Stories from the Road: ‘Big’ John McCarthy
There has always been a larger-than-life ambience about him, and “Big” John McCarthy is already pretty hefty. He stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 260 pounds, and one gets the impression that the third guy in the Octagon can still kick the asses of most of the guys he separates in there; and McCarthy is 54.
A former decorated member of the Los Angeles Police Department, McCarthy has been mixed martial arts’ best beat cop the last two decades, perhaps more memorialized as the sport’s big-shouldered guardian, a walking, talking MMA encyclopedia. McCarthy has gone from an initial proponent for what was once deemed “human cockfighting” to reaching iconic stature. He cannot stroll down a street anywhere, from Las Vegas and Tokyo to St. Petersburg, Russia, without someone recognizing him. He has been enshrined in the Legends of MMA Hall of Fame and the Masters Hall of Fame. When anyone thinks of MMA referees, McCarthy invariably is the first one that comes to mind; and to think it began with one incredulous look.
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McCarthy wound up being part of the display. After he got off the mat, Gracie sat next to him and asked where he trained. McCarthy’s head shot back. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Gracie invited McCarthy to work out with him and his brothers.
“That’s what started it. I fell in love with what they did,”
McCarthy told Sherdog.com. “I was one of their students and up
comes this thing that they were thinking of doing, the ‘War of the
Worlds,’ they called it; and it ends up being the Ultimate Fighting
Championship.”
McCarthy was one of Royce Gracie’s sparring partners for UFC 1. How a legend was born came through sheer happenstance.
During the first fight at UFC 1 on Nov. 12, 1993, Gerard Gordeau beat Teila Tuli with a head kick in just 26 seconds. Joao Alberto Barreto, a black belt who trained under Helio Gracie in Brazil, was the referee. This was a time when there were hardly any rules. The UFC was in its neophyte stage and had a dirty quality to it. The referee was not allowed to stop a fight unless the corner threw in the towel or the fighter tapped out. After Gordeau kicked Tuli in the mouth, a tooth flew out. Tuli went down and Gordeau followed with a right hand. Barreto saw enough and immediately signaled it was over.
“It was funny when you originally see it but I know now Joao Barreto had compassion for another human being, and because of that, he lost his job and they asked me to ref,” McCarthy said. “Rorion came to me and said he needed me to referee. I told him that I didn’t know how to referee. Rorion told me he knew that I boxed, I knew the ground rules, I knew everything and I didn’t mind seeing people get hurt.”
So it was that UFC 2 on March 11, 1994 started a memorable career as a referee that has now spanned 24 years. However, it was almost short-circuited.
“Guys were asking me what I was going to do as the ref, and I told them, ‘I’m going to move around here, I’m going to move around there,’ but there were really no rules back then, so there wasn’t much for me to do. I honestly had no idea,” McCarthy said with a laugh. “After UFC 2, I told Rorion that I will never do that again. He asked why. He told me I did great. I told him, ‘You’re going to get someone seriously hurt. You’re not worried about these other guys. You care about your brother, and you’re supposed to, but you know your brother is going to be OK; and you know if your brother is in trouble, you guys are going to throw in the towel. These other guys -- they don’t even understand that.’
“I wasn’t going to be a part of watching someone get their head stomped on while someone who’s outside of the cage won’t throw a towel,” he added. “I don’t have the power to stop a fight. I told him I couldn’t do it. Rorion asked me what I wanted, and I let him know that I have to be able to stop a fight. If a fighter cannot intelligently defend himself, I have to have the power to stop the fight, because these other people are too stupid. Rorion said he would think about it. I honestly thought, ‘OK, I’m done. I’m never going to do that again.”
Rorion agreed with McCarthy.
“I told Rorion, ‘OK, I’ll do it again,’ and I learned everything I could about every fight, every show,” McCarthy said. “I would break down everything that occurred and tried to figure out what could I do to make this right. If I made a mistake, how can I make up for that mistake, what should I do to make it so it doesn’t happen again? It just became this self-evolving learning. I had no one I could go to, so I had to learn on the job. How do you make it work and how do you make it work so it’s effective for everyone?”
McCarthy wound up being the driving force that instituted most of the Unified Rules of MMA, put together in April 2001. Each fight, something new would emerge and new rules had to be created.
