The cage dominates the centre of Ballykeeffe Amphitheatre, the old quarry turned outdoor entertainment venue a short drive from Kilkenny city that is the setting for a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) event.
Tall, circular and black-framed, the cage is made up of panels of fencing wire that dig into your back when you’re shoved up against it.
If you’re fighting, you can’t grab it to save your opponent from dragging you to the matted floor. But you can push your back against it to try to work your way back to your feet, if you can free yourself, just an inch, from the fighter trying to smother or squeeze you into submission.
But the cage isn’t there to make MMA look more violent for spectators – in a sport where two competitors wearing small, fingerless gloves fight using takedowns, throws, grappling, kicks and strikes, it’s for the fighters’ safety. If this sport took place in a boxing ring, the competitors could end up hurtling through the ropes.
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Outside the cage at this evening’s Premier MMA show – the first outdoor MMA event in Ireland – are perched a varied cast of behind-the-scenes characters.
Closest to the door is the doctor – the referee in the centre of the cage doesn’t signal the bout to start unless they can see them there.
The cut-team are perched on the edge of their chairs to get into the cage as fast as possible during the one-minute break between rounds. They have about 40 seconds to shore up a bloodied fighter and get them ready for the next round – Vaseline, cloths and cold water are the tools of their trade.
Professional fighter Will Fleury, from nearby Tipperary, is helping call the shots on the pay-per-view live stream, where the ring announcer usually double-jobs as a commentator.
Three judges sit triangulated around the cage – so close to the action they can sometimes get hit by a wayward spray of sweat or blood spatter from inside.
The crowd sit on the tiered amphitheatre steps on a late June summer evening, their shouts and cheers echoing off the quarry walls. While MMA shows are usually a cacophony of noise, roars and thundering music, this evening is particularly loud – no wonder the show has been billed as ‘Premier Colosseum’ to the hundreds of fans in attendance.
The click of a bolt and a thumbs up from the pit referee signals that its door is safely locked. Fighters ready?
It’s showtime.
McGregor’s enduring legacy
Irish MMA has moved on since the glory days of UFC double champion Conor McGregor’s rise to fame and fortune over a decade ago.
Yet many of that early wave of Irish MMA fighters, out of coach John Kavanagh’s small gym on the Long Mile Road in Dublin, are still integral to the Irish scene.
Turn up at any Irish MMA show, from novice to professional, and chances are you’ll encounter the likes of Paddy Holohan, Peter Queally, Chris Fields or Philip Mulpeter, among many others dedicated to the sport, coaching and mentoring the next generation of talent.
None of that new talent has yet made the crossover breakthrough from being known by an MMA fan base to general recognition.
Perhaps it’s to do with the changing perception of a sport that went from outlier to near-national obsession on the career of one athlete, and then drifted back towards the margins of public interest.
Portmarnock’s Ian Machado Garry is on an incredible undefeated winning streak through the UFC’s welterweight division that, if it were replicated in any other sport, would make him a household name in Ireland.
Shauna Bannon, Caolan Loughran and Kiefer Crosbie are also signed to the UFC, while other global promotions including the Professional Fighters League (PFL) and Bellator have plenty of Irish talent in their ranks.
A small number of domestic novice and amateur shows are regularly run in the Republic, although one veteran promotion Cage Legacy, recently announced it was considering a temporary hiatus, due to the cost of running events.
Many more commercial promotions operate in Northern Ireland – and keen Irish amateur fighters, once they get a few bouts under their belts, travel there and to the UK to rack up fights.
The Irish Youth Squad came seventh overall in the medals table at the International Mixed Martial Arts Federation (IMMAF) World Championships in Abu Dhabi in early August – an incredible achievement for a team of teenagers not eligible for Government support or funding, because MMA is still not officially recognised as a sport in Ireland.
There is even a flourishing white collar MMA scene with Kavanagh’s Train Alta programme for beginners who want to train and walk into the cage for their first amateur fight.
And for every fighter slogging away for amateur glory or a few thousand euros per fight at the start of their professional careers, there are hundreds of kids taking up MMA as a sport at the combat gyms that have sprouted up over the last decade.
