Just five seconds into the fight, the kick comes like a piston, crunching Joe Kennedy in the thigh. The mohawked kid from Indianapolis buckles and nearly falls. Tampa favorite Carl Ognibene has landed the blow and, with his opponent suddenly vulnerable, tries to tackle him to the ground.
A mistake, Carl would say later.
The two combatants end up in a clutch; Kennedy shakes loose, lands a right with a small, four-ounce glove. Carl, unfazed, presses forward and strikes a right to Kennedy's jaw. Then a left. Then a grazing left. Then a big right. The two clinch again, and Kennedy throws a sharp knee to Carl's midsection.
The crowd at Tampa's A La Carte Pavilion roars.
It's on. Stand-up action like this — two bare-chested, bare-footed gladiators throwing fists and feet and knees and elbows — has turned Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) into one of the fastest-growing sports in America. "Banging" is only one aspect of a much more complex — and even gentlemanly — sport that combines kickboxing, wrestling, karate, Brazilian jujitsu (a style of ground fighting built around submission holds) and other disciplines. A fair amount of the action, in fact, takes place on the mat — the so-called "ground game" — where fighters tie each other into pretzels, grappling, working methodically to wear a foe down and hopefully force him to tap out, to submit. One MMA teacher has called it "hugging each other to death."
But it's the quick spasms of stand-up violence that fire up the crowds and make MMA the combat sport of choice for males age 18-34, who prefer it over traditional boxing. Last year, an MMA pay-per-view surpassed a million buys, far more than the purchases for comparable boxing PPVs. And the sport's proponents proudly point out that last October a televised match between Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock pulled 4.2 million viewers. In the 18-34 male demographic, the show outdrew its competition that night, the opening baseball game of the American League Championship Series, by 400,000.
Ognibene (Onya-BEN-ee) and Kennedy are among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and a few women who toil away in MMA's minor leagues for small purses and little glory. Tampa's professional MMA organization is called Real Fighting Championships (RFC).
MMA athletes train incessantly. They thrive on the combat and gym time. They have to. Their chances of making it to the big leagues of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), where they'd battle on Spike TV or pay-per-view, are slim.
Ognibene has tasted a bit of the big stage, fighting three times in front of large crowds in Japan in a league called Pride. Another Tampa kid, Edson Berto, recently won a bout in Mississippi in the inaugural event by Pro Elite, Showtime's first foray into MMA. He won by knockout in the second round. (Berto was part of an undercard that did not make the Showtime cablecast). Still another Bay area martial artist, Allen "Monstah Lobstah" Berube, was chosen for the upcoming season of the popular Spike TV reality show Ultimate Fighter, which is being filmed in Las Vegas.
A market study commissioned by a group that intends to open a martial arts superstore in Tampa this spring illustrates the sport's explosive growth in the area: 14,400 MMA participants in the metro area; 86,000 fans; 361 schools and gyms.
Backstage at the A La Carte Pavilion before the fight, Kennedy speaks to the TV camera: "I see me stompin' a mudhole in him. He's got a fight comin'. He's gonna remember the day he fights Joe Kennedy."
Months later, viewing a DVD of the bout, Carl Ognibene mutters, "Yeah, I remember it all right."
When he battled Joe Kennedy that night in September 2006 as part of the RFC's Battle of the Bay VI, Carl had a Mixed Martial Arts record of 11-4. But, he says, in many ways it was the first fight of his life.
Carl was 5 years old when Larry "The Great Malenko" Simon, one of the Southeast's most famous pro wrestlers in the '60s and '70s, came into his life. Carl's mother, Nona Ognibene, met Malenko at a wrestling event and they became a couple. The family moved to Tampa when Carl was 9.
The kid was subjected to massive doses of tough love. When he messed up, he didn't get a beating; rather, Malenko or mom would simply order him to do squats — knee bends where his butt would have to touch his heels. Carl would act up in a department store or restaurant and Malenko would bark, "A hundred squats." If Carl protested: "Two hundred squats." He'd have to do the exercises right there in the store.
Shortly before the family moved to Tampa, Carl's mother ordered him to fight a lunch-money-stealing neighborhood bully. Eight-year-old Carl, younger and smaller but with a body taut from thousands of squats, showed up in the courtyard of the Knoxville, Tenn., apartment complex wearing an oversized pair of red football cleats. He quickly got the better of his nemesis, who, on hands and knees, looked up and croaked, "I give."
Carl began to back away when his mother stepped in and hollered, "What're you doing? Finish him!" "I did a football kick to his ribs," Carl recalls, shaking his head. "And I just flipped out. I must've kicked him 20 times. Kids were crying. They thought I killed him. After that, I never got into fights."
Because of that violent encounter, and because he viewed anything associated with wrestling as punitive, Carl avoided the sport and played football instead. He says he had a solid varsity career at Leto High School, but soon found his way into trouble — first stealing radios from cars, then stealing the cars themselves.
