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."