Ultimate Fighting League Struggles

Image: Chris Trotman/Getty Images

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At the risk of offending the Hells Angels, the two fighters boxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu-ing each other in the ring at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas look like enforcers from that outlaw biker band. Both are meaty fellows with shaved heads, tattooed arms, and bellies that sag like sandbags. Their stares are unyielding and invite alteration with a brick.
    
The mixed-martial-arts card is being staged by the International Fight League. One martial artist lets out a wolflike howl, pounces on his cauliflower-eared opponent, and locks him in a half nelson. The 40-foot-high video screen behind the ring shows them dropping to the mat, where Cauliflower Ear breaks the hold, then rises to his feet and attempts to separate Wolf Man from consciousness with kicks to the head. As 3,900 onlookers cheer halfheartedly, Wolf Man gets up, and the combatants stagger around in a tight lock until Cauliflower falls on his back and—like some overturned turtle—flails his arms and legs at Wolfie, who hovers over him like an indecisive bird of prey.
   
Jay Larkin surveys the inaction with a weary, seen-it-all expression. "This isn't my idea of fighting," he says of the world's fastest-growing spectator sport. "To me, two guys rolling around on the floor is tedious, like watching gay foreplay."

That's not the sort of assessment you'd expect from the I.F.L.'s chief executive, but Larkin, who ran Showtime's boxing division for 25 years, is nothing if not brutally honest. He'll have to be brutal to keep his publicly traded startup—which has plowed through more than $30 million in the last year and a half—from going down for the count.
   
On Tuesday, Larkin announced the cancellation of the league's August 15 event at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Bereft of fans, funds, sponsors, and marketable personalities, the fight promotion seems to be rapidly imploding. "Trying to revive this company is like doing open-heart surgery," concedes Larkin. "We're going to stick around as long as we possibly can."
   
Until now, the I.F.L. has been the best-funded of the dozens of mixed-martial arts outfits that have challenged and been smacked down by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose raucous, cartoonish format allows elbows to the head and puts combatants in a Mad Max-like cage called the Octagon.

"These rinky-dink organizations think all they have to do to compete with us is buy a cage and put three letters together," says Dana White, the U.F.C.'s blustery president. "Funny how they seem surprised when they get their asses whupped."
   
To White—a bald, beefy 38-year-old former hotel barman—ultimate fighting is not just a blood sport, it's a blood business. "Since 2001, when my partners and I bought the U.F.C., a new league has popped up every few months," he says with barely concealed glee. "They all stick around for a little while, and they all disappear."
   
On White's watch, the U.F.C. has dominated its rivals much like a skilled martial artist crushes his opponents. "Sometimes it has won by sheer aggression—demanding exclusivity from fighters and suing the ones who try to break their contracts," says Jon Wertheim, author of the forthcoming mixed-martial arts chronicle Blood in the Cage. "Sometimes it's clever defense work—letting other organizations overpay and bleed themselves financially."
   
Sometimes the U.F.C. intensifies its choke hold on the sport by chewing up the competition and spitting out pieces of bone and gristle. Last year it acquired its Japanese rival, Pride, for a reported $70 million. After consuming Pride, the U.F.C. devoured both World Extreme Cagefighting and the World Fighting Alliance. "It's the Microsoft approach," says I.F.L. middleweight Josh Haynes. "You know, absorb whatever's in your path."
   
The I.F.L. is not so much in danger of getting absorbed as annihilated. With the fledgling league on the ropes, White seems intent on taunting and teasing and tormenting the league before sending it toppling. "Our so-called friends in the M.M.A. [mixed martial arts] world are telling people that the I.F.L. is going out of business," says Larkin. "I like to tell people you can't spell fuck without U.F.C."

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