Andy Nichols

Dozens of Mixed Martial Arts studios, dojos and gyms have popped up throughout Calgary like Starbucks on steroids.

The smell of money, sweat and Ben Gay permeates the Silver Dollar Action Centre and Casino. Two bare-chested, heavily muscled men are fighting in a hexagonal steel cage with a blue mat floor and chain-link fencing between padded posts. The well-lit cage is surrounded by more than 1,000 screaming fans — many of them teens and twentysomething males, interspersed with females, donning black shirts emblazoned with chains, pit bulls and skeletons. At ringside is Calgary’s gilded class — casually dressed but with Rolex watches and high-price shoes; they look a tad uncomfortable in the light, trying to keep a low profile in their VIP seats. Perhaps more surprising is the sweater-and-corduroy crowd, sitting outside the concentric circles of money and blood lust, drinking in the bedlam spectacle with equal irony and fascination.

If Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events have one redeeming quality, it is the diversity of the crowd. Like the gladiatorial games in Rome, the event transcends the usual sport demographics. Today at the Silver Dollar, the fighters are amateurs. Many are combating for the first time, risking major injury; they aren’t fighting for money, but to test their fears and mettle and to appease their own demons.

In the 1999 cult film Fight Club, a disenchanted white-collar hypochondriac finds meaning and salve in his life when he establishes an amateur underground fight group. Around the same time the film broke into the collective psyche, MMA was emerging in Calgary as an extreme sport juggernaut with the pay-per-view premiere of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Now a billion-dollar industry with mainstream credibility, the sport has transformed the way people view combative training and fighting. Today, more people watch MMA events than playoff NHL hockey.

Moreover, the popularity extends beyond just watching. MMA training is now preferred over all other traditional martial arts, wrestling and boxing — combined — and it’s no longer just pumped-up testosterone-filled bald guys with something to prove. Dozens of MMA studios, dojos and gyms have popped up throughout Calgary like Starbucks on steroids. Moms from the burbs, restless downtown suits, and Hemingway throwbacks are all converging to strike, grapple and choke one another into cathartic bliss. Enter one of the many MMA hotspots and one will inevitably be asked the perennial burning question: “Do you want to fight?” And much to the chagrin of the Calgary Combative Sports Commission, if you are willing to fight for free in this city, you don’t need permission, a licence, or common sense to make a spectacle of yourself… that is, until now.

THE ART OF MARTIALLING A BYLAW

“Somebody is going to die!” bellows a voice from Calgary’s old city hall, the prophesy echoing down through the basement, where jail cells clanged over a century ago. “I tell you somebody is going to die — this week!” reiterates a blubbering woman, tears flowing down her cheeks, sniffing miserably.

City aldermen aren’t strangers to histrionics and indeed such displays of raw emotion are common enough to harden the softest of aldermanic hearts. But this is different. The weeping woman is Candy Schacter, who is not typically some fragile creature, but a tough-as-nails former martial arts champion and a boxing and wrestling enthusiast who regularly travels the world to take in all types of ringside fighting. Moreover, this is not a crazed citizen complaining about traffic, garbage removal or potholes. Schacter is the chair of the Calgary Combative Sports Commission (CCSC), the eight-member board (mostly former promoters and fighters) charged with overseeing fight events throughout the city, and at this June meeting she is briefing aldermen and the mayor on a proposed amendment to the combative sport bylaw.

So, what has prompted the fight czar of Calgary to break down in front of city council? And why is it that, immediately following her teary plea, a bylaw is hurriedly, unanimously passed — a vaguely-worded bylaw that could be interpreted as outlawing everything from high school wrestling matches and tackle football games to Indian leg wrestling on front lawns, if one doesn’t have a licence?

This bylaw brouhaha was started and later fuelled by an idealistic lawyer with cauliflower ears and dreams of providing Calgarians an opportunity to discover their inner Neanderthal by making Fight Club a reality — a legal reality. It’s just that this lawyer, Ari Taub, didn’t think it was necessary to have a city licence to hold MMA fights.

Taub, a promoter and owner of the Hard Knocks Fighting Championship who represented Canada in the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a heavyweight wrestler and his business partner and teammate Beamer Comfort, a precocious law student, started holding amateur MMA fight events at the Silver Dollar last March, charging spectators $25 to $150 a seat. The legal duo insists it isn’t about the money, even though they won’t say how much they rake in. Their legal fight, they say, is about growing the sport and the problem with what Comfort calls “the lack of amateur opportunities for Calgary fighters.”

Until this year, an MMA fighter had to debut as a professional to be able to fight in Calgary. “The goal of Hard Knocks,” says Comfort, “is to give Calgary MMA athletes an opportunity to test their skills in a more controlled setting with the added bonus of not tainting their professional record.”

Before Hard Knocks, there had been plenty of MMA events in Calgary — but none without a licence from the CCSC. The CCSC is charged by the city to oversee the blood sport by issuing licences for prize fights. Calgary is one of the most expensive and rule-bound places in North America to stage a cage fight, costing about $10,000 in fees and expenses, which covers everything from fight doctors to ambulance coverage, police, locker-room attendants, officials, and paid “volunteers,” who must be approved by the commission, ergo a slew of defunct local fight promotion companies that can no longer afford to showcase the sport. But when Taub entered the business he didn’t bother getting fight licences. He preferred to test the limits of the CCSC’s bylaw. And until this summer it seemed to be working in his favour.