He had a k began hanging around Malenko's Wrestling School at Busch Boulevard and Dale Mabry, learning the basics from martial arts guru Karl Gotch. The pressing question emerged: What was Carl Ognibene going to do with his life? The answer: martial arts.
In '92, he shipped off to Tokyo, where he lived with other fighters in a dojo and furthered his martial arts training under the tutelage of coach/manager Yoshiaki Fujiwara. He also fought a few times a year, culminating in his three Pride appearances. In a loss by decision to Wanderlei Silva, Carl made his biggest purse ever: $6,000.
When Malenko died in 1994, Carl lost an advocate and protector. His Japanese supervisors, Carl says, screwed him out of money. He continued to fight, but half-heartedly. "I was really just playing," he says. Carl began drinking heavily in Tokyo party districts.
By 2002, fed up, he returned to Tampa, his martial arts career behind him. The rootless ex-fighter worked manual labor jobs and lived in North Carolina for a while. One day in '05, Carl was talking about MMA with his young nephews when one of them asked if he'd ever been a champion. No, Carl reluctantly replied. The notion nagged him, and on New Year's Day 2006 he returned to the gym, doing squats and other grueling exercises he learned from his youth.
Carl Ognibene, mixed martial arts pro, was back — with a brand new attitude.
Twenty-two seconds into the Battle of the Bay VI fight, nine months after his New Year's resolution, Carl drops Joe Kennedy to the mat and establishes top position, a full mount. A half-minute later, he goes for an arm bar, which, if fully executed, will force his opponent to tap out or risk having his arm broken. But now Carl is on the bottom, and Kennedy, standing, picks him up and slams Carl's back hard to the mat. A "Whoooaaahh" rises from the crowd.
Today's MMA effectively began in the early '90s as a challenge between practitioners of various fighting techniques. Dubbed the Ultimate Fighting Championship (or UFC 1), it was won by Royce Gracie, a Brazilian jujitsu master. Sans gloves or much in the way of rules, the 1993 pay-per-view show drew an impressive 80,000 buys.
While its popularity grew, a backlash quickly set in. Senator John McCain labeled it "human cockfighting" and urged states to ban it. Cable backed off showing pay-per-views. The UFC responded by adding weight classes, gloves and more rules. Still, its image as nothing more than animalistic cage fighting or glorified tough man competitions persisted.
That began to change when Dana White and Frank and Lorenzo Zuffa bought the UFC in 2001 for $2 million. White embraced regulation and quickly secured sanction from New Jersey and Nevada. The sport is now approved in 30 states, its popularity on an irrepressibly upward trajectory.
Still, the debate over MMA's brutality remains. Renowned HBO boxing analyst Jim Lampley blasted the sport as nothing more than a "bar fight," which people in the MMA world took to be a sign of boxing's desperation in the face of stiff competition.
At first, MMA looks more dangerous than boxing. Kicks, chokes, elbows, knees, those little gloves? When a fighter knocks his opponent down, he doesn't go to a neutral corner, he attacks. But there's another way to look at it: "With boxing, the goal in mind is to punch your opponent in the head as much as possible," says Ross Kellin, co-owner of World Class Martial Arts in Tampa, a school that Carl Ognibene and several other local pros call home. "The accumulation of those blows is devastating. With MMA, you can win in a plethora of ways, and fighters don't take a fraction of the blows to the head. You might go through a whole MMA fight without getting hit one time."
A hefty portion of MMA activity takes place with contestants grappling on the mat, vying for submission holds. The end point of a match can become abundantly clear. When faced with conceding or having a leg broken, the choice seems easy. "In MMA, you can tap out; sometimes you have to tap out," Kellin says. "In boxing, the only person who tapped out was Roberto Duran, when he said, 'no mas.' And that's how he's remembered."
Chris Baten, a local light-heavyweight, says, "There is zero shame in tapping out. In American culture it's, 'I quit,' but in Japan and Brazilian jujitsu, it's not quitting. You were bested and will live to fight another day."
As the most empirical evidence of MMA's safeness in comparison to boxing, its advocates point out that there has never been a death in a sanctioned MMA fight.
The bout's a couple of minutes old now. Kennedy slips the arm bar, but Carl regains top position. He softens up his foe by pressing his thick forearms onto Kennedy's neck and throat. Carl then straddles Kennedy and lands a crushing, over-the-top right. With his adversary's defenses all but gone, Carl starts throwing haymakers like a high-speed pendulum. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right.
World Class Martial Arts sits in a rundown strip mall on Waters Avenue. On this Tuesday morning, seven mixed martial artists of varying levels gather on about a thousand square feet of mat to brave gamey odors and a couple hours of sweating, gasping and groaning.
Carl Ognibene starts the group off with, of course, squats, followed by a series of ab exercises and exotic variations on pushups. The atmosphere lacks the tough-guy posturing of a boxing gym. The vibe is almost collegial, with Carl demonstrating to the guys a complex sequence of moves leading up to a submission hold, while his guinea pig, a big guy named Jeff, emits a few aggghs.
With the preliminaries completed, the fighters pair off to "roll," to grapple without striking. They compete for five minutes, take a minute-long break, then change partners. Carl gets in a half dozen sessions and afterward looks no worse for wear.
