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By Charles Jay

There is an issue that is especially important now that the Association of Boxing Commissions has now appointed a designated official “record-keeper” for mixed martial arts (you can find them at MMA.tv).

Which fights are MMA and which aren’t?

I ask that because already, I have found at least one competitor in mixed martial arts who has been penalized for competing in something that, arguably, ISN’T mixed martial arts, or to be more specific, isn’t mixed martial arts as we know it, and as athletic commissions know it, in the U.S. today.

Vernon White is a perfect example. White started to fight professionally for the Pancrase organization in Japan, and while he was there, he compiled a record of 8-17-1. But competing in actual MMA bouts, with actual MMA rules, in America and elsewhere, he is 18-15-1, which is a substantially different mark. Officially, however, White sports a record, as it is listed at sources such as MMA.tv and Sherdog, of 26-32-2, and as a result he has been trying to get fights in California and other places without much success.

White is caught in a precarious trap - the way his record is referenced by boxing commissions, such as California, it shows 60 pro fights, which makes him “too experienced” to fight against competitors with ten fights or less (a conversation with Armando Garcia of the California commission more or less confirmed this), but at the same time, because he shows a losing record by that same standard, he isn’t considered an attractive enough “sell” to get fights with the kind of world-class opponents needs to vault himself back into more lucrative bouts.

“I tried to get a exhibition fight with no punching on the ground in February and I was told no because of the number of fights I have had,” White says. “I also was going to fight one of Frank Shamrock’s guys and once again I was told no because of the record.”

It looks like a double standard when you see fighters like Brock Lesnar, with one MMA fight to his credit, getting a fight with former UFC heavyweight champ Frank Mir, as he did in January. And these same athletic commissions, when overseeing boxing, have regularly permitted fighters like Butterbean, with 50 or 60 pro bouts, enter the ring against fighters with little or no pro experience. Enforcement of rules, regulations and policies is supposed to offer equal protection across the board.

“The athletic commission has put them on my pro record even though the rules are not the same as modern day rules,” says the man known as “Tiger” in MMA circles .”I feel as though I am being singled out.”

Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t. But I can vouch for the fact that White’s “losing” record is something difficult to overcome. When I was doing matchmaking in boxing, I could have gotten away with putting a fighter who was 18-15 in with a lot of people. But even though I may have known that a fighter with a losing record (such as White’s 26-32-2) may well have been the equal of another fighter who was, say, 14-1. But there were other considerations, such as fight publicity, posters, and sometimes television interests, that precluded me from making many of those kinds of fights because, from a cosmetic standpoint, it just didn’t look good enough to satisfy those other interests.

That gives you an idea of what White is going up against.

There are obviously some very important fundamental differences between the way Pancrase was conducted when White was competing in it and the way mixed martial arts has been defined in the United States for the last six or seven years. In Pancrase, closed-fist strikes to the head were banned - which means punching and the “ground-and-pound,” two staples of the MMA game - were not part of the proceedings, and when one of the fighters on the ground got close enough to the ropes, the fight was temporarily halted and the competitors brought to a standup.

That does not bear a strong resemblance to anything I have seen in the UFC or the IFL or anywhere else here that uses the set of rules that all of those organizations and more have used as a vehicle to “legitimize” the sport.

And by the time Pancrase came around to adjusting its rules to make it look more like mixed martial arts (1998), White was long gone.

“When I fought those fights in Pancrase, I was an amateur put into a ring with pros,” says White. “I had to fight guys who had three to four years of training and fights. I really don’t think the Pancrase should be used (in compiling records). Closed-fist fighting and Pancrase were not in the same ballpark.”

If you are going to have a uniform system of record-keeping, which is going to be refereed to - sometimes blindly - by the athletic commissions (at least that is the way it works with the boxing counterpart, Fight Fax Inc.), shouldn’t it, by logic, coincide with a standardized form of combat? To illustrate what I mean, let’s take a look at the process, and one of the things commissions will be using it for. It basically works like this - the commission requires that the promoter submit a proposed card, and demands that the records of the fighters involved be sent to it.

Those records must come from the approved source, and must be unaltered. Essentially, there is a centralized database that spits out a record, and more likely than not there is going to be a fee attached to it. This will be the standard they go by. Obviously, they’ll be able to exercise some discretion, but that will largely depend on the amount of real MMA expertise any particular commission has. In other words, they don’t have to exercise it if they don’t want to. And they can use the numerical record of a fighter as an excuse to approve or disapprove a match, simply on its face value. This becomes more and more of a problem as more commissions find themselves regulating it (there are 28 so far, according to my count).

What I contend is that if this database is to be compiled for the purposes of aiding in the proper regulation of MMA, then the reference point in terms of the actual records should be that which includes the style of fighting that is under the jurisdiction of those commissions. That means the sport of mixed martial arts as we know it, which is contested under the so-called “unified rules” that were adopted under the leadership of Larry Hazzard in April of 2001. It may possibly mean the UFC in its previous forms, before the implementation of those rules, since it can be chalked up to an evolutionary process. But it does NOT include Pancrase under its old rules, which has not been sanctioned and/or regulated by an athletic commission in the United States.

While one could concede that kick-boxing, like “old” Pancrase, is, in the literal sense of the word, a “mixed” martial art, but again, there is an “apples and oranges” quality to it, vis-a-vis MMA, that makes it completely impractical for any regulatory body to evaluate a competitor in what by including results from the other.

It would make no more sense than to evaluate a boxer based on kick-boxing events he may have engaged in, or kick-boxers, based on submission wrestling contests they may have engaged in. You simply couldn’t be doing that and continue to operate in the spirit of sound public administration, which is exactly what any regulator is a part of. And you know what? They don’t do things that way. Why should things be any different with these other records?

I have no problem in documenting a competitor’s past performance in any combat sport, whatever that may be. But it is more efficient - and more historically accurate - to designate those kinds of bouts as “supplemental,” UNDERNEATH the actual MMA record and noted by an asterisk (*). But to do it any other way is not only unnecessarily confusing to some of the neophytes (and I say that in no disparaging way) that might populate athletic commissions, but it’s intellectually dishonest as well.

Mixed martial arts, as it is the subject of regulatory authority by government agencies, is not kick-boxing. It is not wrestling. It is not point karate. It is not judo. It is not SHOOTO. It is not boxing. And it is not Pancrase.

For the purposes of getting off on the right foot, it is appropriate for record-keeping entities and commissions to recognize that and not compromise that they are doing as this sport tries to evolve in the future.