UNLICENCED FIGHTS

Despite ominous warnings from the CCSC, last March Taub began holding cage fights without its sanction. And for a while, the CCSC couldn’t really do much about it. It even sent the cops in to shake down Hard Knocks. Halfway through Taub’s first event, about a dozen boys in blue sauntered in. Most awkwardly stood around, while a couple of them deaked into the dressing rooms to weigh fight gloves on electronic scales — in case the weight didn’t adhere to the Criminal Code of Canada.

With the fight in full throttle, Taub ignored their presence. At six foot three and 280 lbs., the heavyweight Olympic wrestler cum impresario doesn’t scare easily, especially while on a mission.

“After I got back from the Olympics in Beijing,” he says, “I realized this was my dream — to have nationwide fight club events, to make Calgary an MMA world centre and give up-and-comers in the sport an opportunity to compete without being thrown to the lions in the pros.”

In preparation for his sport odyssey Taub went down to Las Vegas and hung out with Randy Couture, an Ultimate Fighting Championship star. After sharing his dream with the MMA icon and further realizing his goal, Taub returned to Calgary with an audacious plan. But he was bluntly warned by former Calgary fight promoters, who had left the industry because of bureaucrats’ stringent rules and high costs, that Calgary is “where MMA comes to die.”

But Taub, the advocate, did what it appears no other promoter had done before — he read Calgary’s bylaw and discovered that amateurs had carte blanche to fight without a licence because the bylaw apparently referred to only pros in prized fights. “I told the commission they had a problem and I suggested how they could amend it,” he says, “but they weren’t interested.”

Not only did Taub choose to bypass buying a licence, he also didn’t put up a purse; all the while, he managed to sell out the venue. Taub ensured every safeguard that regular amateur Calgary fights were deemed to have, but did it his way: for one-tenth of the cost.

Shortly before Hard Knocks’s first event, the CCSC took a hard line by initiating a court challenge. This isn’t the first time the CCSC took on fight promoters. Back in 1983, the same commission slapped Calgary’s veritable institution, Stampede Wrestling and its patriarch Stu Hart, with a six-month suspension, and in turn, Hart sold the business to the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). The CSCC, like its fight game members, is tough as nails and doesn’t easily roll over.

So, last March the city and Hard Knocks found themselves in court, duking it out in front of a judge. Taub won the first round in the Court of Queen’s Bench, but the CCSC wasn’t down for the count. It came out swinging with a new, far more stringent bylaw, approved by council on June 22. This one may lay Taub out for the count.

TABLE IS TURNED

In early September, on the fourth floor of old city hall the blinds are closed and the CCSC begins its meeting with a new bylaw — No. 43M2009 — on the books. Taub’s business partner Comfort is in attendance. His main concern is Hard Knocks’s upcoming September 26 MMA event. Looking like a Grecian statue squeezed into a business suit, he waits his turn to plead his case for amendments to the new bylaw.

Dressed in a lime green business suit and glitter eye makeup, Schacter extends her typical bone-crushing handshake to Comfort and others in attendance. She begins the meeting by quickly demanding that the room be emptied to conduct an in camera session (an off-the-record, closed meeting with the CCSC), despite voiced concerns of a CCSC member that such a move is out of order. But Schacter snaps back: “Oh, stop it with all that legal stuff.”

After the room is cleared of the public and interested parties, a half-hour later, the CCSC resumes its regular meeting to announce the rules have changed yet again: to hold any fight, not only do Calgary promoters have to get a licence and pay the hiked fees, they now also have to hire approved personnel — one of which includes Schacter’s husband as a “paymaster.”

The CCSC also announces new fighting rules, such as: no punches to an opponent’s head while he/she is on the ground and no kicks to the head while standing.

Taken aback, Comfort asks for specific rule amendments, which are quickly put to a vote and defeated. Schacter then takes a shot at Comfort: “Everyone is looking to Calgary for the future of MMA in Canada…. Don’t put it in a cage in front of paying customers. It is barbaric to people used to fighting.”

Later, a defeated Comfort points out that the CCSC wrongly finds ground fighting — MMA in particular — contemptible. “But if you look at the science, punching on the ground is safer than standing punching, and a kick to the head is less dangerous than a kick to the leg — that has the potential of causing a deep muscle blood clot,” he explains. “Besides, why is it OK for Calgary Muay Thai fights to allow kicks to the head but not MMA?”

But ground-and-pound fighting — punches with forearms and elbows to the face — is hard for the CCSC to stomach. And ultimately, bloody ground-and-pound is quintessentially MMA. “When are they going to realize that if you use the rationale it is dangerous, then all combative sports ought to be outlawed?” Comfort asks.

So, why exactly did the CCSC hand down this new bylaw that deters specific kicks and punches? And why has it become so expensive for promoters to hold a public fight? Asked several times to explain it in an interview, Schacter declined.

What is clear for local fight promoters, though, is that this bylaw is the most restrictive fight law in the province of Alberta. And its associated costs have become so prohibitive, that several frustrated promoters have quit the industry. But other cities like Edmonton are keeping a close eye because they too are poised to rewrite their laws to make public fighting much more costly and restrictive.

Meanwhile, Taub and Comfort are forced to conform to the new law. So, for Hard Knocks’s next cage fight at the Silver Dollar on September 26, the legal duo have decided to hold a pro-am card, instead of amateur fights.

Yet, Taub contends the CCSC is “a racket.”

“We are not given the freedom to hire who we choose and as a result, our costs are higher than they should be.”