Total kombat

The grassroots world of Ultimate Fighting

by Michelle Chihara

Frank Black's mother is standing with the palm of her hand pressed to her chin, her fingers covering her mouth as if to keep herself from crying out. "This is like high school," she says, shaking her head, "like when he played sports in high school."

Inside a hangar-like garage in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, her son is about to compete before a crowd of 700 people, including about 70 of Frank's friends, co-workers, and gym buddies, as well as his mom and his wife, Tracy.

This is not high-school football, or even boxing. Black is the 12th fight on the card in a sport called vale tudo, a Portuguese phrase meaning, unfortunately for Frank's mom, "anything goes."

The lights go down and a door flies open behind the ring. Frank Black appears framed in smoke from a fog machine, his cadre of fans scream Frankie!, and a thudding bass line follows the MC's introduction. Black enters the ring and strips down to his trunks. At the call "Fight!", he squares off against Pierre Gouillet, a lanky fighter with a tribal tattoo across one shoulder.

"Oh God," his mother says. "I gotta talk him into taking up golf."

Thirty-four seconds later the fight is over. After a flurry of blows, Gouillet executes a quick takedown and pins Frank Black in a submission hold with his elbow hyperextended; Black, helpless, taps his free hand on the mat to signal that he submits. He gets off easy: he has taken few blows -- as they say in vale tudo, very little punishment. He has not, like a fighter in tonight's first middleweight match, been straddled by his opponent and had his head whacked into the mat until blood was gushing from his nose, with the ref calling out, "Hit the gong, hit the gong!"

Black walks away shaking his head. His mother exhales and lets her hand fall to her side. "He caught him with a good kick, Tracy," says one of Frank's buddies, comforting Frank's wife.

"Yeah." She almost laughs. "But he's gonna be all fired up now, and he's gonna want to do another one."

Fight fans call it pure. Promoters call it "no holds barred." Critics call it gladiatorial violence. Massachusetts calls it illegal, which is why a Brockton guy like Frank Black is traveling down to Rhode Island to compete.

Vale tudo is basically the local amateur circuit of ultimate fighting, a combat sport you may have seen or heard about in the early '90s. Like its participants, ultimate fighting came on big and then lost big -- in 1993, it was a heavily promoted sport advertised as a bloody spectacle with "no rules," but within a few years, opposition from parents, Congress, and boxing commissions had relegated it to the status of a sideshow on the fringes of pay-per-view cable TV.

At the grassroots level, however, the sport caught on, even though fighters in the US know that big purses are scarce, even on the professional circuit. Only Japanese fights award huge prizes. For the most part, these guys are in it for the thrill of the fight. They vary in height, weight, and race; most are (unsurprisingly) young, with shaved heads and tattoos.

Promoters these days tend to leave the garish term "ultimate fighting" to the professional league, the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), instead referring to the sport as "mixed martial arts." (A sport of many names, it's also called "submission fighting," since fights tend to end when one opponent gives up; "extreme fighting"; and "no-holds-barred fighting.") Like Frank Black, who has a background in Muay Thai kickboxing and a Brazilian version of jujitsu, its competitors are usually trained in one or two martial arts -- judo, jujitsu, Greco-Roman wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, karate, tae kwon do. They're matched according to fight experience and weight.

There are also a few rules, although just how many rules depends on the organizers of each tournament. At the vale tudo tournament in Rhode Island, fighters are not allowed to hit each other with a closed fist -- it's open-palm strikes only. Chokeholds are fine. But they cannot gouge each other's eyes, bite, kick a downed opponent, hit the opponent in the throat, or do something called "fish-hooking," which consists of sticking your thumb in somebody's mouth and pulling.

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.