Maine natives helped legalize mixed martial arts
The Pine Tree State has had a unique association with the Ultimate Fighting Championship right from the 17-year-old, mixed martial…
The Pine Tree State has had a unique association with the Ultimate Fighting Championship right from the 17-year-old, mixed martial arts organization’s infancy.
Longtime UFC president Dana White grew up in Hermon and is building a home in Maine. Former champion Tim Sylvia is an Ellsworth native. Bangor’s own Marcus Davis has been one of the organization’s more popular fighters for the last couple of years and fighters like Dale Hart of Bangor and former WEC featherweight champion Mike Brown of Portland have enjoyed success as well.
Now that the state has finally legalized and sanctioned professional mixed martial arts fighting, the follow-up question goes from Why Maine? to What took it so long?
Actually, the more relevant question is what are the prospects for the UFC in Maine?
Maine MMA fight goes distance
It’s taken about five years, but Maine is now among the four-fifths of the country sanctioning professional MMA fighting, and the UFC in particular.
Maine is now on our radar, said Marc Ratner, UFC vice-president of regulatory affairs. Officially, we have 41 states that have passed laws to allow MMA fighting [Maine was 40th and Rhode Island 41st].
Augusta, Portland, and Bangor are the three areas we’ve looked at. We actually had a possibility of bringing a show next year in March.
Yes, UFC fans, if not for a scheduling conflict, the UFC’s first-ever event in Maine would have been hosted at Portland’s Cumberland County Civic Center in March — much to the chagrin of Maine state Rep Matt Peterson of Rumford.
THAT broke my heart, said Peterson, a longtime fan of MMA fighting. I got an e-mail from a guy I know at Cumberland County Civic Center that they [UFC] wanted to book a date March 31, which is also my birthday.
Birthday aside, it was particularly significant development for Peterson, who authored and shepherded a bill — which officially became law last month — that legalizes and regulates MMA fighting in Maine.
Sure that was disappointing, but still, it’s exciting because I know we’re going to eventually get this done, Peterson said. It’s been my dream to sit down here in my own state and watch something like this.
Peterson another significant development occurred last week with Governor John Baldacci’s appointment of a five-member mixed-martial arts authority, or commission that will regulate the sport in much the same way as an athletic or boxing commission does.
They dissolved the Maine Athletic Commission as a cost-cutting measure back along, so we had this funky situation of trying to regulate a sport without a commission, said Peterson, whose brother Jesse was a record-holding wrestler at Mountain Valley High School in Rumford and now a professional MMA fighter. I’m looking forward to working with them in setting up rules and regulations and once that’s all complete, we can start holding events in Maine.
It’s a gratifying development for Marcus Davis as well, since he basically landed the first punch on MMA’s behalf back in 2004.
I wanted to put on an MMA event in Maine, so I called the athletic commission and they said we could do it, but they wouldn’t oversee it, the 36-year-old Davis recalled. Our attorney looked into it, and although they said they wouldn’t govern it, they didn’t mention until we started really getting into it that they’d have to shut us down because under Maine law, it was a Class E crime to hold an event like that.
The former pro boxer wasn’t about to abandon the fight, but fate followed up a setback with a lucky break in the form of a tryout for Spike television network’s Ultimate Fighter show and MMA promotion had to hit the showers for awhile.