At UFC 6, McCarthy noticed David “Tank” Abbott sticking his thumbs in Oleg Taktarov’s mouth, and the Russian’s only true defense was to bite Abbott. McCarthy immediately knew it was fish hooking, where a fighter sticks his fingers in an opponent’s mouth and pulls in opposite directions. Fish hooking was gone. Later, Geza Kalman took on Joel Sutton at UFC 7. At the time, head butting was allowed. Sutton head butted Kalman, then took his fingers and stuck them under a cut. It split Kalman from his hairline to his eye. That was when McCarthy instituted the rule against sticking one’s fingers into a cut or body orifice. At Ultimate Ultimate in 1995, Marco Ruas took down Taktarov, who grabbed the fence to pull himself to a standing position. At UFC 11, on Sept. 20, 1996, Jerry Bohlander snared the fence to hold Fabio Gurgel in position. That became another no-no.
“That’s how all of these rules came about,” said McCarthy, who is responsible for 18 rules the UFC applied, outlawing hair pulling, small-joint manipulation and groin shots. “I went to Bob Meyrowitz, who was running the UFC at the time, because Rorion had just left, and said, ‘You can’t have this.’ If the sport was going to be taken seriously, there had to be rules. Slowly, we made sure there were. I put all of that in there. We had to do something.”
About ‘Stoolgate’
In over two decades of work, McCarthy has seen and heard everything in the Octagon. He does not recall anything unusually wacky ever occurring during a fight he was officiating, though there is one bout in which he would do things differently if he could go back in time. McCarthy was the third man for Tim Kennedy-Yoel Romero at UFC 178 on Sept. 27, 2014 in Las Vegas -- an event which also featured a budding Irish fighter named Conor McGregor -- and calls it one of the “most frustrating” matches he has ever worked as a referee.
“They call it ‘Stoolgate’ today,” he said. “The UFC announcers were looking at the fight a certain way; I’m looking at it a different way as the referee inside. You have inspectors that were responsible for things. You’re going to have things like that that occur when things don’t go right.”
Kennedy had Romero in serious trouble late in the second round. If it had gone on a few seconds longer, McCarthy probably would have stopped it. A gaping cut had formed over Romero’s left eye, and he was saved by the bell. That is where the controversy stems.
“Tim almost put him away,” McCarthy said. “The bell rings and Yoel was still able to fight. I stopped the round and Tim goes back to his corner under the impression that I was stopping the fight. I told him, ‘No, we’re going to the next round.’ Yoel went back to his corner, and he was hurt. He had a two-and-a-half-inch cut over his left eye. The UFC has assigned cutmen who aren’t part of the corner. They’re with the UFC. Romero’s cutman had a hard time with the cut. The break was coming to an end and round three was coming up. Instead of fixing the cut, the cutman puts a giant blob of Vaseline on the cut, because he can’t get it to stop bleeding. He runs the Vaseline from his left eye back to his ear. By the time I walked over to look at Romero, I have this giant swath of Vaseline and now I don’t want to touch it, because if I touch it and the eye opens up, then I’m the one creating the cut to bleed.
“I tried to get the cutman back inside,” he added. “I remember telling the state inspector, ‘Get him back inside.’ We can’t get the cutman back inside, so they send the cornerman for Yoel, and he doesn’t speak English. I don’t want him to touch the cut. The biggest mistake I made was we allowed Yoel to stay on the stool during this time. It wasn’t that he had to; we just thought it would be easier for the cutman to work on the cut, but that was a mistake. It was a big mistake to leave him on the stool. We should have had him stand up, and I should have brought him to the opening of the cage. Those are the frustrating things that happen as a referee in fights that I look back on, [things] that if you could do it again, you’d do it differently.”
Romero benefitted from the longer break and knocked out Kennedy 58 seconds into the third round.
“The referee is going to get blamed for anything. If it’s inside of the cage, the referee will get blamed for it,” McCarthy said. “You’re the one in charge in there, and you’re the one everyone is going to look at. It’s not the cutman or the inspector. You’re the one that should take care of this, and I’m OK with that. That’s fine. The real problem is, looking back, would I change something if I could? Absolutely. I would have done things differently. It’s one of those ones where I do look back and figure what I could have done differently to make that better. Then you just have to walk forward. The next time, it will never happen like that. Unfortunately, a lot of people look at it and put the blame on Yoel, when it really wasn’t Yoel’s fault. It wasn’t his corner’s fault. It was promotion’s cutman that caused the biggest problem with it. Then Tim gets knocked out, which makes it look much worse and looks like Tim got cheated.”
Monstrous Memories
McCarthy was to be the ref for the Kevin Randleman-Pedro Rizzo fight at UFC 24 on March 10, 2000 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The story has fallen into legend. McCarthy lived it.
