The Origin of a Species

As of the onset of this writing, I have experienced fifty-six winters in many a country, with many incomplete companions (some finally deceased). I have been lucky to have truly hunted game all my life rather than stand on lines for meager rations as the Lakota were forced to do by “slippery tongued” Euro-Americans with wondrous weapons, although I may be to many newer-born Americans’ eyes as much a heathen for not continuing with the powers that (came to) be in the new version of The Ultimate Fighting Championship, for not falling in line and into the fold, although I, with others, pre-executed in action and coinage the current trend of the “Mixed Martial Arts,” even inventing the “Grappling/submission” contest as co-producer of The Contenders. I stand firm as a witness to my graphite gestures that came before what you may believe now as fact, in font.

I submit this accounting, albeit lengthy, of what went into the makeup of the “Martist”^[1] that I am, one who wanted to be more than a representative of any one (life) style and instead encompass all that was viable and quickly reject the vestigial. “Compared to today’s strip-mall schools, we were part of something very special,” Dr. Peter Maguire said of my approach to martial arts. I embrace diversity.

There will be no lies of omission in this book.^[2] I do have a fondness for metaphors drawn from war and (our) gladiator’s arena. Devotees to any one style of “dueling” cannot or will not understand my yearning for well-roundedness and unequivocal distaste for mediocrity within systems. In reading, “You might find it a bit long—but perhaps you’re not in too much of a hurry…”^[3]

“I wanted to be the best fighter in the world,” Frank Shamrock told me. This life composite may lead you far from the cozy niche you entered to be one with the rest of them at any given school of thought or action or prayer, as I deviated from that odd sediment-deposited path, and I may possibly now, through the finger tread of computer-laid lead, lead you into the slipstream of a runaway train or a broken record of sights and sounds that we, the originators of Mixed Martial Arts, created before anyone else was doing anything of the kind.

All that is told here has been witnessed by many and may stretch your current conceptions. This is what we mostly pure pugilists pursue. No matter how diversified the beginning may seem, it all congealed, the end still un-treaded-upon. My interests and intentions are well traveled. As Nabokov wrote in Invitation to a Beheading, “This we can call the pleasure of art; it occupies an important place in [my] life.”

All was not as you see it today in print and on TV channels and websites worldwide. In the early days, “MMA” barely made it out of the sides of the mouths of politicians and states’ attorney generals. What we were doing was treated as a vulgarity that was beneath them, though they were unable to provide any accurate description of the offending events, having never even viewed them. Those hypocrites much later walked among us.

Financially, The Contenders and Extreme Fighting were a disaster, in large part my direct disaster. However, in retrospect, they marked a creative entranceway to unleash my vision of the future, under the social and intellectual tutelage of Donald Zuckerman, which indeed did come true.

Under the telling of this tale of a fighting world lies a mass of other stories, like the seven-eighths of Antarctic ice under the frigid surface. The top layer of the story, about Mixed Martial Arts, floats above the rest like the Japanese art form Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world.”

This verbal flow may be off-road by the two-wheel-drive standard you are accustomed to, and you may be reluctant to read further. My catacomb-like cocooning has long passed and has produced a winged journey recalled accurately by a diversified and select few. I am now just a cicada shell dead on the road after much-winged menace and multiple moltings.

Remember, my soul is not under censorship, I am telling you a life story. “The agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer,” Schopenhauer wrote. I still support all the facts with genuine enthusiasm. I have lived on a Spartan diet, “Guns before Butter,” all vinegars and hard work. I still live alkaline as the Romans did, though I prefer Japanese Acerola Black. A personal PH above 7.5 will kill all attacking fungus within us, however not the parasites among us.

I have “endeavored to persevere” over the younger years to remain anonymous and cloister myself outside of the sport I helped birth, odd as it may seem to all who have claimed their unfair portion of former fame. Although much verbal shrapnel others have thrown at me has penetrated my dermis and has been painfully ejected as disenchantment, the fight within me has been continuously for the purity of the vision. I care only for the facts.

I believed wholeheartedly in the then new ideals of creating a sport in a legitimate pyramidal system, and in caring for the fighters. It would seem obvious that all combatants and fans of our sports would be offended by the crocheting of falsehoods into legend.

I have been redacted from MMA history, however my evidence preexists the mythology.

Although one can never prove sincerity unto another, this is a work of non-fiction.