ANNOUNCER:
00:00:01
60 MinutesRewind.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:00:05
Walk into any neighborhood and if they're playing football on one corner, basketball on the next, baseball on the third, and a fight breaks out on the fourth, everybody's going to run watch the fight. Hand-to-hand combat is strangely irresistible. These days, the national street corner is on TV, where millions are being drawn to a new kind of fight called Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA. Not long ago, the sport was banned as too vicious for decent society, but mixed martial arts came back swinging. And this fall, a fight was watched on TV by more young men than the Major League Baseball playoff game that same night. This is the story of how a contest, once reviled and banished, has become one of the fastest growing sports in America. To get an explanation, we went to two of the experts. But when we found them, they had their hands full. [CHANTING] Miletich! Miletich!
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:01:03
These men are among the pioneers of mixed martial arts in America. That's Pat Miletich in yellow, among the greatest coaches in the sport, fighting Brazilian Renzo Gracie, who helped invent it. You cannot hide who you are once you step on that ring. If you are a coward, that will show it. You can't hide. It doesn't matter how much money you're getting paid, on the moment that bell rings, the fight comes down. You forget about everything else. You think about survival, and you think about beating up the other guy.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:01:32
The name Gracie is to mixed martial arts as Ford is to cars. In Brazil in the 1920s, the Gracie family invented a new jiu-jitsu. They challenged all comers and nearly always won. They brought their challenge to the US in the '90s in a contest of styles-- boxers, kickboxers, wrestlers, and jiu-jitsu masters to find out who was the ultimate fighter. What do you say to people who watch an MMA fight and say that it's barbaric? For them to understand my sport, I know it's going to take a little bit for them to accept and understand? What's to understand? You're pounding a guy, choking a guy into submission. The first impression is hit him! Knock him out! Hurt him! But believe it, it goes far beyond that. There's so much technique involved that, to be honest, I think when I see a good fight, I think it makes a Russian ballet look like uncoordinated body movements. That's a tough ballet. Yes. [LAUGHS] It's a tough one. That's true. It can be a bloody ballet sometimes. But the blood is the sauce of the whole thing. Believe. It's not blood that is coming out. It's a little bit of pride that you are putting out. It used to be boxers were called, OK, this guy's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Now it's, no, you're the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world. These guys are the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:02:57
That's Renzo Gracie's opponent, Pat Miletich, who blended all those combat styles into one. Look, most people are more familiar with boxing. So how do you compare MMA to what we're used to seeing? I would compare boxing to MMA as, jeez, checkers to chess. If you take the branches of a tree, all the techniques-- if I do one submission hold on you, you have three different ways to escape. That's three more branches. And I have three more moves off of each one of those branches, and then it just keeps going from there. It's very complex.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:03:33
Complexity will win this match of the masters where our story began. But before we show you who mastered whom, you should know that this entire sport suffered a stone-cold knockout just a few years ago. Back then, there were virtually no rules. In the late '90s, the reputation of Ultimate Fighting Championship was what? Uneducated gorillas that like to go in there and basically kick the crap out of each other.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:03:59
If mixed martial arts is in a city or a living room near you, you have Dana White to thank for that. White's a former amateur boxer who thought the fights might be just the thing to draw an audience that advertisers often want most, men ages 18 to 34. That group has been disappearing from TV audiences. So White convinced investors to buy a league, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC. He adopted rules for the safety of the fighters and got 21 states to sanction the fights. Were TV channels eager to put this on? Not even close. I mean, you wouldn't believe, all these big TV geniuses and all the guys from Fox and this place and that place, all these guys that supposedly know everything. Too violent. Yeah, they're scared of it. What's more violent than the NFL? What's more violent than the NFL? Come on, the NFL, they're not throwing punches. Really? At each other. Not usually. You've got 250-pound men in the best shape they could ever get into. And they're so fast, they can run track and field, with pads on, running directly into each other head to head-- broken arms, legs getting snapped in half, broken necks. What do you consider violent? You and your partners bought UFC for what? $2 million. What's it worth now? I don't know, a lot more than $2 million. The smile on your face suggests maybe over $100 million, I'm guessing. Could be. Could be. Could be a billion. I don't know.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:05:35
Seems plausible. A fledgling company that sponsored that Militech-Gracie match, the International Fight League, just went public, and it's now valued at more than $150 million. Turns out rules were the key. The money flowed when the blood stopped gushing. These days, there are 31 fouls, and the fighters don't come at each other bare fisted anymore. They're required to use these gloves with a little bit of padding over the knuckles. You can't kick to the groin anymore, and you can't stomp on your opponent once he's on the ground. The octagon itself is 30 feet across. There's a bit of padding under my feet. And they put the fence up around it so the fighters don't go rolling out on the floor. Have all the new rules and regulations made the fights less interesting for the fans? Well, apparently not. Look at this night in Anaheim, 14,000 fans in the stands and 700,000 at home who paid $40 a pop to watch on TV. That's $28 million just for pay per view, just for this one night. And White does 14 of these a year. We wondered exactly where the fighters come from. Who wants to get in on this? Well, one of the biggest stars is welterweight Matt Hughes. We found him where he grew up, on the family farm in Illinois. When I leave this sport, I want to be the same person as when I started the sport. And when you get in front of a camera, when you sign autographs, when you get noticed, it's hard to do that. It'll change you if you let it. You're exactly right.
ANNOUNCER:
00:07:16
The story will continue after this.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:07:21
Like a lot of the fighters, Hughes has a college degree. He was an All-American wrestler who sees this more like the Olympics than a street brawl. But you know better than I do that that's not why those 17,000 people are in there. Well, that's true. They want to see somebody bleed. They like excitement. There's excitement all over. It doesn't have to be somebody getting hurt to get excitement in the octagon.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:07:44
In fact, a recent medical study found that MMA fighters are less likely than boxers to suffer brain injury. There's a lot more options. It's a wrestling match. It's a jiu-jitsu match. It is partially boxing. It's not my only option to stand toe to toe with you and beat you in the face.
SCOTT PELLEY:
00:08:02
Pat Miletich teaches all of that in Bettendorf, Iowa. Fighters from all over come to this gym, where Miletich has turned out eight top champions, including Matt Hughes. Hughes showed me some of the finer points when I tried to train with Team Miletich. They wrestle. They grapple. Why do I think this isn't going my way? They maul. Then they work endurance relays with a man on their shoulder. Miletich teaches power, top conditioning. Renzo Gracie is all about counterbalance and cunning. Now, let me ask you this. When the fight-- [LAUGHS] Fight is over. Fight is over. Fight is over, questions over. People see a lot of times fighting as-- they see fighting as an ugly thing, as a thing that denigrates the human being. In reality, I see fighting on everything. Everything is fighting. Everything is fighting. Doesn't matter what it is. You wake up in the morning to get out of bed, it's a fight. Believe it. So fighting is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul. [CLOCK TICKING]