He has a burr haircut with trimmed sideburns, a brick jaw and piercing brown eyes. He's quick to smile and is so respectful that I have to remind him a few times to stop calling me Sir or Mr. Snider. Carl's calves look as if they've had baseballs sewn inside. He's thick and ripped, about 5-foot-10 and 190 pounds. Carl works nights assembling shelving so he has time to train.
In this gym, he is The Man.
One of Carl's protégés is 19-year-old Anthony "Gorilla" Lentine, who's only been doing MMA for a few months but has designs on fighting professionally. Through changing his workout regimen, Lentine has dropped from 198 pounds to around 180. He quit high school, but has since gotten a GED, attends Hillsborough Community College and works as a server at Charley's Steakhouse.
Lentine says he used to party a lot, but about two months ago quit drinking and only occasionally ventures out into the nightlife with his friends. "I guess I'd have to say that MMA turned my life around," he muses.
Another member of the World Class Martial Arts stable is Chris Baten, who's currently going through Hillsborough County Sheriff's academy. A true specimen with a bodybuilder's physique, he has massive thighs that allow him to leg-press 2,000 pounds. The former amateur tae kwan do champion switched to MMA in 2005 and — grudgingly at first — learned the ground game. He's 5-2 in his pro career and will be fighting at RFC VIII on Sat. Feb. 24 at the USF Sun Dome.
Relaxing after a workout, Baten has a decidedly gentle countenance. He's not given to the braggadocio found in boxing and other sports. With its Asian roots, MMA puts a premium on sportsmanship and honoring your opponent. "It's two interesting paradigms," he says. "In American culture, they love pro wrestling and the theater, the backstage trash-talking. Guys in MMA generally grew up in dojos and learned a high level of respect. You shake hands and hug. I always invite my opponent to come to my school and train, even if I lost the fight."
Such sportsmanship might be admirable, but it makes it a little tougher to market MMA to American audiences that expect their blood-sport athletes to have brash personalities. Promoters also wrestle with the problem of too much ground fighting, which tends to make crowds restless. (The referee can order the contestants to stand up and fight if he deems that there is too little action, but grappling can go on for most of a five-minute round.)
Partners Jason Freyre and Joe Valdez have taken on the role of establishing professional MMA in the Bay area. They formed Real Fighting Championships and put on Battle of the Bay I in early 2005. It drew a crowd of 1,200 at the A La Carte. RFC VII in November moved to the Sun Dome, substituting the boxing ring for a cage, and brought in 3,000 fans. "I'd give it a passing grade, but it wasn't what we expected," Freyre says. "I think we can get to 6,000, but it's going to take time."
With virtually no coverage from local mainstream media, the RFC puts flyers in martial arts gyms and builds a following largely through word-of-mouth among aficionados. A local media outfit, Fight Zone, publishes a glossy magazine and, more important, videos the RFC fights, which are showing on the FSN/Sun Sports cable channel.
Freyre sees part of his job as coaching his fighters to project more charisma. "I've let these guys see who they are first and now I know what I have to do to build them up," he says. "Basically, I work with them on showmanship. Monstah Lobsta (Allen Berube) had that naturally, but he moved on to the UFC."
To juice up RFC VIII, Freyre hired UFC superstar Chuck Liddell to make a personal appearance. The light heavyweight champ is slated for an autograph session and a live interview to whip up the crowd.
Joe Kennedy's about done. With fists raining down on him, he flails and taps on Carl's chest, but the referee doesn't notice it amid the flurry of blows. Carl pauses and hollers to the ref, "He's tapping!" then hits Kennedy with another perfunctory shot. The ref jumps in to stop the fight at just under three minutes. With his vanquished foe splayed on the mat, Carl Ognibene howls toward the heavens in jubilation. He's just earned a shot at the RFC middleweight championship.
Despite his victory, Ognibene says Battle of the Bay VI didn't turn out exactly as he'd hoped.
"When I landed that first kick, I should not have tried to body-lock him; I should've finished the fight right there, knocked him out," Carl says. "I've never knocked a guy straight out."
He thinks he knows why. In the weeks leading up to the bout, Carl came to terms with the buried guilt he felt about the savage beating he gave the bully when he was a kid. Carl first confided in his fiancée, Melissa Cifaldi, about it. After hashing out the event with his mother, who tearfully apologized for her actions, Carl felt freed up to unleash his killer instinct.
"I used to be one of those boring fighters, always going to the ground, relying on strategy, always trying to submit my guy," he says. "I realize now it's not just technique and skills. I'd have to say that was my first real fight. First and foremost, any time you're in there it's a fight, and I have to approach it like that."
In November, Carl Ognibene easily dispatched an out-of-shape opponent to win the RFC middleweight championship. He made $5,000. In January, while training for his first title defense, he separated his shoulder and had to withdraw from RFC VIII. A setback, yes, but Carl Ognibene plans to be back in the cage very soon. He's already returned to the gym.
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2007.