“It’s one of the great stories in MMA,” he said. “My secondary referee came and told me what happened to Kevin. I just got done reffing a fight. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but knowing Kevin, Kevin used to do these sprints in the back before he fought. He jumped up and down with the unbelievable spring that he had in his legs. He would do sprints before, so I could see him running in the back, stepping on a pipe and hitting his head on the hard concrete floor. I was supposed to ref his fight, but I got word that Kevin was in the back throwing up. I got back there and I found out he had stepped on pipes while running in the back. His feet flew out from under him and he hit his head on the concrete. He was throwing up in the training room. I brought back the ringside doctor with me, and Kevin wanted to fight.
“I understand why Kevin wanted to fight,” McCarthy added. “Kevin was a warrior and he needed to get paid. We were going to take the fight away from him for his own health. He didn’t look in any condition to fight. It was unhealthy and he could have suffered possible serious brain trauma, and he would have gotten knocked out just by being touched. It wouldn’t have been a big shot to put him out. There was a lot of talking back there. Mark Coleman was in Kevin’s corner and he’s a fiery guy, telling us Kevin is fine. I’m telling Mark, ‘You’re not looking at this the right way. If he doesn’t fight, he doesn’t fight.’ Mark kept at it, looking at it like his friend needs to get paid. I told him we understood that. I would never want to put a fighter in the cage where he is altered in a way that he could be seriously hurt beyond the norm. Fighting is dangerous enough. Going in and fighting after you get knocked out, he was only going to get knocked out again.
Randleman died at the age of 44 in February 2016, having left his imprint on the sport.
“Kevin is missed today,” McCarthy said. “People can look at Kevin as a hard person to figure out. He was explosive as far as his personality when it came to competition. As a person, Kevin was one of the nicest guys. He was such a good guy, fun to be around. He was amazing when you looked at the physical gifts that he had. Unfortunately, Kevin was too tough for his own good, and there are a lot of guys like that in MMA. A lot of guys go through wrestling, and there is a lot of injuries and pain. Kevin one time had his jaw dislocated in a wrestling match and he actually jumped on the mat to knock it back in place. Kevin did some crazy things when he was younger, and it all stems from his toughness and that attitude that, ‘I’m OK, I can put up with this.
“In the end, that’s what wound up taking his life,” he added. “Kevin was teaching wrestling, and he had pneumonia. He couldn’t breathe, yet he’s telling himself, ‘I can put up with this.’ Eventually, his body just gave out. Most people would go to the hospital, but Kevin was that tough an individual that he could put up with it; he could put up with anything. It hurts talking about him, because Kevin was one of the good guys, a really good man with a tremendous heart.”
Toughest of the Tough
McCarthy has seen them all: the best, the strongest, the fastest and, most importantly, the toughest.
“I’ll give you two, one that everybody knows and one that nobody knows or would remember,” McCarthy said. “Don Frye is as tough a human being when it comes to taking pain than anyone. He would just keep going forward. That’s not to take away from anyone else, but you know what? There was just something about that guy that was incredible. He kept coming and coming. The other guy, believe it or not, is Gilbert Aldana. He’s fighting in UFC 57 against Paul ‘The Headhunter’ Buentello. Paul’s standup was really good. People forget how good Paul was, so during the fight, he had this beautiful left jab that he used knock guy’s heads back with. He was putting it on Gilbert, who was a fighter from Arizona who took the fight on short notice. They end up on the ground, and Paul had just got done hitting Gilbert with everything he had, and at one point, he’s on top of him hitting him and says, ‘Brother, you’re going to have to give this one up.’ Gilbert says, ‘That ain’t happening. You’re going to have to kill me mother [expletive].’ You just look, shake your head and say to yourself, ‘That’s a tough man right there,’ because he had taken a ton of shots. There was no quit in Gilbert, but there is and was a lot of guys like that.
“If I had to pick one, it would be Don Frye,” he added. “He was just a rock-hard individual who was going to give you everything he had. He may not win, but you knew he was going to fight you to the end.”
As far as choosing the greatest fight he has ever officiated, McCarthy did not hesitate. It happened at UFC 189 on July 11, 2015 in Las Vegas.
“Now the greatest fight I ever reffed, and ever saw, that’s easy: Robbie Lawler vs. Rory MacDonald 2,” McCarthy said. “MacDonald took more abuse and hard shots -- hard shots -- in that fight. He has a broken nose from the first round, cuts inside of his mouth. By the third round, he looks like a different person, not able to breathe. Robbie took his part of it, too, because he was beat to death. Lawler-MacDonald was one of the greatest fights ever. After the third round of a five-round fight, those guys had given the public everything that they paid for. They didn’t owe anyone anything. They gave everything.
