Battle for New York: Fighting Resistance

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Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a two-part series on the fight to get mixed martial arts sanctioned in the state of New York. Read part one here.

Back in January 2010, Ryan LaFlare sat ringside at New York’s Madison Square Garden, rooting on close friend, training partner and pro boxer Chris Algieri during the latter’s unanimous decision victory over James Hope.

“I’ve been to Madison Square Garden -- absolutely,” said LaFlare, 30. “When Chris fought at The Garden, he brought about 200 people there and it was one of the best nights of the year for him, and it was great to sit in that great building and to watch him fight.”

A native of Lindenhurst, N.Y., who competes as a welterweight mixed martial artist in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, LaFlare attended yet another of Algieri’s fights in June at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Joining LaFlare at ringside was 27-year-old Dennis Bermudez, a finalist on Season 14 of “The Ultimate Fighter.” Together, they cheered on Algieri as the Huntington, N.Y., native achieved his greatest victory by defeating Ruslan Provodnikov for the WBO junior welterweight championship.

“I’ll tell you what, that was awesome, man. I was slightly jealous, because it’s like, ‘Man, he gets to do his sport in his home state and right in our backyard,’” said Bermudez, a native of Saugerties, N.Y. “Meanwhile, I just fought in San Jose, [Calif.], and I usually have to catch a flight and go across the country a lot of the times. It sucks. I mean, New York is known for doing a lot of really cool things and for being top-notch in a lot of things; and for MMA to not even be legal in New York, you’re like, ‘Man, it just sucks.’”

That is because MMA remains unsanctioned in The Big Apple, even as it is allowed in 49 states nationwide, as well as in areas all over the world. For some seven years and through numerous annual legislative sessions from January through June, lobbying efforts of Ultimate Fighting Championship officials such as chief operating officer Ike Lawrence Epstein, vice president of regulatory affairs Marc Ratner and the fighters themselves have been unsuccessful in winning approval for MMA legalization in New York.

“Last year, me and Dennis Bermudez, another teammate of mine, we actually went up to Albany and Rochester and Buffalo and Syracuse,” said LaFlare, who owns and operates Long Island MMA. “We did a lot of lobbying with the UFC to try to get MMA legalized. We talked to a lot of congressmen, but it seems like everybody is pretty ignorant of the sport. They don’t even know what it’s like.

“Some people are stuck in their ways thinking that it’s human cockfighting, or they think that it’s street fighting,” he added. “The way that they think about this sport is ridiculous. They obviously don’t know what we do and the way that we train. We dedicate our lives to this. I think that some people get it, but some people don’t.”

Boxing historian Thomas Hauser, a longtime New York resident who has authored several writings addressing the inner workings of the New York State Athletic Commission, remains adamantly opposed to the legalization of MMA in the state.

“I personally oppose the legalization of MMA,” he said. “Number one is a personal one for me. I don’t like MMA. I realize that it’s a sport. I realize that some of the practitioners are extremely talented, and I know that MMA has a large fan base. I’m particularly intrigued by [UFC women’s bantamweight champion] Ronda Rousey, who is among the most charismatic and exciting athletes in America today, but I don’t like the concept of MMA.

“Look at it from another perspective,” Hauser added. “We just had a fight at Madison Square Garden where Gennady Golovkin knocked out Daniel Geale. If the promoters of that fight had said, ‘We’re having trouble selling tickets. We want to add some excitement to the bout,’ and gone to the New York State Athletic Commission and said that, ‘If one fighter knocks the other fighter down, we’d like him to be able to jump on top of the other with his knees going into his abdomen and punch him in the head,’ the promoter would have been be told absolutely not; but that sort of thing is allowed in MMA. What MMA has done in many respects is simply take a number of rules that are designed to protect the health and safety of the fighter in boxing out of the equation.”

UFC light heavyweight titleholder Jon Jones is well aware of some perceptions surrounding MMA. As such, he attempted to tone down an ESPN interview with Daniel Cormier in the wake of a recent brawl in advance of their scheduled September bout, which has since been postponed.

“It’s bad enough that people look at our sport as being barbaric and uncivilized. I was actually still heated and still ramped up, but I was able to control my emotions and not to come off as a fool to the general public,” said Jones, though a nasty off-air exchange between he and Cormier was later released. “I figured that being on national television that yelling and screaming and being immature wasn’t going to help anything at all, so I tried not necessarily to be the bigger guy but to try not to sabotage the reputation of the UFC and what we actually stand for. At the end of the day, we’re mixed martial artists, and we’re not barbaric cage fighters.”

Hauser asserts that David Berlin, the newly elected executive director of the state commission, should focus on regulating boxing before turning to MMA, particularly in the wake of a lawsuit brought by brain-damaged fighter Magomed Abdusalamov.

“At this point in time, the New York State Athletic Commission has its hands full simply trying to regulate boxing,” Hauser said. “There was a long period of drift at the commission where a number of things weren’t done properly. David Berlin was brought in as executive director to fix that. I have a lot of respect for David. I think that he is hard-working, honest, smart and passionate about boxing; but he has only been in his new job for three months, and he has a huge job ahead of him in modernizing the New York State Athletic Commission in terms of bringing in and training a new generation of inspectors, referees and judges, retraining old ones, instituting a whole new set of administrative procedures in the office, updating medical protocols and the like.

“Until New York is completely up to speed in its regulation of boxing, it would be counterproductive for the commission to try to take on a whole new set of responsibilities for a sport that it doesn’t understand and is ill-equipped to regulate at the present time,” he added. “Give David Berlin time to bring everything at the commission up to the level of excellence that he wants to achieve for boxing, and when that’s done, if you want, revisit the debate about the legalization of MMA in New Yok; but don’t legalize it now. Let’s first get the commission functioning the way that it should with regard to boxing. Let the commission become the best commission in the United States and at a level of excellence where it’s doing the best job it possibly can with regard to drug testing, officiating, internal administration and all the things that David wants to accomplish. Then, if you want, revisit the issue of legalizing MMA.”

Still, Hauser and Epstein appear to agree that the battle for New York has as much to do with politics and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, of Manhattan, as it does with regulation and the violence the sport entails. Epstein acknowledged the issue with Las Vegas Culinary Union local 226, which is involved in an ongoing battle with UFC co-owners Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta, who also own the non-unionized Stations Casinos. Hauser calls Silver “the most powerful person in the New York State legislature.”

“He has longstanding ties to organized labor, and there are labor unions with a national footprint, most notably, the culinary workers’ union, that have grievances against the Fertitta brothers because of their opposition to unionizing workers in their casinos,” Hauser said. “It’s my understanding that, because of this, the unions have encouraged Silver to oppose legalizing MMA in New York, and Silver has done their bidding.”

Jones remains optimistic, however, the legalization of MMA will prevail in New York before his career ends.

“I think mixed martial arts being legalized in New York State is just a matter of time,” said Jones, a Rochester, N.Y., native. “We have a lot of intelligent people working on this situation, and I think that every time that you lobby in your state that you’re getting closer and closer. My dream is to fight at Madison Square Garden, and I think that, as a fighter, fighting at the Garden is [the] pinnacle.

“Muhammad Ali fought there, and Mike Tyson fought there,” he added. “The greatest fighters of all-time have all gotten to compete at The Garden, so I think that our time will come. I think that our proponents and our people will continue to push for it, and I think that eventually, we won’t be ignored. They just can’t ignore us forever.”