Blast from the past.

Editor of The New York Times,

Given that I was the target of Senator McCain’s 1995 attack on Mixed

Martial Arts, not to mention the matchmaker, co-producer, and commentator for

Extreme Fighting and the matchmaker and color commentator for The Ultimate Fighting Championship, there are factual errors in Amy

Chozick’s article, “The Slugfest in the Executive Suite” that must

be corrected.  The New York State Athletic commission refused to sanction

Extreme Fighting’s 1995 bout at the Brooklyn Armory due to what the

chairman at the time, former boxing great Floyd Paterson, claimed were

concerns about the fighters’ safety. Mixed Martial Arts is NOT the

blending of styles into a whole like Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do or my own

style Tao Jutsu Do.  Rather, it is the mixing and matching of different

disciplines against each other.  MMA was not a “Free form bloodfest”, the

UFC was. Weight classes, gloves, referees stoppage, even the term "mixed martial arts," were my inventions and part of Extreme

Fighting from its first inception in 199?  Historian Peter Maguire

put it best when he wrote, “The UFC’s blatant historical revisionism

would make Stalin proud. John Perretti will soon be air brushed out of

the photographs.”While the Zuffa brothers and their

mouthpiece Dana White deserve great credit for turning MMA into a very

lucrative business venture, sadly, they have followed the example of pro boxing under Don King. When one promoter owns the fighters, he also owns the results.

John Perretti