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thedrifter
12-14-06, 06:42 AM
Local Marines ultimately enjoy a good fight

Miramar troops relish chance to see popular UFC firsthand
By Jerry Magee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

December 14, 2006

In Iraq, U.S. Marines have their own version of mixed martial arts and their own name for it.

“Bull-in-the-pen,” said Daniel Carroll, a private from Chicago. “It's exactly like UFC, pretty much. If you win, you stay in.”

Three thousand Marines seemed to count themselves winners yesterday. They formed the audience, an enthusiastic one, at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar for the first Ultimate Fighting Championship program presented at a military installation.

“The adrenaline rush you get seeing two guys getting out there and giving it their all!” said Ian Pasquette, a lance corporal from Lewiston, Maine. “It's exciting!”

In the welterweight main event of a nine-bout, five-hour card televised on a delayed basis by Spike TV, Diego “The Nightmare” Sanchez of Albuquerque, N.M., knocked out Joe “Diesel” Riggs of Phoenix (28-9) at 1:45 of the first round with a UFC one-two, a right hook to the head followed by a right knee to the head as Riggs began to rise.

That right hook by Sanchez (18-0) was a picture shot. It was his reward for having polished his punching skills in Mexico City with Francisco “Panchito” Bojado, a junior welterweight of ability.

America's young people, it seems, are attracted to what happens within the eight-sided cage in which UFC bouts, combining judo, kick boxing, boxing, wrestling and plain old kick-butt, are waged. Said Marc Ratner, who stepped down as the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission to become the vice president of regulatory and government affairs for UFC:

“If I went to any high school in San Diego and had Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya with me, most of them would know Oscar and some of them would know Floyd. But if I brought Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, I would get a stronger response.”

Ortiz and Liddell, a couple of 205-pounders, are matched at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. Ratner said he expects the show will do $4 million at the gate.

Another measure of how UFC is being received: David Schwarz, vice president of communications for Spike TV, said the network in October offered an Ortiz-Ken Shamrock match opposite an NLCS game on the Fox Network between the Cardinals and the Mets.

“We beat 'em by a half-million people,” said Schwarz.

Schwarz's expectation was that Spike's television audience for yesterday's production would total about 3 million.

Ratner's assignment, meantime, is to persuade more states to legalize UFC. Currently, the sport can be offered in 22 states.

“We're talking to Michigan, we're talking to Illinois, and certainly we will be talking to New York,” Ratner said. “It's going to be a legislative process. You just can't go into a state and say, 'Do you want to have mixed martial arts?' You have to have the athletic commission's support and then have lobbyists have sponsors in the Legislature.”

Know this: The Marines gathered yesterday in a Miramar hangar like it. “It's just fun to watch,” said Shannon Ronda, a lance corporal from Turnersville, N.J. “As long as nobody gets hurt, if they enjoy it, I enjoy it.”

Ronda admitted that part of the sport's appeal to women is that the fighters are young and clearly fit. “Of course it is,” she said. “Eye candy.”

Ratner said UFC has found its audiences are made up largely of persons from 18 to 34. “The MTV Generation,” Schwarz called it.

It's a generation that seems to find it thrilling for men to be put inside a cage where they can knee one another, pound their opponents with their fists when their opponents are down and otherwise abuse them.

The Marines there yesterday seemed to approve. Cried one at one point: “Kick his butt, like an insurgent!”

Jerry Magee: (619) 293-1830; jerry.magee@uniontrib.com

Ellie