Rough beginnings
MMA was rough stuff back in the early days in the 1990s – it was bare knuckle, with no time limits and no judges’ scorecards. Wins were only by submission or knockout – or if your opponent threw in the towel – and purists from different styles such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, boxing or wrestling competed to see which art was best.
The Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts are now used worldwide in professional competition – essentially the top-level prizefighting you see on TV – and there are rulesets offering additional protections for lower-level amateur and novice competitors. These rules evolved to protect the fighters’ health and wellbeing, without neutering a ferociously tough sport that was evolving its own specific skills as well as drawing from other martial arts.
So how do judges decide who wins an MMA fight, if it goes to the scorecards?
Simply put, almost all fights which go to a decision are decided on which fighter’s striking – punches, elbows, knees and kicks, and the famous ground-and-pound, where a fighter on top pins their opponent to the mat and unleashes head and body shots – and grappling – their takedowns and submission attempts – are most effective. Which combatant comes closest to ending the fight?
I started judging MMA fights a couple of years ago. I’d been training in a gym, the Honeybadger Academy, in Portarlington, and saw that the Irish Mixed Martial Arts Association (IMMAA), were seeking new officials. I thought, why not?
So I did a weekend qualification course, and then shadowed their experienced officials crew to start earning my stripes – from shows at hotels in Meath to tents at the Red Cow to community halls in Cork. And I got hooked.
The sport is loud, it’s explosive, it’s creative and a little wild and you have to be able to compartmentalise and adjudicate fairly, dispassionately and according to the judging criteria, even with the roars of fans and the shouts of the corner men ringing in your ears.
Refereeing is a whole other level of responsibility.
Cork man Derek Hickey is Ireland’s most experienced MMA referee and judge. He’s been in the centre of the cage for over a decade and travels the world working on top promotions including the Professional Fighters League (PFL) and Bellator. In 2019 he was named the IMMAF Referee of the Year.
He also oversees the team of IMMAA referees and judges who officiate at sanctioned bouts in Ireland.
“Our initial job is to protect the fighters, that is our main concern always. After that, it is then to keep the bout fair and within a particular ruleset, but our main concern will always be about the safety of the fighter, as a priority,” says Hickey.
“Our job isn’t to allow a fight to the death in there. Our job is to allow a fair fight, a competitive fight and a safe fight, and once we move out of those boundaries, then it’s our time to stop this fight.
“When I’m in there I see something that other people don’t see – people sitting at home don’t see it, the judges don’t see it, the fans don’t see it. I can see the looks in their eyes, I can hear the breathing.
“We make split second decisions, and those decisions have to be made on our instincts, from our experience, from our knowledge of the sport, from what we see in there at that time.
“If I get it wrong, and that fighter leaves and he goes home safe, and I’ve gotten it wrong, I’ll take that stick online from fans that are writing. What I wouldn’t want to ever happen is for me to ignore a situation, and allow a fighter take extra punishment or extra strikes, just for the fans, and for him to have an injury.”
The standard of safety in the Republic of Ireland is now among the best in the world.
Since 2016, the Irish Mixed Martial Arts Association (IMMAA), has mandated that all sanctioned events in the Republic of Ireland adhere to certain medical standards, including pre-and post-fight screening of competitors, with doctors and paramedics cage-side and ambulances at venues. Fighters have to be greenlit by SafeMMA, an independent voluntary organisation which provides medical screening, including MRIs and blood scans, and advice to athletes across Ireland and the UK.
For those that love it, from all walks of life, MMA is unashamedly one of the best sports in the world.
As Fleury said: “There’s something kind of unique about it, the fact that you can be an outcast in any other aspect of your life and come into an MMA gym and fit right in”.
For most of us, it’s not all about the showmanship and the hoopla of the prizefighting.
It’s about the grassroots of the sport, those working to improve standards and safety, the coaches’ guiding of fighters through novice and amateur competition, the team camaraderie, the fitness and the fun and the enjoyment of sport for those who don’t fit into the traditional mould.
Laura Coates is an assistant news editor at The Irish Times
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