An Article taken from the Daily Mail

Dragan

By Jane Fryer

"SNARLING, cursing and muttering obscenities, the gladiators strut into the arena. Barefoot and semi-naked beneath their ornate embroidered gowns, they wear neither boxing gloves nor body protection just the scars and bruises of earlier bouts and expressions cemented with hate.

As they enter the octagonal metal cage and the 7ft steel door slams and locks behind them, the 15,000 strong croud goes wild-cheering, yelling and baying for blood.
Meanwhile, girls in bikinis dance to thumping music, fireworks explode above, and to mark the start of a fight, a deafening claxon sounds. Within just 15 minutes, one of them may be dead or maimed - and the other could be very rich indeed.
Fists, elbows, knees, feet and fear are the weapons. As the croud roars and jeers, the combatants kick, punch, knee, beat, crush, wrestle and strangle each other.
They are bound by just four basic rules - no biting, no head butting, no eye-gouging and no jabs to the genitals. Every other form of violence is encouraged.
Many fighters follow another, unwritten rule: no timidity.
Just another day in ancient Rome's Colosseum? A clip from Gladiator or Mad Max?
No, this is the gory, blood-splattering scene that will unfold this evening at the World Cage Fighting Championship (WCFC) in a giant sports arena in Manchester before a delighted audience, including celebrities such as footballers Rio Ferdinand and Wes Brown and pop-singer Kym Marsh.
And the man responsible for policing the bouts and protecting against fatalities? Who else but the former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, who in 1996 famously bit a chunk from opponent Evander Holyfield’s ear and in 1992 was jailed for three years for rape.
Speaking of his appointment as official referee, 39-year-old Tyson – who retired from boxing after being defeated by Irish club fighter Kevin McBride last June – says he believes this event will be a huge hit with the British audience.
‘When I go to the UK, the people are extremely aggressive – more so than Americans. I would think [the British public] will take to this with open arms,’ he says.
‘Unlike boxing, where you’re protected by the gloves, this is basically bone on bon, so there’s probably going to be some blood, some broken bones. Its not for the weak to watch.’
No wonder that this ‘sport’ has been dubbed the human equivalent of cock-fighing.
So what on earth is it that could lure audiences willing to pay up to £375 for the best seats (within blood and sweat-splattering range of the fighters)?
And what kind of person volunteers to enter a cage where they will take part in a form of combat so bestial and so degrading that when previous contests were released on DVD they were accompanied by boasts of ‘teeth knocked out, sprays of blood, bouncing skulls, dislocated arms and broken jaws’?

UNSURPRISINGLY, cage fighting has attracted some rather unsavoury characters, not least Lee ‘Lightning’ Murray, 28 – Britain’s No.1 middleweight – who police yesterday named as the suspected man in charge of the ‘logistics and planning’ of last month’s £53million Securitas heist.
In America, the sport has been deemed so barbaric it has been banned in most states. Here in Britain too, medical experts have urged the Government to intervene. The British Medical Association has long warned of injury or death and called for the ‘highly dangerous’ sport to be made illegal.
A spokesman says: ‘Fighters face a serious risk of severe brain damage if they take part in close combat events of this kind. All such events should be banned.’
But supporters claim the sport has a better safety record that than boxing (‘Boxing can give you brain damage, this is more superficial – cut eyes, broken nose, ripped tendons,’ says fight promoter Chris Bacon).
Try telling that to the family of Douglas Dedge, a 31-year-old American father-of-five who died from severe brain injuries after taking part in a fight in Kiev in 1998.
He was floored by Yevhen Zolotaryov in front of 4,000 screaming spectators who screamed ‘Kill the Yankee’ and ‘Finish Him! Finish Him!’ as Zolotaryov repeatedly punched him as he lay semi-conscious on the floor.
In Britain, however, the sport remains legal, subject to a licence being granted for each event. Which is how, tonight, Manchester will be hosting the first international cage fighting tournament of this scale in Europe.