“As the referee, I was looking at a different fight than the public, though,” he continued. “The public is cheering and they see a very close fight. They see two guys going after each other. They’re seeing Robbie landing big blows now and then, and they see times when Rory is hurting Robbie. As a referee, I see Robbie has injuries, but they were nothing in comparison to what I saw from Rory. He was aspirating blood; he was doing all kinds of things that I was concerned with as a referee, because those were the kind of things that could affect his life, not that moment, but later down the road.
“My whole thing is I want guys to be able to fight to their abilities and do their very best, but I want them to walk out and be able to come back and do it again,” McCarthy added. “In a war like that, they were never going to be the same. There would always be a part of them that’s left in there. That’s what happens in fighting. It’s why we don’t play fighting. Fighting is a different game than other games.”
Corner Hijinks
McCarthy cannot exactly remember their names, a rarity with him, but in the early stages of MMA, there was a fight he was officiating in which the cornerman actually glued his fighter’s eye shut.
“When this all began, you had guys in there that were beat up and cut, and other fighters or trainers trying to put glue into their cuts to paste them together and stop the bleeding,” McCarthy said. “One of the fighters, I remember, had a cut above and below his eye. The trainer sat there and fixes the cut above the eye. He’s holding it, and he glues it. He’s working on the cut below, and tells his fighter to close his eye. So the fighter closes his eyes and the trainer pinches the cut together and the fighter is sitting there trying to open his eye, and his eyelashes are glued to his cut. That’s the kind of s--- that happened all of the time. Is this for [expletive] real?”
Early MMA was often a theater for the bizarre.
“I had one fighter, Bobby Hoffman, [and] he’s fighting Maurice Smith [at UFC 27],” McCarthy said. “He’s taking uppercuts from Maurice, and he has this quarter-size mouth piece that he wears. Bobby was always chewing on it on the outside, and he gets hit with an uppercut, where his teeth go through his tongue and he bites off the first third of his tongue. It’s being held by the side of his tongue. Bobby loses the fight and he’s in the back and actually trying to pull his tongue off, trying to separate that small piece from his tongue. I told him, ‘You’re a sick bastard.’ That’s what it was like in the old days.”
Always Good for a Laugh
McCarthy calls him “absolutely the wackiest, funniest guy in MMA.” If there was one fighter that could always get a laugh out of him, it was Bas Rutten.
“Bas is a nut, and I’ll give you a little for-instance with Bas,” McCarthy said. “Conor McGregor is a trash talker; Frank Shamrock was a trash talker. Bas wasn’t a trash talker, but fighters will talk to each other during a fight. Bas was unique. Bas wouldn’t talk to his opponent; he would talk to himself. He would say things like, if someone were to take him down, ‘Oh, you don’t want to fight on your feet, either do I. I think we should stand up. Yes, let’s stand up. You don’t want to stand up. No, then, no, we’ll fight here. I’m going to throw an elbow. See, I did. How does that feel?’ All of that would be Bas talking to himself. He would do that and I was watching and thinking, ‘He’s so nuts.’ One of the things I joke about to this day with Bas is his fight with Kevin Randleman; and the first five or six minutes of the fight, he’s crushing Bas. He took Bas down. He broke his nose. Bas was beat up. I stopped the fight to take Bas over to the ringside doctor; and he has cuts under his eyes and his nose was broken.
“The doctor was asking Bas how he was feeling,” he added. “He wanted to know if Bas wanted to continue. Bas turned around to me and asked, ‘John, is my nose broken?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He asked me, ‘If I continue to fight, would the bone go into the brain?’ I told him, ‘No, no, it’s sinus cavity; that’s a freakin’ myth.’ Bas says, ‘I’ll fight.’ I tease him to this day that he was dumb enough to listen to me -- that crazy bastard -- but Bas Rutten is definitely the craziest, funniest guy in MMA that there is. He’s also one of the sport’s really good guys. There’s nobody that doesn’t like Bas. He will stand up to anything, fight the devil himself. He will back you up and he only does what he believes is right, and that’s Bas. The other beauty about Bas is that he’ll have a good time doing it the entire way. You’re lucky to be able to know those types of people.”
Pure Zaniness
A myth persists that New York was the last major bastion to legalize mixed martial arts. In actuality, it was one of the first to give it the OK.
While the UFC was still under the direction of Meyrowitz and Semaphore Entertainment Group, it contracted a lobbyist, James Featherstone, to work toward convincing then-Gov. George Pataki to legalize MMA. The problem was New York was dealing with one promotion. The UFC had promised it would not go to New York City and vowed to focus on more outlying areas until the state felt more comfortable with MMA.
