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Big John McCarthy has been involved in mixed martial arts since the beginning He was one of the best referees in all of combat sports before retiring.He has refereed some of the biggest fights in the sports history. He even helped come up with the unified rules for the sport.I got a chance to chat with Big John after a taping of HDNet’s “Inside MMA” show.
Here’s what Big John had to say:
On the UFC scheduling a card with Anderson Silva going up to light-heavyweight to fight James Irvin on Spike TV on the same night as Affliction’s pay-per-view card on July 19:
“I mean, look at that fight. You got your middleweight champion (Anderson Silva), you’re moving up to light-heavyweight to fight James Irvin. What good does that do for him? I mean, (UFC president) Dana (White) feels … obviously he feels there is some competition there with Affliction. He wants to try to do something to damage Affliction. That’s why he is doing this. I look at it and it’s bad for the sport, it’s bad for the fans. There needs to be more than the one promotion.
“The UFC is the big one on the block. I would never say anything differently until anything really comes about. But to sit there and try to shove a show in on the same date to say come watch. It’s the same thing they did with the Chuck Liddell special (on Spike TV) the same night as the (EliteXC) fights on CBS. It’s like, come on. The sport is big enough to where there can be more than one. There needs to be more than one. The UFC has what 200 fighters signed or 250 fighters? You know what, there are a whole lot more fighters thana that in this world and they need jobs. So there needs to be the other promotions.
“Thank God, Affliction is doing what they are doing and putting together … honestly, I’m not saying it to say it, it is the best card with heavyweights that has ever been put together by any organization in, at least North America, and probably in the world ever. You’ve got three ex-UFC champions (Tim Sylvia, Josh Barnett and Andre Arlovski). You’ve got the ex-PRIDE champion in Fedor (Emelianenko) and you have other guys. You have Matt Lindland, Vitor Belfort, Mike Whitehead against Renato ‘Babalu’ (Sobral). You’ve got some great fights there. It’s going to be a hell of a card. Go and watch the one live and TiVo the UFC show. That’s what I’m going to do. I will TiVo the UFC show.”
On the confusion of how the rules are interpreted from state to state, commission to commission and throughout the world:
“The problem is this, when you have what is the unified rules and the rules set that were brought up by that, and then you have people come into the sport, and they come in usually from a boxing background and the doctors and everything, and all of a sudden they want to change something. Well, if you have an official who sits there and says, ‘This is what I’ve heard and we’re going to start and change it.’ You can’t do that. There are ways that they want to change it, then there are ways of doing that.
“If it was in California, then (California State Athletic Commission executive officer) Armando Garcia would have to take it in front of his commission, have a commission vote on it, they pass it and then they make it a rule in California. This is what you have as far as an illegal elbow or an illegal knee strike or whatever. But it has to be changed that way. It cannot be where you have a doctor that sits there and says, ‘This the I way I say it should be.’ And then we have officials that start to follow it because it hasn’t been changed in the rules. That means I’m going to have one official doing it one way and I’m going to have other officials doing it another way, which causes confusion.
“There can’t be their own interpretations. It has to be very clearly defined. This is what is allowed. This is the illegal area. And this is what you are allowed to do. Once it’s defined that way, you can’t have separate states trying to do separate things because then each state is coming up with its own set of rules. That way when, especially when you take officials like Steve Mazzagatti, Herb Dean and myself when I was doing it, and you start to move from state to state and the rules start changing. You are doing one thing in one state one way, and then you are going to do another thing in another state. The fans are going to say he did it this way there and he did it that way there. They are not going to know the difference and it causes confusion. It has to be uniformed everywhere that it goes. That way there is less confusion for the fans, the fighters and the officials.”
On dealing with boxing officials who still look down on MMA:
“When I go out there in Montreal (in July) that’s the comissions and the people that run the commissions. It’s hard for people to … everyone wants to feel like they are the person that knows, they are the person that is an authority on something, they are an expert on something. When you take a commission, they are usually good people to work with, but they don’t want somebody outside their commission that knows more than them. So a lot of times they will fight against things because they don’t understand it. And a lot of them, they don’t understand MMA.
“They continually try to take boxing and MMA, and they try to take MMA as a square peg and stick it into the round hole of boxing. It doesn’t work. You can’t do that. It’s two separate entities. You have commissions like New Jersey and they have separate people working separate things. They have people for boxing and they have people for MMA. There is no crossover and there should never be.
“I’ve said it for a long time, if you are an inspector for boxing you don’t work MMA. There are different things that you are allowed to do in boxing that you are allowed to do in MMA. In the pre-fight stuff, as far as taping hands, where vaseline is allowed to go, all these things. When you start to cross them over, you start to have problems. Commissions are trying to do the right thing. It’s just, there are egos involved. And they all want to say that they did something and they are a part of something.
“There are a lot of people looking at MMA and they still don’t like it. I hgear people say all the time, ‘You can’t tell me that MMA is safer than boxing.’ It’s like, ‘Do you want me to show you the stats? You are just saying something to say it.’ The truth is, yes, it is safer. It’s safer because of options. It’s safer because fighters are allowed to do more things than just punch someone to the head or body. And they don’t take all the shots that a boxer does.
“That’s saying nothing about boxing. I love boxing. You take the skillset of a boxer and they are incredible, but they work in boxing. It’s the same as you listen to (HBO boxing announcer) Jim Lampley talk about MMA fighters have nowhere near the technical skills or hands that a boxer has. No, they just can’t do the same things because they don’t work in MMA like they work in boxing. I can do shoulder rolls and all kinds of feints in boxing because someone can’t come in and take me down and it’s going to work for me. It’s not going to work for me in MMA, so I’m not going to do it. You listen to some people talk about stuff and Ii don’t want to say you are ignorant about it, but you have a perception and your perception is absolutely wrong and you need to be educated about what the real facts are.”
Big John McCarthy on MMA rules and UFC vs. Affliction
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