Friday, February 22, 2013

To the editor of The New York Times...



Editor

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

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