and sanctioning will bring. “My next step is either top-of-the-food-chain promoter or I keep it where it’s at. If I don’t like things the way they are in New York, I’ll move it somewhere else or shut it down. We’ll have to see.”

There were eight bouts total at this event, and now that it’s all over, the crowd slowly shuffles toward the exit. Some stop to mingle with battered fighters. Others continue out, to the subway station a block away, to a parked car or to a nearby bus stop. One of the secrets to the Underground Combat League’s longevity has been its accessibility—Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, wherever the event has popped up, all it took was a token to get there. That, plus its uniqueness, has enabled it to endure. But sanctioned mixed martial arts is a game-changer. Does this mean the end of the road for the seven-year-old promotion?

“The UCL brand is not going anywhere,” explains Storm. “Right now I’m just figuring out which direction the UCL will go in.”

The bell that would signal the start of the next round of combat for the State Assembly’s MMA bill has yet to ring, so it’s been sitting in committee since January, its proponents prepared to come out swinging.

“It had to go back to square one, but hopefully it won’t have to be amended like before,” says Legislative Director Ashley Pillsbury, whose boss, Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, is one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Like many who’ve had a hand in the process or a stake in the outcome, she sounds both cautious and optimistic—twice now the piece of legislation has been sent back to square one, and who could’ve predicted a coup in the Senate? Yet for all the setbacks, the bill is still there, a marquee fighter destined to throw down in the main event, as inevitable as the legalization of the sport. There’s simply too much potential revenue at stake. The “when” of it, however, is anyone’s guess. “It has to go through Tourism, through Codes and Ways and Means, and then it gets voted on,” Pillsbury says. What are the chances of it becoming law before Governor Paterson’s version?

“I was unaware that the Governor had included MMA within his budget proposal,” says Pillsbury. “But as this bill is still in the Tourism Committee and his proposal should get voted on sooner, it’s very possible the Governor’s version of the MMA bill will get passed first.”

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the timing, it’s clear the fight will continue. After all, there’s a fistful of taxable revenue at stake—no one is tapping out until legalized mixed martial arts in New York gets done.

-- ON THE COVER: Anil Melwani has photographed NYC area MMA shows for over 10 years and his work can be seen at [www.MMA.us](http://www.MMA.us)