Dragan

AN INTERNATIONAL line-up including Holland’s Alistair ‘Demolition Man’ Overeem will do battle alongside Britain’s Terry ‘Hit Em’ Etim, Carl ‘the murderer’ Morgan and James ‘the Colossus’ Thompson, for the £100,000 prize to be the last man standing.
As Chris Bacon, 36, a former cage fighter himself, puts it: ‘This is full-on, exciting and raw – anything goes. It’s the nearest thing to a real fight you can get. People are tired of going to see a boxing match that only lasts half a minute with two guys slugging each other with gloves. Why watch them punch, when you can watch them punch, knee, kick and wrestle each other into submission?’
Throughout the contest, combatants wear only thin fingerless gloves and shorts.
A match consists of three five-minute rounds and the winner is decided by knock-out, judges decision or submission – signalled by a fighter tapping on the floor – although, says Bacon: ‘Some of them have such big egos their legs would be breaking before they tapped out.’
Kicking off tonight’s fight will be Terry Etim, 20, who has been working towards this event for four years. In his regular life, Terry is a softly-spoken Liverpudlian builder. But tonight he will take part in a bout against Manchester’s Ozzy Haluk, 29. Etim is tall (6ft 1in), slight (just 11stone), shy and terribly polite. He is devoted to his family and his girlfriend Jodie.
Dressed neatly in a fleece, pressed jeans and spotless white tennis shoes, he looks more like a skinny computer geek than a currently undefeated cage fighter, or as he prefers to call it, Mixed Martial Arts.
‘Outside the cage, I’m not aggressive at all,’ he concedes, sheepishly. ‘But when the door slams and the crown roars, it’s as if a switch goes in my head. I’m a different person – until the horn sounds again and, hopefully, I’ve won.’ He insists it is not the brutal blood-letting it appears to be. ‘It’s more than just two people kicking the s*** out of each other. I don’t see it as a fight, I see it as a sport. Everyone is doing it of their own free will. We enjoy it. Cage fighting is about becoming the ultimate athlete. You can get injuries in every sort of sport and this is no different. So far, touch wood, I’ve never been injured.’
Among his fellow combatants tonight will be Paul ‘British Bulldog’ Cahoon, 29, from Liverpool – a 10-year veteran who has fought and taught cage fighting in Japan, Holland, Russia and America. He is Etim’s opposite – short, squat nearly 15 stone and very chatty.
‘Cage fighting is the most exciting thing you could imagine,’ he enthuses, wincing from the pain of a knee injury – the legacy of an over zealous training session.
‘It’s hard to explain what goes through your mind when you step into the cage. Its fear, instinct, adrenaline and excitement, but most of all nerves – you don’t know if the other guy is going to knee you, kick you, hurl you to the ground or smash you in the head. It’s amazing, it makes you feel so alive.’
‘When I first saw it on TV I thought it was sickening. I wondered how they could show it? But then I watched it again and again and I got used to the level of violence and started to understand it was a sport with rules, albeit not many.’
‘It’s much safer here than it is in Japan,’ chips in Chris Bacon, blowing his badly broken nose.
‘In Japan, if your opponent is on the ground you can stomp on their head and kick them in the face. We’ve cut that out because we want to minimise serious injuries, but you can still punch, elbow, slap, knee-poke to the head, armlock, strangle, leglock and crush – and we always have paramedics, doctors and plastic surgeons on hand.’
The mood of extreme violence is not confined to those inside the cage. Such is the atmosphere among the audience for the fights that skirmishes often break out between overwrought spectators.
In 2000, two men were stabbed at a match in Simi Valley, California. And last August, a cage fight night in Bristol was abandoned after members of the audience started throwing punches.
According to Carl Merritt, a retired fighter who wrote a book on the subject entitled Inside The Cage, the crowd is whipped up into a mob frenzy by the spectacle infront of them.
‘People get a kick out of the violence,’ He says. ‘I suppose it was just like the Gladiators in Rome – people get off on that sort of thing, get a thrill.’
Perhaps surprisingly, the crowd is made up of well-to-do professionals who find somewhat of a primitive thrill in watching what amounts to legalised street-fighting.

HOLLYWOOD blockbusters such as Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, which featured bare-knuckle boxing, and Fight Club, both starring Brad Pitt, have helped boost its popularity in America, VIP tickets can cost thousands of dollars, with George Clooney, Paris Hilton and Cindy Crawford all big fans.
Sport and exercise psychologist Dr Barry Cripps says the sport appeals to man’s most brutal instincts. ‘The sight of blood psyches the audience up,’ he says. ‘In short its blood lust – a primitive and destructive response dating back to the gladiatorial entertainment developed by the Romans. Which should be a warning in itself.
‘The Roman empire fell in part because it concentrated on this narcissistic form of entertainment. If cage fighting is allowed to expand as predicted, it could have very dangerous consequences.
‘It is paradoxical that we have campaigned against cockfighting, badger baiting and fox hunting and yet appear to openly encourage its human equivalent. It might not go as far as death, but its not very far removed.’
Paul Cahoon and Terry Etim are too busy focusing on the fight ahead to question the ethics or the dangers of the ‘sport’ in which they take part. Indeed it becomes clear that the thought of death inside the 24ft by 7ft cage has never crossed their minds. Etim is much to busy pumping his muscles with 50 press-ups and smearing his torso with sweat for the photo shoot.
Cahoon prefers to talk tactics: ‘Some people like to treat it like a game of chess, but I just like to knock them out.’
Right now the two combatants care more about meeting their mutual here Tyson, who arrived in Manchester on Thursday. Tyson has long been a fan of the sport: ‘We love cage fighting in the States and cant get enough of it,’ he said.
‘Even if they do have a death, you have got to understand we are grown men and no one has a gun to our head telling us to do this.
‘This was the first form of fighting, even before boxing. It went from the Greeks to the Romans and the Romans took it to another perspective.’
Sid Gore, president of the World Cage Fighting Championships, couldn’t agree more.
‘This is the gladiatorial way, the way fighting should be. Back to the old days of Caesar and his mob. It’s a wonderful thing to watch – in its own way its artistic.
Aesthetic merit, however does not hold much interest for 17-stone, one eyed cage fighting veteran Barrington Patterson. Describing the mentality that made him one of the sport’s champions, he said: ‘I want to destroy whoever gets in that cage with me. I’m going to rip his head off. He’s dared to stand up against me and I’m going to annihilate him.’