The now-defunct Extreme Fighting organization was not listening. It wanted to hold its first event on Saturday, Nov. 18, 1995 in the Brooklyn Armory. The New York State Athletic Commission flipped. Consequently, UFC 12, which was set to take place in Buffalo, New York, on Feb. 7, 1997, was sent packing to Dothan, Alabama. The New York commission said it could not keep the UFC from putting on a show, as long as it followed the 114-page rule book it was handed; the rule book was more appropriate for amateur boxing than a MMA event. That was their definition of MMA to the state commission.
Meanwhile, Arizona Sen. John McCain attempted to shut down the sport by attacking it through the cable industry, because he sat as the Senate chair of the cable industry. The UFC and Meyrowitz wanted to avoid trouble, so within 24 hours, they shipped everything and stuffed it in a rented 757 jet.
“The whole show had to be picked up and moved,” McCarthy said. “It meant picking up and breaking down the Octagon, which was already put up. We all went from Buffalo, New York, to Montgomery, Alabama, because Dothan didn’t have an airport that could land a 757.”
They landed in Montgomery, where they boarded buses for a two-hour drive to Dothan. The event happened the next day before 3,100 fans at the Dothan Civic Center.
“You can’t make this s--- up; the show came off,” McCarthy said. “Vitor Belfort fought. Everyone fought. The arena was filled, because the tickets were free. A local radio station came up with T-shirts, and I still have one, that says ‘In New York, they allow gangs to kick your ass. In Dothan, Alabama, we just watch the UFC,’ or something like that.”
An Evolving Sport
MMA is where it is today on the backs of men like McCarthy. When major politicians were looking to douse the sport, it was McCarthy that helped give it some semblance of order. MMA is a relatively young sport, yet it has evolved quite a bit in 25 years. McCarthy has had as much to do with that as the fighters themselves, fighters he groups together based on their skills and the time in which they competed.
“I try to get people to look at it from the perspective of the Royce Gracies are like a 1.0 version of a computer for mixed martial arts,” he said. “Then you have the Randy Coutures and Chuck Liddells -- they were the 2.0 version -- and the Georges St. Pierres, who I would say are the 3.0 version. You have the Jon Joneses and Demetrious Johnsons, and they’re the 4.0. Today, you have guys like Yair Rodriguez doing things that in the future is the 5.0, and Conor McGregor is definitely in that category. I love MMA. I love the purity of fighting. People look at it and don’t understand. They’re afraid of fighting. They look at fighting in a way that they personalize it. Fighting is like any other skill, and it’s a perishable skill, which requires that you have to work incredibly hard to do it, especially in this day.
“You have to be one of the best conditioned athletes in the world to compete in MMA,” McCarthy added. “To watch what these guys do, you talk about a guy like Conor McGregor. What’s absolutely fascinating is to watch how calm he keeps himself and the way he goes about a fight. He does things that no one else does. It’s what makes him special. He talks during a fight, and he’s funny. He picks things up and is intuitive the way an opponent will react. Conor is very intelligent and incredible in the way he puts fighting in terms of understanding that his life is not going to end if he loses. That’s what I love about him. It’s what I love about the sport. They do stuff that to some is scary, but it’s competition. Fighters say a lot of things, but when you have someone that stands across from you and you throw hands, there is a respect there that each fighter shares with each other. You don’t get that anywhere else.”
McCarthy looks at the sport far differently than the fighters, the promoters or the fans. He has one major concern.
“Our sport right now, unfortunately, is governed by government,” he said. “We have state athletic commissions, and each one is an entity all onto itself. Each commission can do what it wants to do, and that’s a problem for the sport of MMA. We need to have one overriding agency that makes the rules, gives instructions to its officials and tells fighters what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do. Instead of the fighters having 50 different versions of something, they should get one. The NFL, NBA, MLB, they all govern themselves. In MMA, we have all of these governing agencies, and it causes problems. It’s ridiculous; it’s asinine. New York follows the unified rules of MMA as of 2017. New Jersey, however, follows the unified rules as of 2015-16. They don’t follow the rules of 2017, because they don’t want to change. New Jersey follows the old rules. Missouri follows the old rules. Ohio follows the old rules. California follows the new rules. Arizona follows the new rules.
“You can’t have that. It’s ridiculous,” McCarthy added. “The sport of MMA should never change, whether I’m in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Columbus, Ohio, St. Petersburg, Russia, or Tokyo, Japan. There should be one set of rules for our style of fighting.”
Joseph Santoliquito is the president of the Boxing Writer's Association of America and a frequent contributor to Sherdog.com's mixed martial arts and boxing coverage. His archive can be found here.
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