(( funny how she hinges on the one death to ever have occured when a man chose to fight against doctors orders in an unsanctioned event , eh? ))

Dragan

You can send your thoughts to the daily mail on Ms Fryers article at letters@dailymail.co.uk

breadmonkey

Ah, hilarious "journalism" all round, but this was my favourite bit:

‘The Roman empire fell in part because it concentrated on this narcissistic form of entertainment. If cage fighting is allowed to expand as predicted, it could have very dangerous consequences."

LOL

Valmont

That is the most bias article I have ever read. What an absolute load of bull****. I'm so angry. What a bitch.

Half of it didn't make any sense

FiannaGym.com

Excelent!

Thats great coverage for MMA.

THere are 3 types of people who will read this.
1. People who know the truth and think this is BS.
2. People who know nothing and think this is deadly - generally the young male contingent
3. People who know nothing about this and are shocked and think it is terrible, these people also forget about it very quickly.

Generally I think this sort of coverage is good, as long as people are countering it publicly and with educated arguements. I think the point is to rise above this sort of nonsense rather than bicker with them. Present a persona to accompany MMA that Genki Sudo would be proud of. The persona of the new samuri. Bound by respect and honour.

People just cant argue with that.

Haha
Peace

Tim_Murphy

I couldn't be bothered reading all of that article but if people are going to advertise their events as Cage Fighting as opposed to the sport of MMA then what do you expect? I don't think the media are the only ones to be blamed here.

MaxBax

I think Randy Couture should be the role model for international MMA.

cmb.

ah - the daily mail - as a friend of mine put it - slightly to the right of mein kampf

damo

My response, written with too much time on my hands on a sun drenched beach in dubai:

I would like to express my disgust with the above mentioned article on cage fighting. It is one of the worst examples of gutter journalism that i have come accross in recent times, and that is saying alot. Mixed martial arts is one of the worlds fastest growing sports, and i do not use the term 'sport' loosely.

MMA practitioners are not mindless thugs brought in from the streets to fight for the amusement of others so they can pay for their next crack hit. They are highly trained, highly skilled athletes who dedicate themselves to their training and their fitness. The term 'cock fighting' is a term conjured up by biased, uninformed gutter journalists like mrs. Fryers to do harm to the sport.

The article written by mrs. Fryers was totally unbalanced, uneducated and unfair. The death she spoke of (Douglas Dedge) is the one and ONLY fatality in MMA competition. However what mrs. Fryers neglected to mention was that mr.Dedge was turned away by a licensed event on the grounds of poor health. The event that he fought in was an underground, unlicensed, illegal event. So there you have it: there has not been a single fatality in licensed MMA competition in nearly 15 years of existence. That figure, in my opinion, pales in comparison to the 5 or so a year fatalities in licensed boxing competition.

It is my opinion that mrs. Fryers is totally uneducated and ignorant on the subject of mixed martial arts and therefore totally incompetent when it comes to journalism on the subject. The sad consequence of this is that people will read her garbage and the misinformed masses will grow, stunting the growth of this new and exciting sport.

To conclude, I hope to see, as in all areas of journalism, unbiased and informed articles on the sport in the future.

Yours,
Damian Condon.

Roper

Give articles like this all the attention they deserve... none. The Daily "Irish" Mail is just an outrage rag, expect nothing less from it. People who read it and believe the hype and want it banned are NEVER going to come and watch an MMA match no matter what the publicity.

If you read the Daily Mail and don't already see through it's pseudo racist diatribes, anti-liberal manipulations and right wing drum beating, then you're probably incapable of rational opinion.

New headlines from the Daily Mail today:
Paedophiles have weapons of mass destruction: and they live next to YOU!
Taking YOUR jobs and YOUR women. Immigrants: They're all over the place dammit!
World is changing all the time- That's bad.
Iraq is "very bad" says "source".
"Sources" are always reliable, says "source".

cavedave

The daily mail may be a rag but that doesn't make this particular article neccesarily wrong.
Intelligent commentators, for instance Robert Kaplan in I think "The Coming Anarchy", have equated cage fighting with the Roman games and a descent into barbarity in general.
Mike Tyson as a referee at best this is a WWE like publicity stunt. Its more accurately the purient use of a convicted rapists reflected squalor to try add an other layer of scumminess to already grim procedings.
Does anyone really think that fighting in a cage is a good idea? Pride that has much more brutal rules gets very little coverage of its babarity in comparison to UFC. I believe this is mainly because it is ring based rather then cage based.
My basic point is its hypocritical of a sport to take place in a cage and use Mike Tyson to drum up publicity and then to complain that some people regard it as barbaric.

Roper

Yes I agree Dave,
but nonetheless it isn't exactly a well researched article is it?

It doesn't help when you watch Men and Motors and get "put them in a cage and they will fight like animals" either.

MaxBax

Cages can prevent people from falling out of ring or onto top rope.

Cages are hardcore.

ONE WAY IN ONE WAY OUT.

TWO MEN ENTER ONE COMES OUT.